What to do when you realize an interviewer isn't technical but is asking technical questions?

Question

I am looking for work and recruiters are something I’m new to. I keep getting contacted by recruiters from recruitment agencies, through LinkedIn. I’ve had some bad experience. Some ask very strange and generic questions. My background is technical and the jobs I am applying for are too. The recruiter I just spoke with was asking me questions like

1. Tell me about yourself. I gave a run down of where I’m at in my career but I didn’t expect a recruiter to be asking this question as I’ve only heard someone say it in interviews, and I didn't expect the first contact with a not-in-house recruiter to be like an interview.

2. How do you trouble shoot issues with LAN or WAN? When I asked for more of a background she said I shouldn’t need it, and when I said I think it makes a difference she added “the issues are happening at the enterprise level”.

3. What do you know about LAN, WAN and TCP/IP?

I said “you basically just asked me what I know about the internet” and she just repeated the question.

I had set aside other responsibilities to take the call and was a bit upset it was going so poorly and she commented she has never gotten resistance when asking these questions before.

I told her I needed more context to better answer the question and she said she wanted to see what my process was based on previous experience and I don’t need specifics. I asked her to give an example of an answer she thought was good and she said “use remote desktop to connect to the computer with network problems” (which made me laugh) and she also said “if your tier 1 you would talk to the person on the phone to diagnose the problem and if you were tier 2 you would go to their desk”. Then it struck me: she was nontechnical but trying to ask technical questions! What do you do in this situation? I caught on to this and said “for the network problem I would check to see if there were any issues, maybe a tree fell on the wires” and she took offense to this and said she’ll contact me if there are any other positions. I normally wouldn’t say something like that but I know some nontechnical people like those answers. She also mentioned she wanted me to talk about ticketing systems. Am I right in thinking that we didn’t see eye to eye as she was nontechnical but asking technical questions? What do you do in these situations?

Also, it seemed like it was an interview and I thought that recruiters are supposed to help find you placements and prepare for interviews. Am I correct?

How can I find out at the beginning if the person is looking for technical answers or more soft skills?

Answer 1

How can I find out at the beginning if the person is looking for technical answers or more soft skills?

Asking works well.

Alternatively, you can give a short answer and ask - "is that what you are looking for? I can be more/less technical if you'd like."

Out of curiosity why do interviewers ask this question when they’ve already seen your work experience and resume? It suggests to me they didn’t read it.

This may be true but also, a decent percentage of people either blatantly lie or creatively increase their actual responsibilities/tasks to look far more meaningful than they were.

It's far cheaper to pay a recruiter for 30 minutes of time to determine it vs bringing someone onsite and paying a technical person to do the same.

It's also important to note that many brilliant people can't communicate at all. Being able to communicate your ideas is often more important than your actual ideas.

And there are bad recruiters just as there are people doing any other job poorly, too.

I said “you basically just asked me what I know about the internet” and she just repeated the question.

I caught on to this and said “for the network problem I would check to see if there were any issues, maybe a tree fell on the wires”

As an aside to your question here, this comes across as pretty... know-it-allish and condescending if you respond this way. Not that it likely matters here since you don't care about the job.

What you should do in the future is make sure you know what specific job you are discussing prior to meeting with a recruiter. Or have a clear objective in meeting with them - ask what the purpose of calls are. It sounds like you had no idea why you were being asked these questions, which suggests you likely didn't know what the ultimate purpose of your conversation was.

Answer 2

This is an interesting question because both you and the recruiter dropped the ball here. let's break it down.

I didn't expect the first contact with a not-in-house recruiter to be like an interview.

That's exactly what it is. Good recruiters invest time in you and they want to get a sense of who you are, where you're at in you career and what your skills are. They do that to avoid wasting time if you're, in their view, a bad hire as well as to determine what kind of clients or positions would fit you.

I had set aside other responsibilities to take the call and was a bit upset it was going so poorly

Avoid getting upset. It will be apparent in your voice and doesn't help you. A lot of interviews, especially initial phone screens, won't pan out.

she commented she has never gotten resistance when asking these questions before.

