job interview - On boarding Specialist!

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Hey all,

potentially, later this week I shall being having an interview with a financial company for a 6 month contract in the above position.
Aside from wether I really want to leave the security of a full-time job and jump to a 6 month contract in todays climate (gulp) what I am really wanting guidance with here is, what kind of questions may they throw at me?

I have copied a snippet of the job spec (recruiter posted the role as IT Administrator, on the clients site, its billed as "On-Boarding Specialist")

"Skills: IT Administrator is needed based in Belfast. Job Purpose:Providing support to the business incorporating all aspects of newstarters including hardware, software, account setup, data access andapplication permissions. Responsibilities include: IT support for newstarters, logging calls via management system (Remedy) and provide customer support to business managers and administrators. SkillsRequired: Windows 2000/XP, MS Office, Outlook and system administration. You must have exceptional customer service skills"

thanks in advance guys

 

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bump

 

Anything related to the job you'd be perfoming. Since this can be vastly different from employer to employer even with the same job title, there's no way for any of us to know what they could ask.

Technical interview questions aren't really something you can prepare for. If you're the best suited candidate for the job, you'll be offered the job, simple as that.

 

message received and understood BM. I dont have masses of interview experience, so I think I should just prep for everything else I can predict.

thanks again BM

 

Exactly - focus your efforts on preparing for the overall interview. Be confident without being arrogant, be pleasant and easygoing, make eye contact, smile. Speak confidently, but honestly - if you don't know something, say so. Be ready to talk about your employment history and what you have experience doing.

Hope this helps. Do well!

 

most interviews that i have been to are always structured in two parts,

the first part have general question, like what's good about working in a team, explain how you communicate ideas etc. i can remember struggling with these a few years ago, so i did a bit of research on generic questions, and complied a answer sheet for these, which i read before every interview

on it questions its difficult to give guidance on this as the subject is so big, I had question papers before, with questions like what command to promote a dc, to questions like how would restore a failed computer, describe iscsi and what does the abbreviation stand for etc

 

had interview at 10 am.

Not a great start, turning up to the wrong Building ( happens a lot apparently), courtesy of the recruiters crap directions. To be fair they are based in London, not Belfast.

20 question technical questionnaire ( which I was not made aware of but predicted I would get). Did not do especially well on this, a lot of AD questions which I obviously have no experience with.

The personal side of the interview went well, two interviewers, both team leaders. Seemed to be going through the questions on auto-pilot ( they admitted the questions by and large were horrid).

They also stated that the technical questions were tough, with very few successfully answering them all.

All in all, I am not very confident of a result, but am awaiting some feedback from the recruiters

 

Technical questions in an interview are almost always tough, I wouldn't worry too much about that, apart from anything else (as I've discovered recently) pitching the questions at the right level is a total PITA and no one wants a situation where they go for something too simplistic and the answers end up not helping seperate the candidates.

 

Exactly this. If the questions were easy, everyone would do well, and that's not the point of the interview... the interview is designed to tell them who the better candidates are.

Don't sell yourself short just yet... after all, you might have done better than everyone else.

 

just got confirmation that I did not get the job.

While I am not surprised, its always tough to get final confirmation.

And yes, they felt my technical skills let me down.

I am more angry with myself than anything, but I knew I had done poorly.

Anyway, onwards and upwards. To me this begs the question, how can I improve my technical knowledge in order to do better in these situations? As I mentioned, a lot of the questions were on AD, which I have no commercial experience with.

 

If you want to get better knowledge on AD etc for interviews, the best way is to setup a Windows server at home, configure this with AD and add some users. Its what i'm currently working through as we've just started support a large customer with 4 servers all using W2k3 or W2K8 and 4 Linux based servers. They have no users but plenty of appliations running on these with remote sessions Radius etc.
I'm working my way through the 70-290 MS press book. If you did teh same at least you'd have some knowledge for interviews. OK so its not commercial experience, but you wont get that without a job and even then only after 6 months to a year working on servers with someone else normally. You just need to show some basic knowledge and you can always say in interviews that you have a setup at home your learning with, its better than total ignorance.

Bad luck this time, but better luck in future.

 

Twizzle,

thats something I had not considered, its something I will certainly look into. What kind of cost would be involved in setting up AD at home?
As you say, I would at least have a rudimentary understanding of the concept then.

thanks for the response Twizzle

 

I would agree doing what Twizz recommends. One caveat, however: although it gives you hands-on experience, it doesn't really give you real-world AD experience, which is what employers are looking for. Still, something is better than nothing.

In addition to this, I would recommend making a lateral move to a similar position where you CAN start getting some light, real-world AD experience.

 

Depends on how hefty you want to make your Lab, the most useful purchase for you though would be a TechNet subscription, not cheap but 100% worth it.

After that its all down to what your hardware can handle, if you've got spare cash then buying a small sever box is an option but otherwise if your desktop/laptop is of decent spec you should be able to get a few VMs up and running for testing and training purposes.

 

As Jos has said a technet sub will help and thats around £250 but does give you all the Windows OSs and variants to download and play with incl;uding server 2003 or 2008 so well worth it. (I have it and convinced work to get it for testing)
Then you can buy a full server capable of running W2K3 for £150 or less on ebay or ask someone on here. Then you just need the books, and again you can pick these up cheap on ebay. I even bought Trips book from amazon on Visual server 2003 for less than a tenner!

So you can easily get a full server system to add to your network for less than £500 (the cost or a cheap new PC!) but it will help you gain some knowledge. OK as BM said not real world knowledge but thats the case with anything. You can practice, but that practice isnt the same as dealing with it in a real world situation. However, without the practice you'd be left floundering like a wet fish in the desert surrounded by scorpians and a hungry camel! With practice at least you have some chance.

 

I currently have a decent spec HP laptop running vmware with xp sp3.
But it can be a little sluggish (4GB RAM), so I may be able to obtain a spare Dell optiplex from work and use it.

Technet subscription ain't cheap, but if it will help I guess I need to consider it.

thanks for all the suggestions guys.