If you are interviewing or hiring for an Technical Analyst position, you may want to read this post. Below are some good job interview questions for an accounting job. The methods we used to develop these questions are the same ones we used as corporate HR in developing job interview questions for hiring managers. We have developed these questions by analyzing the core competencies or skills, job ad requirements and so forth.
Technical Analyst Jobs in Canada
7 Technical Analyst Job Interview Questions
Provide an example of a time when you provided tier three, specialized technical support, advice and guidance to internal customers in the areas of WAN/LAN, applications, telecommunications, databases, and related enterprise computing systems?
What is your experience in troubleshooting and maintenance of servers, user devices and communication links to assure operational availability?
Provide examples of experience with maintenance’s of the local/wide area networks, variety of Windows servers and desktop applications, and providing standards for installation and on-going support?
What do you do to keep abreast of changing technologies? What hardware/software do you have experience working with?
Describe some of the documentation you have created and maintained (standards/best practices particularly on Linux Infrastructure)?
Describe your working knowledge with infrastructure architecture including Server Hardware and Partitioning, High Availability and Clustering, SAN, Storage, RDMS, Messaging, Systems Management (Openview), Security, Backups, etc. on Linux and HP-UX?
Do you have experience as a team lead on technical initiatives and projects; What was the size of the team? Did you mentor junior members?
More About These Questions
The interview questions in this post assess the essential soft skills for this particular job through its core functions. We focus on the soft skills because we have found that most candidates handle the questions designed to assess their technical proficiency very well only to stumble with the questions designed to assess their soft skills. For example, when we ask a programmer to explain what a certain set of code means or how best to handle a coding issue, most often their answer is a good one. Now when we ask the same candidate to “describe a time when you did not get along well with a co-worker and how you handled it” to assess their interpersonal skills, 9 times out of 10 they stumble. We see the same thing over and over again whether we are hiring for an accountant, teacher, and so on. Most candidates can handle questions designed to assess their technical competencies much much better than questions designed to assess their soft skills
Why does soft skills matter? Because 9 times out of 10 applicants are bypassed due to their soft skills. We hear this all the time when we debrief with the hiring manager to get their feedback on the applicant. Sometimes, the hiring managers will directly state that the applicant lacked the soft skills but more often it will be phrased as “no connection with the applicant”, or “didn’t get a good feel about the applicant” or “don’t think the applicant would fit in well” and so on.
In addition to focusing on the soft skills we have incorporated behavioral based interview questions. We focus on behavioral based interview questions because they are very prevalent in the HR industry. Behavioral questions focus on assessing past behavior by asking you to provide an example or describe a situation that has happened in the past and what you did. So because of the reasons stated and others beyond the scope of this post, you will likely be asked these questions in your next job interview.
How to Answer
Your response really depends on exactly the type of interview question asked. While interviewing skills as a hiring manager or job applicant can be quite an in depth topic and beyond the scope of this post, we have provided a quick lesson on how you can improve your interview skills. We have chosen to briefly cover the behavioral question because this is where we see most people struggle.
To ensure that you provide good answers consistently we advise that you follow a structured approach when responding to behavioral type questions. Two effective techniques to use are “STAR” (situation, task, action, result) and “PAR” (problem, action, result). These techniques are very similar to one another, so for illustrative purposes, we will discuss the STAR method.
To use the STAR technique, simply describe each element in your interview answer. So with the star technique, begin by describing the situation. Here you want to quickly give context to the interviewer (where, when, etc). Next clearly describe your task, that is what were you tasked to do in this situation. Now it is time to describe the steps or action you took to complete your task. Lastly, describe the results that you achieved. Sounds simple right? Well it is simple, but the secret is to practice responding following this structure. By following structure, you will ensure that you provide complete answers and do not omit vital pieces of information.
The Questions Are In Your Resume
Remember that another good source of job interview questions is your resume. Hiring managers will ask you questions based on your resume. For some people it’s hard to recall what you did last week, let alone what you did at work a few years ago. So it pays to review your resume before you go to your job interview.
For more see our online job interview and resume writing courses. So until our next post, we wish you much luck and success in your career search.
 |
Take our interactive online course and ace your next interview! |
 |
 |
Hire a personal job interview coach and learn from HR professionals |
If you would like to see job interview questions for other positions, just let us know by leaving a comment here or contact us directly by email. If you enjoyed this post, we invite you to subscribe by email or RSS feed.
Email us at:
If you liked this post, then check out:
This “Interview Questions” series is not only great for prospective applicants but for fellow hiring managers such as myself. Occasionally I worry that I put too much stress on the minimum job requirements when interviewing, when in reality any candidate that proceeds to the interview level should have met those criteria already. For a while my company was getting a slew of underqualified candidates from recruiting agencies, although since we’ve been using the recruiting marketplace Dayak that has improved considerably; there’s a bit more incentive there for recruiters to find good candidates. It’s certainly frustrating to interview prospective hires only to discover that they don’t possess very essential skills.
Here’s a question — with a robust set of questions such as this do you ever give preparatory materials to candidates? I will usually tell them to be at the ready to discuss prior experiences and jobs in full detail, especially with specific software/technical/networking questions. A few candidates brought in extensive notes! I like ending on the team leader question as well — it’s always good to survey a candidate’s potential management skills, no matter the position.
I just read an article on Venture Beat about a site a new career site that doesnt use resumes but some kind os skill tags.