Welcoming questions
- Can you tell us about yourself and how you got started in systems administration?
- Which environment you have managed are you most proud of, and what shape was it in when you took it over?
Role-specific / technical competencies
- Describe the environment you currently manage: servers, operating systems, identity, and networking. What would you improve first?
- How do you plan and roll out patches without disrupting the business?
- Walk us through your backup strategy. When did you last test a full restore, and what did you learn?
- A server is running slowly and users are complaining. What is your troubleshooting process?
- What have you automated with PowerShell or Bash that saved your team real time?
Behavioural & culture fit
- Tell us about a stressful outage you handled. How did you communicate while fixing it?
- Describe a time you had to enforce an unpopular IT policy. How did you handle the pushback?
- How do you prioritize when tickets, maintenance, and a project deadline all compete for your time?
Problem-solving / case
- You arrive Monday morning and no one can log in. Walk us through your first 30 minutes.
- Leadership asks whether we should move our remaining on-premises servers to the cloud. How would you build the recommendation?
- You discover that backups for a critical system have been silently failing for three weeks. What do you do immediately, and what do you change afterward?
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