Good Interview Questions for "Information & Technology" Candidates Barbara Gray 03 Mar 1997 12:28 EST
I have had a request to share with the list the questions Suzanne Huard (UNH) sent me to use when interviewing candidates for our Information and Technology Coordinator position since many of you are planning to hire someone of this nature and we seem to have wide ranging opinions regarding testing the computer skills of applicants. Thanks again to Suzanne for taking the time to put this together. e-mail: there are various e-mail packages each with different interfaces. Some questions you might ask in an interview re e-mail: what packages have you used? mainframe or workstation-based? how have you helped users with mailing attached documents? what incompatibility issues re attached documents have you come across and how have you resolved them? have you found useful techniques to help users organize info they receive using e-mail? Both internet and SPIN searching require an understanding of content (e.g., what are you looking for, and how best to frame what you are looking for) and of how searches work, i.e. an understanding of boolean logic, regular expressions and the syntax of both. You might ask an interviewee what search engines they have used and their assessment of them; or what techniques they have found helpful in searching the web or in making use of information from the web; or if they've had direct experience with SPIN, some of the more unusual/satisfying "hits" they've made by constructing a search request "just right." Some questions that would help determine spreadsheet experience level: Have you used macros? For what purpose: Have you developed Excel tools in Visual Basic? what is the nature of these tools? Do you have users with different spreadsheets or different versions of the same spreadsheet? What kinds of problems has this posed and how have you helped resolve them? I would rather know what they think in general about ways to automate the completion of application forms; if/how they've used TRAM; if they've used TRAM what incompatibility issues have they come across; have they helped faculty/staff download forms and helped adapt the forms to their individual printers, etc. What have been the more nettlesome problems associated with downloading forms, etc. -- HTML (hyper-text markup language), the language that is used to design web pages, has undergone a number of revisions (I think many people are currently using v3.0 or v3.2), each providing for more features. You might ask for experience in including graphics, tables, frames in web pages. And for feedback re the matching content with a display type like tables, frames. When is it useful to use a graph? a table? a frame? -- what considerations affect how you design a page (I might expect/hope to hear something like: clarity of information displayed, speed of downloading, ease of navigation thru a series of pages) -- there are many authoring tools today that make web-page design much easier than before (e.g, Adobe PageMill, Claris Home Page -- at least in a mac environment), so you might ask what tools the interviewee has worked with; how the tool is helpful; what shortcomings it has. -- web pages are served up by a server. I don't know whether this is a machine that you have in your office or one that is centrally located. Someone who has had experience designing web pages will have some knowledge of server environments and the development cycle (e.g, WebStar, BBEdit, again for the mac environment). I think it's possible to design a web page and not have as great an understanding of the server environment if that part is being handled by some other office/dept. But, I would prefer someone who had a basic understanding of the entire development cycle (or had the capacity to learn it). Barbara Gray Telephone: 803-953-5673 Director of Sponsored Programs Fax: 803-953-6577 College of Charleston e-mail: xxxxxx@cofc.edu Charleston, SC 29424