Common questions in interviews

[ubarnmiha]

So I'm going to have an interview for Network Engineer soon. I always get kind of nervous because I usually get questions to prove my knowledge. Now, because of my previous jobs I have far more experience with WAN than with LAN almost nothing with firewalls, load balancers and DNS.

I was searching in Google for common questions in interviews but almost every results shows questions that I never got, like: what is a network or what LAN mean. In my experience, those questions are never asked to someone with some experience, it just unnecessary. I usually get questions like: how packets are handled in a network or why you should choose eigrp or ospf or why this happen or how to avoid that.

Honestly I am not PRO expert in regarding to networking, I have experience with multiple IT stuff but I am not an expert in an specific thing. I have more experience with WAN and troubleshooting than configuring or designing but I know the theory or have basic understanding.

Anyway, could you please help with questions and if you want and can't, answers that you usually got or ask to candidates? I am asking for answers too because sometimes I don't understand what kind of answers they expect. Any suggestions also?

Thank you so much.

[Giuseppe Larosa]

Hello @ubarnmiha ,

the kind of questions you can get in a job interview depends from the job position / description from the company and it is also a question of who are talking  with.

If you have a job interview this means tha your knowledge and your experience are a good fit for the position otherwise your CV , your application would have been discarded.

So if the job skills are a good fit for the job description you should be fine.

You will be asked to describe your job experience , the way you approach troubleshooting issues and so on.

If the job description is focused on what you know less firewalls and load balancers it is better to clarify that you can learn new things but that you are not able to work in autonomy on them immediately.

Hope to help

Giuseppe

[Jon Marshall]

Whenever I have interviewed people I was far more interested in whether the person understood the basics and their approach to things than whether they knew specific commands on the CLI which anyone can look up in the documentation. 

As long as your CV is accurate and you have made clear where you strengths are then as Giuseppe says you got the interview so they must think you would be a good candidate for the job. 

My main advice is if you do not know something then be honest about it, don't try and answer something you have no idea about but at the same time make it clear that what you don't know now you soon will.

Good luck with the interview. 

Jon

[Georg Pauwen]

Hello,

I used to do a lot of job interviews, mainly because my boss, who was supposed to do them, did either not speak the local language, or was too lazy to do them. I can of course only speak for myself, but the one thing, the most important one in my opinion, is attitude. Networking is such a vast field that nobody, even the most seasoned and the most experienced people, know all commands. As long as you can convey that whatever you don't know, you are willing to learn, you should be ok. I totally agree with @Jon Marshall , just be honest when you don't know the answer to a specific question, write down the question, and tell your interviewer that you will find out.

That said, it is also my experience that any job interview is decided within basically the first 5 seconds of the interviewer seeing you. Besides your technical knowledge, you need to 'fit' into the team, the company. If you do not get hired, that is usually for the better, because you don't want to work there anyway.