Technical Interview Preparation for IT Jobs

Most IT hiring processes have several steps. Not every employer uses all of them:

Ask the recruiter what each round includes, how long it takes and who you will meet. Then prepare for that format.

• Recruiter screen: a short call about your background, work authorization, location and pay expectations
• Hiring manager interview: your experience, projects and how you work with a team
• Technical interview: questions about your tools and skills, a live troubleshooting or coding exercise, or a take-home task
• Final or panel interview: a mix of behavioral and technical questions with the team

Behavioral questions ask about real situations, for example "Tell me about a time you solved a difficult problem." Answer with the STAR method:

Example answer for a help desk role:

Situation: A sales manager could not connect to the company VPN one hour before a client call. Task: I needed to get her connected quickly. Action: I checked the error message, found that her password had expired, verified her identity, reset the password and walked her through reconnecting. Result: She joined the client call on time, and I added the steps to our team's knowledge base so others could fix the same issue faster.

Prepare four to six stories like this about problem solving, teamwork, a mistake you learned from, a tight deadline and a difficult customer or user.

• Situation: the background, in one or two sentences
• Task: what you had to do
• Action: the steps you took, using "I", not only "we"
• Result: what happened, with a number if you have a real one, and what you learned

Practice saying your answers out loud. Common topics for entry-level roles:

If you do not know an answer, say so, explain how you would find it, and stay calm. Interviewers often care about how you think.

• Help desk and IT support: How would you troubleshoot a computer that cannot connect to the internet? What is DNS? What is the difference between a switch and a router? How do you reset a user's password in Active Directory?
• QA and software testing: What is the difference between severity and priority? Write test cases for a login page. What is regression testing? What makes a good bug report?
• Data analyst: Write a SQL query to find duplicate records. What is the difference between an INNER JOIN and a LEFT JOIN? How would you clean a messy data set?
• Cloud and DevOps: What is the shared responsibility model? What is the difference between IaaS, PaaS and SaaS? How would you keep a website running if one server fails?
• Software developer: Explain object-oriented programming. How does a REST API work? Solve a short problem with arrays or strings and explain your approach.

Interviewers often say "Walk me through your resume" or "Tell me about a project you are proud of." Prepare a two-minute answer for each main project:

Make sure you can explain every skill and project on your resume in detail.

• The problem: what the project needed to do and who it was for
• Your role: what you personally did
• Tools: the languages, platforms and tools you used, and why
• Decisions: one problem you hit and how you solved it
• Result: what worked, and what you would improve next time

• Research the company and read the job ad again the day before.
• Test your camera, microphone and internet before a video interview.
• Prepare two or three questions to ask, for example about the team, the tools they use and how success is measured.
• Send a short thank-you email after the interview.

• What is the STAR method? A way to structure answers by describing the Situation, the Task, the Action you took and the Result.
• How many STAR stories should I prepare? Four to six good stories are a practical goal, because you can adapt each story to different questions.
• What if I have no IT work experience? Use examples from school projects, home labs, volunteering or non-IT jobs, and be ready to explain your projects in detail.

Want to practice with feedback? Ethic Leaf offers optional, paid mock interviews and interview coaching: ethicleaf.com/shop/services/interview-empowerment