Job Interview Questions for IT: What You Need to Know

Planning out your questions for an interview within the field of IT can be tricky, especially if you don't have knowledge in that area. It's important to plan ahead and make sure that you are able to determine the skill-level of the candidate through the correct questions. In this article, we've put together some example job interview questions for IT to give you inspiration for your next IT interview.

Job interview questions for IT

Phone interview

Phone interviews are essential for determining if a candidate could be a good fit for the position and worth the time and effort of an in-person interview. In the case of IT, it’s important to figure out if the candidate has had some experience with the technical applications that will be required for the role. However, the phone interview could be conducted by someone who does not have advanced IT knowledge, as long as they are able to get a general feeling for the candidate's experience.

Potential questions

• Why are you interested in working here?
• What made you apply for this job specifically?
• What is important to you in a position/company?
• In your previous work experience, what did you enjoy doing the most?
• And what did you dislike the most?
• Are you familiar with the technical skills/applications required for this role?
• Can you give some examples of how you’ve used these skills in previous roles?

In-person interview

In the in-person interview, it will be more crucial to determine the skill-level of the candidate in relation to the skills needed for that position. For this reason, it is recommended that there be a recruiter or an employee with these skills in the interview as well. 

The interview should include questions based off the skill-level required for the position. For entry-level positions, the questions may be more general and aimed at what the candidate has learned during their education. The higher the position, the more specific the questions should get.

We’ll be using a front-end developer position as our example in this post, but the questions will need to be tweaked for other positions in IT. This list is to help you imagine what types of questions to ask for each skill level.

Potential questions

Basic

• Have you used Javascript?
• Do you have experience with HTML/CSS?

Intermediate

• Have you worked with Photoshop or Illustrator? 
• Why are you interested in web development and not application development?
• What kind of operating system do you use?
• Do you any experience with jQuery?

Advanced

• Which browsers do you use to test pages?
• Where do you learn about new trends and techniques?
• What steps do you take when you have to fix a bug?
• Do you have SEO experience?
• How advanced are your English skills?
• Do you know AngularJS, VueJs and/or React?

Expert

• Have you ever worked with module bundlers like webpack?
• Have you ever worked with a task runner like Gulp?
• Have you ever worked with HTML templating like Handlebars or Jade?
• Do you have experience with any version control systems?

Check out our page "The Ultimate Guide to Job Interviews" to find further resources on the topic of job interviews.

Would you like to learn more about job interviews and the recruiting process? We will gladly show you further best practice examples and concrete implementation in the Talention software. You can request a demo here and someone will get in touch with you shortly. Request a demo now.