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Specialist I, II, III
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Thee IIntteerrvviieew
This initial interview, whether conducted in person or via telephone, is designed to efficiently
assess two
critical aspects of a candidates’ qualifications for Network specialist level’s I,II,II,.
1)Relevant job skills and experience. 2) Interpersonal competencies.
This worksheet is designed to help determine these candidate attributes.
This interview includes questions relating to these categories:
Experience and accomplishments
Teamwork and management
Work style
The questions in this interview correspond with the candidate assessment spreadsheet that's
included in this
hiring package.
These interview questions and the corresponding assessment are designed to be used for network
specialist level’s
I,II,or III. However, in the technical categories, you will have to consider lowering the standard of
expectancy & accuracy
to be appropriate for less experienced applicants. You may choose to eliminate or replace certain
questions up front, but
it is recommended that you lower the job qualifications benchmark standards in the candidate
assessment sheet so they
are appropriate for positions with lower skill set requirements. Please note: that although there are
technical assessment
questions in this interview, this is not a technical test. You should also never remove any of the
interpersonal or
communication skills questions.
The questions are grouped into eight categories:
1. Technical skills and knowledge
2. On-the-job experience
3. Communication
4. Proactive actions and positive attitude
5. Troubleshooting
6. UNIX administration
7. Windows administration
8. General network administration
An answer key covering the questions in the last three categories appears in a separate section at the
end of this
document.
Federal and state laws prohibits asking questions that are not related to the job you are hiring for.
Questions should not
used to find out personal information. DO NOT ask about race, gender, religion, marital status, age,
disabilities, ethnic
background, country of origin, sexual preferences or age.
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Specialist I, II, III
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Candidate information
Position: Network Specialist level 1 level 2 level 3 
Candidate's name:
Address: street city sta zip
Contact info: Phone: Cell:
E- mail:
Candidate ad source Referred by or job posting info:
Interview date:
Interviewed by:
Salary range discussed: $___________ to $____________
Interview Notes
Was the candidate punctual? Describe the candidate’s appearance? What was their demeanor during the
interview? Did they seem interested in the company and the position?
Interview follow-up action
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Specialist I, II, III
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Technical skills and knowledge
1. What special skills or knowledge can you bring to our organization? Why would this be valuable to us?
How would
you apply it given what you know about our company and the job we are trying to fill?
2. How do you keep up with what's going on in your company/industry/profession? Give an example of
how you have
applied what you have learned to your current job.
3. What diagnostic tools are you familiar with, and what server platforms?
4. Rank your experience with these infrastructure technologies. Choose from no experience,
beginner,
intermediate, or advanced.
On-the-job experience
1. Tell me about your current job. What do you like about it? What do you dislike?
Citrix Metaframe 1 2 3 4 Virus defense 1 2 3 4
Windows servers 2K & 2003 OS, 1 2 3 4 Vulnerability testing 1 2 3 4
Active Directory 1 2 3 4 Intrusion detection 1 2 3 4
Windows Exchange 1 2 3 4 Firewall (Sonicwall, Black ice) 1 2 3 4
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Specialist I, II, III
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2. Describe the workload in your current (or most recent) job. How do you prioritize and
organize your work?
What do you do when you have conflicting priorities? Provide a specific example of a time
you had
several "urgent" and key projects that had deliverables due at approximately the same time.
How did you
get the work done?
3. What is the single most rewarding thing you have accomplished, and why do you cite this
above all your
other accomplishments? What did you learn from it?
4. What's the biggest mistake you've made? How did you recover, and what did you learn?
5. Describe your net admin security expertise/experience: technologies you're familiar with
or security
projects you've completed at your current job.
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Specialist I, II, III
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Communication
1. Describe your preferred communication style.
2. Describe a situation in which you received negative feedback on a work product. What
was the
feedback? How was it delivered and what did you do in response to the feedback?
3. Describe a time that you had a conflict with a coworker, peer, manager, or customer.
How did you
respond to the conflict? What was the result? What did you learn and what, if anything,
would you do
differently?
4. How do you resolve conflict on a project team?
5. The network was brought down by a user who clicked on an e-mail attachment that had a
virus. It wasn't
caught by the antivirus program housed on the e-mail server because it is a brand-new
virus exploiting a
newly discovered weakness in the OS. The company is upset about the downtime caused.
