job screening question

Thu Jul 5 17:16:49 UTC 2012

That's a horrible question for a non-technical HR person to pose to a 
candidate - It's impossible for the candidate to ask clarifying 
questions to make sure they understand what you are looking for, plus 
you may have a strong candidate who gets it wrong (for whatever reason), 
but if they were talking to a technical person you would realize they 
were 99% of the way there. What if they said "it would cause the 
generation of port-unreachable ICMP packets to cease, and applications 
may hang until they timeout"? Not the answer you're looking for, but not 
wrong either.

I leave HR to their standard screening stuff, and do the technical part 
myself. Less chance to skip over a good candidate, even if it takes a 
bit longer in the whole process.

On 7/5/12 1:02 PM, William Herrin wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> I gave my HR folks a screening question to ask candidates for an IP
> expert position. I've gotten some "unexpected" answers, so I want to
> do a sanity check and make sure I'm not asking something unreasonable.
> And by "unexpected" I don't mean naively incorrect answers, I mean
> oh-my-God-how-did-you-get-that-cisco-certification answers.
>
> The question was:
>
> You implement a firewall on which you block all ICMP packets. What
> part of the TCP protocol (not IP in general, TCP specifically)
> malfunctions as a result?
>
>
> My questions for you are:
>
> 1. As an expert who follows NANOG, do you know the answer? Or is this
> question too hard?
>
> 2. Is the question too vague? Is there a clearer way to word it?
>
> 3. Is there a better screening question I could pass to HR to ask and
> check the candidate's response against the supplied answer?
>
> Thanks,
> Bill Herrin
>
>