The Biggest Mistake You’re Making During Your IT Help Desk Interview

Help desk / support jobs are typically where most people in the IT field usually begin. Often times it’s this experience that will aid you in deciding what part of tech you actually enjoy and want to further pursue your career. Also, typically it involves you being exposed to a bunch of different parts of an IT Infrastructure which is tremendous for building up your resume and getting legitimate hands on experience at the same time.

Given that help desk / support jobs are often the doorway into the IT field it can be relatively competitive as of late to really land a gig here. That’s why it’s very important that you are prepared when you get that call back for an interview, both technically and non-technically.

Words from a Hiring Manager

I use the word hiring manager a bit generously as that was my career in previous life. However what I’m about to tell you remains true in any level of IT / or Sector.

The biggest mistake I’ve encountered is not show casing your ability to work through potentially not knowing the answer to something technical. That’s not to say I ever had made any questions specifically to trip people cause that’s not the goal ever but often times nerves take over or it’s entirely possible the interviewe genuinely hadn’t been exposed to the solution.

Simply saying “I don’t know” or even worse pretending to know the answer but forgetting will not get you to the next round. There has been dozens of times that the slightly less qualified interviewee was actually selected due to them being able to verbally walk through what they WOULD do in the situation that they don’t know something off the top of their head. Google, knowledge base, open source information, escalation, etc.

This showcased to everyone on the team that this is a potential player on their team that’s going to truly try to figure out what the answer to what they are looking for before a) giving up b) escalating it without any prior research / effort c) get frustrated with their team.

It’s tech. It changes everyday. No one can keep up with everything 24/7. teams are looking for new team members that can work with the changing environment, understand there going to run into things they don’t know the answer to and how they take these situations.

Teams don’t want the person who auto escalates without ANY prior effort. Or the person who has tickets die in their queue with no resolution which eventually looks bad for any one on the team because they hadn’t known how to resolve it.