10 IT job interview questions and answers

• What employers look for in IT professionals
• The most common IT job interview questions in NZ

IT professionals are seriously in demand in Aotearoa New Zealand at the moment, but what exactly makes one IT candidate stand out from the others?

You might think this role is all about hard skills, and while this is no doubt important, employers are generally looking for well-rounded candidates. For example, Amir Mohtasebi, our Head of Engineering here at Trade Me says that, when he’s hiring software engineers, coding ability is only “half the story”. Amir says he’s also very interested in a candidates’ ability to understand our customers’ needs, and also how they work with other stakeholders and interact with the rest of the team.

In other words, employers in the IT space in New Zealand are very keen on candidates who possess strong soft skills. This means you want to get this across in your interview, both through the way that you answer questions, but also how you interact with the interviewer. If you’re stand-offish or come across as too self involved, they might begin to question whether you’re the sort of person they want on their team.

This question is not only designed to test how you approach unknowns in your job, but also how well you deal with additional stress.

As with all behavioural interview questions, the best way to answer is by using the STAR (situation, task,action, result) method. This allows you to demonstrate how you’ve dealt with similar situations in the past, and how you’d put these experiences to use in this scenario.

Remember, you can use the STAR method even if this is your first job application by drawing on experiences from school, university or projects you’ve undertaken on your own.

IT is a sector constantly on the move, and bosses want to see you’re committed to staying up-to-date with the latest emerging tools and methodologies. After all, they’re looking to invest in someone to take their company forward, not sit in a holding pattern.

Good answers here will name drop podcasts, blogs or publications you regularly engage with. If you’ve got a great professional network, or make use of community websites like Stackoverflow.com or CodePen.io, these are fantastic resources to mention here too.

This is another time to crack out the STAR methodology to provide concrete examples of how your skills and knowledge have made a tangible difference to organisations in the past. Where possible, mention specific challenges you encountered, and how you overcame them. 

This is crucial for employers. They need to know you have the right soft skills that will enable you to work well with others. You can be the best developer, engineer, architect or analyst going, but if you can’t work with people from other departments towards broader business goals, you’re of little use to the employer.

As always, examples are your friends here, as well as your natural charm and personality!

The real question here is probing what strategies you have for coping with tight deadlines. Talk about:

• Your time management skills: how do you prioritise tasks and create a logical workfl;ow to ensure everything is completed on time?
• Your teamwork abilities: in most IT teams, you’ll be working with others, so explaining how you’ll coordinate with your team members is important when time pressure is involved.
•  Processes you’ve implemented before: wherever possible, back up statements with examples from your past. In this instance. This might include workflow management tools you’ve made use of in previous projects.

Despite how it sounds, this one isn’t designed to trip you up. We all learn far more when things go badly than when they’re a walk in the park – and this is exactly what the interviewer wants to see. How did you respond to the problems you encountered, and what would you do differently next time?

It’s common for employers to present you with a verbal problem to solve in your interview (you might also expect a formal test, if you get further through the application process). 

While you can’t predict what the interviewer will ask, it’s worth brainstorming some possibilities. You can do this by analysing the job listing and looking at the core roles and responsibilities your role will have.

Remember, even if you don’t reach the ‘right’ answer, it’s not the end of the world. The real point of these problem-solving questions is to show the employer how your brain works and how you tackle issues.

This isn’t so much about your technical workflow and the steps you would take to resolve the coding issue, it goes back to your soft skills, and how you would deal with the human dimension to this situation. Is your first reaction to go straight to your manager to highlight the mistake, or would you quietly fix the problem and continue as if nothing had happened?

Our suggestion here would be to go somewhere in the middle of these two. You don’t want to run to your manager and potentially blow this into a bigger thing than it is, but equally you don’t want the colleague in question to keep making the same mistake. If we were you, we’d recommend answering this by saying that you’d talk to the person who made the mistake, let them know that you’ve discovered it, and talk about how you’ll both fix it. This shows a solutions-based approach, while also demonstrating your understanding of the impacts this could have on those around you if you made the wrong call.