5 New Pre-Screen Questions to Qualify Cloud and IT Candidates

When you’re looking for the right person to fill an IT role at your company, it can be extremely challenging to find candidates who legitimately have all the skills needed. For example, you might get applications from people who say they’re proficient in Kubernetes, but they may only have a basic understanding and be unable to manage a complex deployment.

So how do you accurately narrow down your applicant pool of IT professionals to legitimately qualified professionals to avoid wasting the time of job candidates and yourself?

With a solid pre-screening process you can create a short list of exceptional potential hires.

Benefits of a Strong Candidate Screening Process

Before your hiring team sits down with IT job candidates, send out a prescreening questionnaire to determine whether a person is right for the role.

When crafted strategically, a candidate screening process can lead to decreased recruitment costs, a selection of better-qualified candidates, and a faster hiring process. While you may experience a decrease in the volume of potential hires, the quality of your candidates will increase exponentially.

The Top 5 Questions to Prescreen Cloud IT Candidates

As you draft the questionnaire, ensure your questions are tailored specifically to the open position and your company. Don’t want to use a template from another company or recycle the same questions for every open role because each job will have different needs and requirements.

The idea of prescreening is to identify whether someone is a good fit for the position, not just for an IT Team in general.

Here are five types of questions to ask Cloud IT candidates during prescreening.

What is your basic troubleshooting process for [issue]?

Pick a common issue a person in this role could run into, and ask them to talk you through how they’d solve the problem. Their troubleshooting process should include identifying the issue, pinpointing the source of the issue, creating a plan of action, implementing that plan, and testing to ensure the issue is resolved. Bonus points if the candidate discusses any preventative steps they’d take to make sure that the same thing doesn’t happen again.

What is the purpose of [process]? or What’s your favorite [process] software or tool?

This kind of question is great for gauging a candidate’s experience level and knowledge of different tools. Nearly every professional in a tech-based role will need to have a strong understanding of a particular software or tool going into a position, and you should personalize the variable for what’s essential in the job you’re trying to fill.

You’ll want to hire someone who recognizes the importance of the process you are screening for, and has familiarity with a relevant tool or software. Even if they don’t use the same applications as your company, they should at least demonstrate a thorough understanding of a similar tool.

Candidates might discuss using a tool to automate administration tasks or manage deployments. They might also talk about regularly monitoring data access authorization logs for security, restoring corrupt and deleted files from external hard drives, or preventing data loss.

What is your understanding of [methodology or framework]?

If your organization subscribes to a certain software development methodology or framework, or management process like Agile or DevOps, this question gives IT candidates an opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge and experience. Someone with solid experience working in a methodology or framework will be able to offer more details and examples of best practices, potential caveats, and different frameworks than a candidate with little to no experience.

If a candidate has experience in a different methodology or framework, they might use this opportunity to express that they’re willing to learn more about your preferred model while demonstrating their knowledge of the model they’ve worked with previously.

What have you learned in previous roles that you think will be useful in this position with regard to [fill in the blank]?

IT candidates with diverse experience backgrounds have a lot of knowledge to share that may not be obvious for the role. This question provides an opportunity for them to showcase their ingenuity and ability to adapt.

After all, when it comes to architecture and development, there’s usually more than one to get the job done. Keep an open mind and look for elements of creativity in a candidate’s answer to this question.

What Is/Are ________?

While it may seem unfair that we’re putting an open-ended question here, you must tailor your prescreening questions to the role.

You can fill in that blank with several possible topics, but it should be something that is vital to the role. You might ask your applicants to say a few words about:

• Hybrid cloud
• The Layers of [Platform/Infrastructure/Software] as a Service
• Distributed cloud
• Cloud-native applications T
• he critical components of AWS Edge computing in relation to cloud computing
• The largest cloud providers and databases

Be specific. The topic you want candidates to discuss should differ for each job listing and you should ask about something that is central to the day-to-day duties of the role.

Hire with Confidence

While prescreen interview questions and basic assessments are valuable, what really matters is that a candidate has the skills to do the job.

The best way to find out is to put their skills to the test by having them complete actual tasks your organization needs them to perform, such as configuring advanced permissions in Linux or using PKI to secure a network environment. Our hands-on Challenge Labs provide a way for candidates to complete real scenarios on various cloud technologies and platforms, including AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, Cybersecurity, and more.

Be confident in your prescreening process. Learn more about Challenge Labs for skills validation or book a consult to tailor a solution for today.