I Need Hiring Advice Logic Tests

What kind of logic tests have you guys seen, or even better do you use, on an entry level position? The job doesn't pay great, it's 83.5 percent of the local median household income (It's not fixed to that, that's just what it happens to be) so it's not terrible either. It's a general helpdesk position and we've not had great success hiring for this position in the past.
just asking, but why you gonna test helpdesk people with logic problems? Most helpdesk setups are a flow chart of follow the symptoms, read the solution to the caller. If you find something new, the low man passed it to the senior guy to figure it out.

If you do want to test them, give them something reasonable and realistic that is on par with what they will see every day in the position. No one cares if they can figure out how many salads chef can make while riding a unicycle if he is only allowed to peddle backwards while juggling up to 2^87th knives and chopping up to e^42 tomatoes. They care if the person can tell the user to reboot politely.
Right, I'm not planning on asking the market potential for cell phones in Paris given these demographics (actual question posed to me for some 1099 work, GTFO HSBC). But our current guy such bone head mistakes, his soft skills are great, but is it unreasonable to expect him to understand why you can't run a batch file from inside a zip? Or that just because you've been installed an application from your thumb drive, doesn't mean you have to mail that thumb drive to Texas to install that software for a user? How about no, you cannot keep your 2FA code for your VPN on a post-it note because not only does it change every 45 seconds but doing so is a direct violation of the computer security rules for our company? It's been two years since he's joined us and all of these mistakes have been made in the past month; so this isn't a case of "nobody told him", these seem like character flaws. It's not that I want to see him leave you understand, but he's expressed wanting to move to an area where he would not be able to continue in his current position so I'm hoping to get ahead of this kind of thing for the next guy\gal. We need someone who can understand the "Flow Chart" and not just parrot his way through it.

Maybe I just needed to rant.
Can't think of anything that will ensure the person will adhere to corporate policy all the time. But if you want someone who can figure out the issues, not just follow known steps, you need someone with some background in setting up and administration of the types of systems and software involved.
Give them a sandbox machine and have them install the products, and then maybe patch/update them. Maybe do something to the sandbox so it needs a driver or configuration or something done to get it working, see not just if they figure it out, but how they go about it. I guess I am echoing what I said before, but I believe in realistic tests as much as possible, and even if they fail it, I am more interested in how they try to fix it and handle the stress than whether they get it or not.
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Maybe I just needed to rant.
The years of mismanagement reflects on you, not the person you are shafting and my bet is you'll do the same to the replacement.
Computergeek01 wrote:
Maybe I just needed to rant.

I hear ya, that is one nice thing about the Lounge. Adults venting in cyberspace so they don't kick off the deep end in the meat world. :)

Looks like someone doesn't like adult conversation, reporting you. Heh.

Now, as to the issue(s) you raised, I don't have a clue. It has been years since I last worked, and then it was as a grunt doing actual productive tasks. Helpdesk yoinks more often than not end up asking ME questions to solve problems when I call for assistance, even now.
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This isn't Reddit dumb ass. The Report button isn't a "super downvote" to be used because a post triggered some flashback to when your supervisor was mean to you and hurt your feelings. Get a handle on your personal inadequacies and learn from them.

As for you genuine criticism though, I'm doing better than %50 with helpdesk recruits. The first left because her wife got a job in Albany, the next guy was a good worker but a raging alcoholic and was terminated due to personal violations (I didn't have a say in that), the third guy landed his dream job as a Java developer and the fourth guy I didn't even like on a personal level, but he stuck around for a good 6 years eventually left for a management job at a data center. I've had one true failure and I blame recruitment because "Skippy", as I've referred to him on this site before, clearly lied about all of his qualifications. I'm not ready to call the current guy an out right failure, like I said he's expressed interest in leaving on his own. It's Wanderlust if you ask me, but the libertarian in me won't let me stop him.
I'm not ready to call the current guy an out right failure, like I said he's expressed interest in leaving on his own.
This is a classic case of there being no 'I' in team. Your Myers-Briggs score, as voodoo-ish as that is, is coming across as being at the extreme bad-end of the 'J' spectrum.
Solving your mis-management issues by hoping someone leaves is at best not a good look and is probably in breach of industrial laws, something you might like to consider because workplace harassment is actionable and can lead to large compensation claims. Now that you have possibly supplied enough information to identify your victims you might also have a defamation action to add to your CV.
I see our resident ass, againtry, is doing his Report Fairy shtick.

Go fuck off, loser.
Well, as usual FG you got that wrong. They aren't my reports.
BTW, we're still waiting for you to write at least a couple of lines of C++ (or any language) code.
But there again your whole life, what's left of it, as a total amateur human extends now way too far into your dotage to ever achieve anything of value. What a trailer-trash waste of protoplasm you are.
Go fuck off, loser.
How amateurish as a best shot that is.
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