Given the
money spent on tools to prevent such problems, you're being asked to explain why this
happened. How
do you explain to the CIO that the end user is the CEO/company executive?
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Proactive actions and positive attitude
1. Tell me about a time you looked at processes or work flow and made them more efficient.
2. Can you describe some things you have done to demonstrate proactive/innovative
thinking to solve a
potential problem?
3. What was your most difficult decision in the last six months?
4. Tell me about a team project you worked on and how you contributed to it.
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Specialist I, II, III
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Troubleshooting
1. The network is experiencing periods of slow response, and you are asked to find a
solution. What
troubleshooting techniques would you use to diagnose and resolve the problem?
2. Users can send e-mail locally, but cannot send e-mail to external recipients. Please
describe how you
would troubleshoot and resolve this problem.
3. A user's roaming profile is not accessible in a Windows 2000 network. Describe how you
would solve
this problem.
UNIX administration
Please answer the following questions on basic UNIX system administration.
Do you have any UNIX experience? If no, go to the windows administration questions. (yes) (no)
1. You want to find out the possible parameters for a command but don’t have the
administration manual.
What do you do?
2. You want to see the IP address of the server. What command do you use?
3. You are curious about how much disk space your server has. What command do you
use?
4. What command do you use to find out what processes are running on your UNIX server?
5. UNIX user account information is stored in what file? UNIX user passwords are not
stored in that file, so
where are they stored?
Basic UNIX administration
1. View the “man” page (manual page) from the UNIX server; for example, man ls.
2. ifconfig -a
3. df
4. ps
5. UNIX user account information is stored in /etc/passwd. Passwords for those accounts are stored in /etc/shadow.
(In
some UNIX variants, the shadow file is moved to another directory.)

Advanced UNIX administration

Please answer the following questions on advanced UNIX system administration.
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Specialist I, II, III
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1. What do you use to send output from one program to another program? How would you
redirect stderr to
a file?
2. What do you need to install to allow Windows hosts to access shared files from your
Linux server?
3. How would you redirect stdout to your terminal and to a file?
4. If you wanted to change your DNS configuration, what file would you edit?
5. What is the difference between an absolute and relative path?
Advanced UNIX administration
1. To send output from one program to the other, you would use a pipe (|). You would send standard error (stderr)
from a
program to a file like this: ls 2> myfile.
2. Samba (UNIX SMB)
3. Use the tee command; for example, ls | tee myfile.
4. /etc/named.conf
5. Absolute path: When specifying an absolute path, you are telling the system, from the root directory, exactly
where you
are referencing. What directory you are currently located in is irrelevant. An example of an absolute path is /usr/bin.
Relative path: With a relative path, your current directory is taken into account when you are referencing a file. For
example, if you are in the /usr directory, a relative path would be vi bin/test
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Specialist I, II, III
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Windows administration
Please answer the following questions on basic Windows system administration. Knowledge of windows
administration is required
at Mr. Rogers Windows.
1. Which of the following audit policies would you enforce to monitor file and folder access?
Audit object access
Audit privilege use
Audit policy change
Audit account logon events
2. What data is included in a backup of Windows System State data?
3. Group policies are applied in what order?
4. Which of the following Windows XP Recovery Console commands rewrites the boot
sector code to the
system volume?
Fixmbr
Fixboot
Fixvolume
Systemroot
5. The HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE key in the registry holds hardware and software
information within what
five subkeys?
Advanced Windows system
Please answer the following questions on advanced Windows system administration.
1. What happens to the permissions on a file when you do the following:
You copy a file within a partition.
You move a file across partitions.
You move a file within a partition.
2. What three predefined counters does Performance Monitor use to provide you with
system information?
3. Explain the difference between RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID 5.
4. What are the five roles a FSMO server can have within Active Directory?
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Specialist I, II, III
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5. What network protocols does Windows 2000 Server support?
General network administration
Please answer the following questions on basic network administration.
1. What are the layers of the OSI Model?
2. How many channels are in a T1, and what is their bandwidth?
3. What are the port numbers for SMTP, HTTPS, and Telnet?
4. What mode would an Ethernet switch port have to be in to have simultaneous sending
and receiving of
data?
