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Hello fellow Spiceheads! I started the new year with a job hunt, so far it’s going well and I’ve had an interview yesterday that went very well. It was a really nice and open conversation and it’s definitely a match, job wise and people wise (so far). They called back within 20 minutes and scheduled the technical interview for Monday.

Now the first interview was with their head of managed services and their financial manager. The second one will be with the manager of their Managed Services Department, their Head Network and Security and a Remote Sysadmin of roughly my age.

My question to IT veterans and people who hire IT pro’s… Any tips, tricks, pointers, do’s and don’ts? It will be the first time I have a separate technical interview for a job, so I’m new at this particular part.

A little background on the company:

  • Local MSP
  • Mostly SMB 5-100 users
  • Job: Remote Sysadmin level 2 (tier 2)
  • www.loko.nl (website is Dutch, but you’ll get a general feel for their professionalism)
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Relax, answer each question to the best of your ability, and remember saying you don’t know or your not sure is never the worst answer.

(I also listen to my favorite comedians standup immediately before interviewing)

Good luck! and Cheers.

Andre

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My very limited experience with being hired, but seeing 10+ interviews over the past year here: Know your limits. Be confident in what you do know, but don’t be scared to admin lack of experience/knowledge if this is a step up in skills for you.

I’m amused at all the titles MSPs run. We’re so small there’s the Owner(CIO?), Me(man of all hats), our office manager(billing dude), and our tier 1. I really need to start adding some fancy words to my business cards.

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The best thing to do in any interview, be yourself!

Don’t get all flowery and boasting about what you have done, be factual, direct, and complete.

A huge plus, shower!

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and after you shower a little dab of cologne behind each ear lobe…

Brian-Fantana-60-of-the-time-it-works-every-time-Anchorman.gif

@jim4232

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Like others have said, be honest about who you are and what you do and don’t know. If you try to lie your way through something they will pick up on it. Also, I always go to the bathroom before an interview too just to be safe. Good luck.

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Former MSP Manager here. Don’t be the guy that can do everything. Too many times I have seen guys get stuck on a problem for multiple hours that could have been resolved sooner by asking another tech. Don’t be afraid to ask a more seasoned tech on your team. Too many people want to be “the guy”, when they should focus on teamwork. Be humble and willing to learn, an MSP environment will have you looking at many different things (software, hardware, etc) that will be brand new to you. Check your attitude at the door.

Those were not personally directed at you, more a blanket statement from what I have seen.

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Be yourself. If you don’t know, say that you don’t know, but explain. When I got hired here just a couple of months ago, in the technical interview, the guy threw out some phrases that I didn’t know and I said “I don’t know about …” On the other items that I did know, I gave them full confident answers and after I got hired, I was told that the reason that they liked me was that I was confident enough to say that I didn’t know something. Mention that on items that you don’t know there are ways to look up the answer.

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Coming from an education background, do not wear cologne at all! The number of weird allergies in the weirdest places tend to show up at the wrong time. Don’t get dropped from consideration by sending your interviewer to the hospital!

@andre-the-giant

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Be respectful, confident and honest. Try not to ‘gush’ too much and ramble on-and-on about a specific topic that you know really well.

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I went for and was offered a job at a MSP last year, which I turned down for various reasons. At the technical interview they ask me the following

  1. List port numbers for POP, SMTP, Secure FTP, DNS, Time Protocol and SSH

  2. Explain what happens to an email when the sender clicks on send button. How does the local mail server find the recipient server and communicate with it.

  3. I had a large amount of data to copy from one server to another, how would I do it. They were looking for file utilities experience such as Robocopy.

  4. General questions about proxy servers and how they worked

  5. How to configure a mobile phone to connect to Exchange server

There was a few others as well, but I can’t remember those. Hope this gives you a feel of the questions and good luck with the interview.

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@Chris, Those are some great points, I’ll make sure I have the basics down. Coming from an SMB environment I know I’ll be rusty with some things. And they know that too, they employ around 40 IT professionals so they’ll know exactly where I’m at after this interview.
@James, That’s great to hear because that was the tone of the first interview already. Coming from a military background, so focusing on teamwork and being humble went well. I’ll continue that into the second interview and beyond.

@chrishone @jamespierce

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That website has bugs on it! Just kidding.

The best advice i ever got about interviews was to be yourself, and remember, you are interviewing them as they interview you.

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To all who replied, the interview went very well! I got a call back a few hours later and they told me I got the job :smiley: This Thursday I’m going in to discuss all the practical things (start date, education, salary, etc…).

2017 and I seem to be getting along so far :slight_smile:

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Congrats!!

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