Help Desk Specialist interview questions and answers
This Help Desk Specialist interview profile brings together a snapshot of what to look for in candidates with a balanced sample of suitable interview questions.
Help Desk Specialist Interview Questions
Hire an experienced Help Desk Specialist or an ambitious candidate that you can train. Experienced candidates will have deep knowledge of products, services, and customers they’ve worked with. They will have ready answers for the situational questions and excellent troubleshooting skills. For less experienced candidates, ensure that they have comfort with computers and basic knowledge of databases. A B.S. in Information Technology or Computer Science is desirable, as well as previous customer-facing experience.
You’re looking for more than technical skills when you hire Help Desk Specialists. This role is more about clear communication and critical thinking. They should be able to solve problems efficiently and have a genuine desire to deliver great customer service. They should be organized, composed, and empathetic. And if they need help, they should be able to make the right judgement call and ask for it.
Use these questions to evaluate your candidates’ troubleshooting skills and knowledge of IT. If written communication is important for this role, you may want to add a written take-home assignment as part of your hiring process. In the assignment, try asking them to walk you through a process or request a paragraph explaining a basic IT concept.
Operational and Situational questions
- What kind of customers do you have at your current or previous job?
- What is your preferred operating system and why?
- What help desk tools have you used in the past?
- What tools have you used for logging and dating calls?
- How do you stay up-to-date on your knowledge of your products and services?
- A caller reports that their monitor has blacked out. How would you troubleshoot?
- It seems that a caller has destroyed a product and asked your company to fix or replace it. How would you proceed?
- Describe a time a caller asked for a refund.
- Walk us through the steps of adding a new printer to a user’s network.
- Walk us through the steps of installing antivirus software.
- Describe the worst customer you’ve ever had to deal with. What did you do to handle the stress?
- Recall a time you resolved an issue with an angry customer. What was the problem? How did you handle it?
- Describe a time you solved a help desk call with one of your team members.
- What do you do when you’re unable to answer a help desk call?
- What do you know about our product? Have you seen anything that may cause problems for our customers?