5. You are using private IP addresses on your internal network. What are your options for
allowing devices
on the private network to access the public Internet?
Advanced network administration
Please answer the following questions on advanced network administration.
1. What WAN technology would allow you to increase the number of remote locations, have
all locations
fully meshed, but still have only a single T1 circuit at each remote location?
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2. What protocol helps prevent loops on a LAN?
3. What routing protocol would work well on any size network, is an interior gateway
protocol (IGP), and
uses cost as its metric?
4. How would using Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI) enhance a firewall?
5. You have a /24 network that you want to subnet into as many networks as possible, but
each network
needs only two usable IP addresses. How many networks can you create?
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Answer key
Basic UNIX administration
1. View the “man” page (manual page) from the UNIX server; for example, man ls.
2. ifconfig -a
3. df
4. ps
5. UNIX user account information is stored in /etc/passwd. Passwords for those accounts are stored in /etc/shadow.
(In
some UNIX variants, the shadow file is moved to another directory.)
Advanced UNIX administration
1. To send output from one program to the other, you would use a pipe (|). You would send standard error (stderr)
from a
program to a file like this: ls 2> myfile.
2. Samba (UNIX SMB)
3. Use the tee command; for example, ls | tee myfile.
4. /etc/named.conf
5. Absolute path: When specifying an absolute path, you are telling the system, from the root directory, exactly
where you
are referencing. What directory you are currently located in is irrelevant. An example of an absolute path is /usr/bin.
Relative path: With a relative path, your current directory is taken into account when you are referencing a file. For
example, if you are in the /usr directory, a relative path would be vi bin/test.
Basic Windows administration
1. Audit object access
2. Registry information, COM+ database files, startup files, resource recovery logs
3. Local policies are first; site policies overrule local policies; domain policies overrule local and site policies;
organizational unit policies overrule local, site, and domain policies.
4. Fixboot
5. Hardware, Security Accounts Manager (SAM), Security, Software, System
Advanced Windows administration
1. When you copy a file within a partition, the file inherits the permissions from the destination folder; when you
move a
file across partitions, the file inherits the permissions from the destination folder; when you move a file within a
partition, the file maintains its original permissions.
2. Pages/Sec, Avg Disk Queue Length, % Processor Time
3. RAID 0, also known as disk striping, uses from two to 32 disks and provides excellent performance but no fault
tolerance. If a RAID 0 disk fails, all data is lost. RAID 1, also known as disk mirroring, uses two hard disks, one as
an
exact image of the first, thereby providing fault tolerance. If one RAID 1 disk in the mirrored pair fails, data is still
preserved by the other disk. RAID 5, also known as disk striping with parity, writes data across multiple disks
simultaneously, thereby providing a considerable performance enhancement and fault tolerance. If one disk fails,
data is
still preserved by the RAID array.
4. Schema master, domain naming master, relative identifier (RID) master, PDC emulator, infrastructure master
5. AppleTalk, ATM, DLC, IPX/SPX (NWLink), IrDA, NetBEUI
Basic network administration
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1. Layer 7 – Application
Layer 6 – Presentation
Layer 5 – Session
Layer 4 – Transport
Layer 3 – Network
Layer 2 – Data-Link
Layer 1 – Physical
2. 24 channels of 64 kb each (kilobits)
3. SMTP – 25
HTTPS – 443
Telnet – 23
4. Full-Duplex
5. Proxy Server, Network Address Translation (NAT), or Port Address Translation (PAT)
Advanced network administration
1. Frame -relay would allow you to have only a single circuit (perhaps a T1) at each remote location but allow every
remote
location to be fully meshed (talk directly from one location to every other location) by using PVCs within the frame
-
relay cloud.
2. Spanning-Tree protocol (STP)
3. OSPF – Open Shortest Path First
4. SPI keeps track of every packet’s TCP state as it goes through the three-way handshake to become established,
transmits
its data, and then disconnects. Because of this, a SPI firewall is more secure than a simple access list.
5. You went from having a /24 network to a /30 network (two usable IP addresses per network, calculated 2^2-2=2).
Thus,
you used six additional bits of subnetting; so, 2^6=64 networks.