Interview Preparation

Do you have any tips to help prepare for an upcoming it director interview?

Are there common interview questions that come up again and again?

The only specific IT questions that you will be asked about are something that's on your resume or in the job description. The questions that aren't related to those are the same for most other non-IT careers.

Tell me about yourself.
What are your greatest strengths?
What are your weaknesses?
What would your last boss say about you?
What would your former coworkers say about you?
What’s your management style?
What’s the difference between a leader and a manager?
Why do you want to work here?
What is your biggest accomplishment?
Why should we hire you?
Have you ever had to fire someone?
Describe your biggest failure?
Have you ever dealt with an aggressive coworker? How did you handle it?
Why did you leave your last job?
What are you looking for in a new job?
What do you do outside of the workplace?
Describe yourself in three words?

What's most important is what you ask them so that you can discuss your value proposition during the interview.
Early on ask - What do you feel are the key skills required to be successful in this position?
Be sure to target your experiences and ability to provide them with those skills.

Good luck!!

Host said: Do you have any tips to help prepare for an upcoming it director interview?

Are there common interview questions that come up again and again?

I believe that Robert hit the nail on the head regarding common questions. However, I just finished (and bombed) an interview today where I was asked to solve three technical questions involving upgrading 3 mailservers from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007, adding capacity to an EMC CX500 SAN that ran out of space and upgrading a Financial management servers O/S from SP1 to SP2 (the server is business critical that had no failover) (I know, who would run a business critical server without a backup!). Ironically, at the very beginning of the interview I told the hiring manager that if they were looking for a Director that could do the job of a System Administrator, I was not the right fit. And then, at the end of the interview, he asked a couple of very technical questions and when I didn't provide him with what he thought was the correct answer, he told me that I was not technical enough for the job. In hind sight, I think he was looking for me to ask him specific questions about the environment, not necessarily to go through the step by step process of the upgrades. Anyway, I discovered that he was asking these questions because these were real issues in the environment that I would have been responsible for. So, my take is that you absolutely need to be prepared for the standard questions but depending on who interviews you, you may need to think outside the box.

My advice is if you are looking at an IT Director position specifically, so looking at someone very experienced and competent, you'd best prepare yourself for a lot more strategic stuff - Key challenges for the specific relevant technical environments over the next 5 years.. Key advancements upcoming... How you would manage staff shortages within your team given the current international shortage of top IT talent, and how you would propose to address key talent management issues associated traditionally with IT... How you propose to integrate technical ability with cultural fit and company values... Who your key customers would be and how to gain stakeholder buy-in from across the business for upcoming IT projects and break down typical technical .V. non-technical barriers etc etc...

good suggestion! I am going to attend a intview this Friday, in my experience,for some IT support jobs, someone may want to know your personality to deside if you should be hired. for example : how to deal with a emergent case ,how to set priority for different case? beside that , I think the ability of cost control is necessary for a IT position.