It always depends on what they’ve applied for, but most of the interviews I’ve conducted have been for lower-leveled positions, so we typically made sure we had at least 2 people in the interview with the candidate. Someone to make sure the candidate was comfortable, and someone to actually assess their skillset. A sort-of play on good-cop bad-cop.
The “good cop” would ask personality and softball questions. Bad-cop would ask the more serious “how much does this person actually know” questions until we got a gauge of their skillset.
For the personality questions, I’d ask anything from “what hobbies do you have?” to “what YouTube channels do you watch?” and would try to keep my questions relevant to what sparked interest in the candidate. The goal was to keep them comfortable and calm so that they might show their real personality instead of whatever persona they may have prepared to look good for an interview. (I will say we had someone on the team who had the opposite opinion… Scare the real personality out of folks and keep the pressure on. While the one hire we made under him did work out, I still personally really dislike that approach, and the interviewees generally do as well.)
As the knowledge interviewer, though, we had a set of “standard” questions that were typical issues we run into and were presented in a similar way that they would be in our ticketing system or phone calls we would receive.
One question that everyone on the team really seemed to like was “Your team moved a department from building A to Building B over a weekend. On Monday morning, one of the users in that department is unable to log into their machine. How would you diagnose and fix this?” The “real” answer to this question is “plug their ethernet cable back in” but watching someone work through the full process, while giving them only information that an unskilled end-user might have is really helpful at determining problem solving skills.
Another one that the team liked using for helpdesk techs is a real-world scenario that we ran into… I can’t remember exactly how it was worded, but it was basically roleplaying the end-user and saying something to the effect of “My VPN isn’t working”. The real cause of this is that the end user’s power had gone out, but because they were on a laptop, they hadn’t noticed. Nobody ever worked out the correct “solution” to that one, but it was another case where we could assess a lot of real-world skills for a helpdesk tech.
If hiring for a management position, though, things change pretty drastically. Asking more about experience with handling projects and/or budgets is much more relevant than problem solving skills. In my opinion, management should have problem solving skills, but should trust their team’s ability to problem solve, and focus more on the actual “management” of the team and their resources.
Finding ways to assess how well a candidate can efficiently use the all of the tools at their disposal can be challenging. Unfortunately, the only time when I was on the hiring side of the team during a manager opening, we were unable to find a suitable applicant, though, so I don’t have any good advice here.