And that's because they're not really technical questions. What they're checking for if they ask you this is how confident you are in your domain and how good you are at explaining technical issues to non-technical people. Those are absolutely vital skills for anyone working with technical stuff, whether that's IT, physics or biology.

Now this is also the part where the recruiter messed up: she should never have tried to answer the question herself given her lack of technical knowledge. She gave a good "soft' answer, focusing on what steps to take to resolve an issue, but of course she got it disastrously wrong from a technical point of view. And you probably jumped on that instead of realising what she was doing. I hope you at least didn't laugh out loud but both this and your initial reaction to her question are incredibly condescending. Your bizarre answer also comes across as facetious to me.

How can I find out at the beginning if the person is looking for technical answers or more soft skills?

The type of question should tell you that. "If I wanted to frazzle the flux capacitor but it gave me an Irdial error, what would your first instinct be to troubleshoot?" is a technical question. "How would you approach a poorly defined issue that's assigned to you?" is a behaviour question. "What are the shortcomings of TCP/IP?" and "Can you describe LAN and WAN?" are softball technical questions that are really looking at your soft skills.

In summary, and since you mention that this is a recurring problem, you're approaching this all wrong. The fact that you have a technical profile does not mean that you don't need excellent soft skills. You do. Especially if you want to get past recruiters (whether internal or external) instead of applying directly with hiring managers, which is only really an option with small companies or personal contacts.

This is not to say that you should just accept anything as normal and that there aren't recruiters who suck at their job and ask nonsensical questions. But you admit to being new to the process and that means that you don't yet know what is and isn't normal. That kind of calibration takes time and experience.

Answer 3

In companies large enough to hire full-time recruiters, it's common to do a pre-interview phone screen (aka "pulse check") where the recruiters asks a set of questions with predetermined set of answers. They can then see how many of these you get "right", and pass candidates who do well enough to the actual interview.

It's easy to fall into the ego trap of "why are they insulting my intelligence like this!", but interviews are expensive to companies and there are a lot of candidates with shiny resumes and next to no actual skills to back them up. So if done well, with pre-screen questions that have a limited set of correct answers, this is a decent bozo filter.

In your particular case, of course, the questions were not. The first question sounds like a warm-up question where the answer is essentially meaningless, the second sounds completely inappropriate for this, and the third sounds like she was expecting you just to spell out the acronyms: "LAN stands for Local Area Network, WAN is Wide Area Network, TCP/IP is Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol".

In any case, all you need to do is give the simplest possible answer and elaborate only if asked to do so. Otherwise, you may end up like this guy. It's also worth noting that any decent company will pass the results to the hiring manager (who hopefully is technical), who may be able to identify answers that are correct but nonstandard.

Answer 4

I’m surprised she started the conversation with “tell me about yourself” which I find a difficult question to answer even when I’m ready for it. Out of curiosity why do interviewers ask this question when they’ve already seen your work experience and resume? It suggests to me they didn’t read it.

This is an absolutely standard interview question and often the first one asked, so you should have an instant pre-prepared answer for it. It's not really about your resume, I use it primarily as an easy open question to get people comfortable and talking, but it's also useful to tell me how much interview preparation you have done and what you see as your most important skills and experience. It's not uncommon for the answer to "tell me about yourself" to be quite different from the picture painted by the resume.

Think of it as similar to "tell me what you know about this company" - as an interviewer I would obviously know the answer as I work there, but interview questions often aren't about the answer (just like "tell me about yourself" isn't a substitute for me reading your resume), the question is about how you answer and what your answer says about your preparation and approach.

Regarding the original question, if you are a technical employee then being able to explain technical concepts to non-technical staff is a key skill, especially at more senior levels. I'm technical, but often ask candidates to do this - it's usually a very good test of how well they understand a technology too. So if you're getting technical questions from a non-technical recruiter or interviewer (or hiring manager!), then don't take umbrage, look at it as an opportunity to probe for the level of detail they need and demonstrate this skill