Interviews

Tell me about your last three days at work-- beginning to end.

How many first appointments do you have each week?

How do you initiate these contacts?

What do you do personally for your professional development?

What do you think are the most important skills in succeeding as a sales engineer?

What is the largest group you've presented to (externally/ internally)?

How do you organize a presentation?

What do you like and dislike about presentations and why?

How would your present prospects and customers describe you as their sales engineer?

Describe a time your company did not deliver on its product or service and how you responded?

Describe one or two of the most difficult challenges and/ or rejections you've faced in the past and how you responded?

What are some of the challenges you see that are facing this industry?

How would those with whom you work now, across all areas of the company, describe you and the work you do?

Describe a time you led a group of people, the primary challenges you faced and how you handled them?

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Explain how traceroute, ping, and tcpdump work and what they are used for?

Describe a case where you have used these tools to troubleshoot.

What LAN analyzer tools are you familiar with and describe how you use them to troubleshoot and on what media and network types.

Explain the contents of a routing table (default route, next hop, etc.)

What do you see as current networking security issues (e.g. NFS mounting, spoofing, one time passwords, etc.)?

Describe how SNMP works.

Describe the working environment you are currently in, e.g. frequent interruptions, frequent priority shifting, team or individual.

How do you manage multiple concurrent high level projects?

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How did you fill downtime at your last job?

Tell me about your last performance review. What was mentioned about how you could improve? Any re-occurring themes?

Which situations kept you from coming to work on time at your last job? How often did that occur?

Describe a recent problem you had with one of your manager's decisions. Listen and then ask, how did you handle it?

What about your character makes you a good candidate for this job?

Priorities often change suddenly throughout the day. If you are asked to quickly do another task, how does that affect your mood? What if it's the third time before noon?

sales operations are like relay races where you take the baton, run with it and then pass it on smoothly. How do you make seamless transitions?

Think about the last time your manager critiqued your work. How did you respond?

Give an example of when you did something without being asked. Can you give me another example?

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Character quality: Dependability

If we were to ask your previous supervisor, what would they say about your attendance and job performance?

The schedule shows 8, however only 6 coworkers showed up. How does that make you feel? What would you do?