[TriLUG] Cert Question

Aaron Joyner aaron at joyner.ws
Thu Sep 12 13:25:40 EDT 2013


I have no Linux certification, essentially no formal credentials of any
kind.  If I applied for the job, would you be interested in hiring me?

I always think it's wise to carefully craft job descriptions to acknowledge
what you really want, which is someone with the skills to do the job at
hand ("LPIC 1 certification or equivalent experience", etc... just beware
the Dunning-Kruger effect).  I also think it's wise to screen and interview
in this way, specifically to ask some weeder technical questions that even
a non-technical hiring manager can ask, and parse the answer for.  Finally,
in a real interview, you need to have someone at least a knowledgeable
(preferably a good bit more knowledgeable) as the candidate to put them
through their paces.

An example recruiter screening question might be something like, "How many
bits are there in an IP address?  a MAC address" or "What command would I
use to list the routing table on a linux machine?"  There are a finite
number of correct answers, which you can give to the recruiter, and they
can rapidly weed out the complete posers.

Once you narrow the field, if you're hiring for a position, say "Sys Admin
1", have someone from your team who is one or two rungs up the technical
ladder ("Sys Admin 3") interview the candidate for 45-60 minutes, ask a
broad range of questions, particularly some relevant "work sampling"
questions, and then ask the interviewer, "Would you want this guy on your
team?  Could he pull his weight?"  If you have the resources to spare,
solicit 2-4 such opinions about each candidate.  If you have a small team
without differentiated levels like Software Engineer 1 vs Software Engineer
3, a simple bar is "don't hire anyone who's not at least as smart as you
are", and you'll have a hard time going wrong.

If you don't have anyone sufficiently technical to evaluate potential
hires, find someone you can trust and have him or her conduct the technical
interviews for you.  That's a potentially expensive proposition, but one of
the only ways to reliably bootstrap that experience internally if you don't
already have it.  I suspect you'd be able to find a pool of local*
trustworthy interviewers by carefully perusing the archives of this very
mailing list.  :)

Aaron S. Joyner

* - FYI, I'm not particularly local, so not a particularly good choice.


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