I’ve only had two IT support interviews so far, so I don’t have much experience with interviews yet. But both of them were pretty similar.
They mostly asked me basic technical questions and terminology — DNS, DHCP, hardware, etc. I don’t mind that, obviously you need to know the basics.
But I barely got any questions where I could actually show how I troubleshoot something.
I was expecting something more like:
a few basic technical questions
a troubleshooting scenario
questions about things I’ve actually done
follow-up questions based on my answers
For example, something as simple as:
*“A user’s PC doesn’t turn on. What do you check?”*
Or:
*“A user has no internet. Walk me through what you’d do.”*
Even if someone doesn’t have commercial IT experience, I feel like questions like these can show how they think and approach a problem.
I do have some basic real-world troubleshooting experience from my current job (which isn’t an IT job). For example, I once had to troubleshoot a manager’s PC that wouldn’t turn on and eventually found that the power cable had come loose.
Maybe I’m expecting too much from entry-level interviews, or maybe I just happened to get unlucky twice.
For people who have done a lot of Help Desk / IT Support interviews — is this pretty normal? How much do interviews usually focus on basic technical questions vs. actual troubleshooting?
Source: r/helpdesk · by /u/Tricksteridze