What to Screen For in a Support Hire, and What Not to Over-Weight

Tuesday, 08:40, at Oakfield Academy. Dana has run the school's two-person IT desk for a year and has never hired anyone. Twenty-three applications arrived over the weekend for the technician post, and she has read all of them twice. Two keep rising to the top of the pile and she cannot say why. One lists eleven tools, three certifications and "advanced troubleshooting" in bold. The other is from a pharmacy counter assistant whose covering letter describes, in four clear paragraphs, the afternoon the dispensing system went down and what she did about the queue of people waiting. Dana has an interview slot on Thursday and no idea which of these two she is looking for. She has a feeling about the pharmacist. She does not trust feelings, which is the right instinct and the wrong conclusion.

Screening is deciding, before you meet anyone, which qualities a candidate must show, which you merely like, and what evidence of each would look like. It is the step most small desks skip, because the pile of applications arrives before the thinking does. The pile is then where the decision gets made. The choice comes down to whoever has the longest list of tools, the most familiar job title or the boldest font. This article is part of our Hiring Support Staff series. It is about doing the thinking first, so that the pile is sorted by the job rather than by the typography.

It covers why a support desk needs traits more than a tool list. Then come the five traits worth screening for: curiosity, calm, clear writing, ownership and the willingness to say "I do not know". It explains how each one shows up in a desk's ordinary day. Next comes what not to over-weight: years, tool names, certifications and the confident talker. It covers where each trait leaves evidence, then the fairness rule that keeps the criteria defensible. It finishes with a short war story and the screening criteria sheet to copy.

Why the Desk Needs Traits More Than a Tool List

The job of a support technician changes less than the tools it is done with. A desk's day is the same whether the ticketing tool is new or old. Read a request written by someone who is upset or in a hurry. Work out what is actually wrong. Fix it or find the person who can, and write down what happened so the next person does not start again. The tools in the advert will be different in five years. The day will not. Screen for the day.

A tool list measures exposure, not ability. Someone who lists eleven tools has been in a building where eleven tools were installed. They may have administered all of them or watched a colleague do it from the next desk. The list cannot tell you which, and in an interview the person with the list will, quite reasonably, let you believe the better version. A trait, by contrast, is something the candidate does when nobody has told them to, and it shows up in the evidence whether they intend it or not. The pharmacist's letter showed Dana four things she needed before Dana had decided what she needed.

Level-one support in particular rewards traits over knowledge, and the reasons are set out in Why Soft Skills Outrank Technical Skills at Level One. Most tickets need patience, questions and a clear reply more than they need deep expertise. The expertise a desk does need is specific to that desk and has to be taught anyway. You will teach the tools. You will not teach curiosity in a fortnight, and you will not teach calm at all.

Curiosity: Asking Before Fixing

Curiosity is the habit of wanting to know what is actually wrong before doing something about it. On a desk it looks small. The curious technician reads the ticket to the end, asks "what changed?", and checks whether the three "printer broken" tickets this morning are one problem wearing three hats. The incurious one reboots, closes and moves on. The second is faster for an hour. The first is faster for a year, because the problem gets found rather than repeated. The desk that finds problems is the one described in Finding the Repeat Tickets.

Curiosity shows in the questions a candidate asks you. A curious candidate wants to know how big the queue is and what the worst week looks like. They ask what the desk is proudest of having fixed, and which department phones instead of logging. An incurious one asks about the parking. Curiosity also shows in how they describe a past problem: the curious person tells you what they found out, the incurious one tells you what they did. Both are perfectly decent people. Only one of them will notice the pattern in the queue.

The limit of curiosity is that it must be pointed at the user as well as the machine. A technician fascinated by the fault and bored by the person who has it is a problem the desk will hear about from the person. Screen for curiosity about why the user needs the thing to work, not only about why it does not. Listen for the moment in a story where the candidate found out what the requester was actually trying to do.

Calm: The Second Ticket After a Bad One

Calm is not being unbothered. It is the length of time between a bad call and being able to take the next one well. Every desk has the morning when the first caller is furious, the second is tearful and the third just wants a password. The technician you want is the one whose third call sounds like a first call. Nobody is unflappable. The trait is recovery, and recovery can be seen.

In the interview, calm shows when something goes wrong, and in a good exercise something always goes wrong. A candidate who walks through a troubleshooting scenario aloud will get stuck, because the exercise is built so that they do. Watch what happens next: a pause, a question, a "let me go back a step", or a rising speed of guessing. The guesser is not a worse person; they are a person who will guess on a live system at four in the afternoon. The one who stops and asks will be slower that day and will not delete the wrong mailbox.

Calm is also visible in writing. The written reply to an upset user is the first exercise in Interview Exercises That Actually Predict. It separates people who absorb the anger and answer the problem from people who answer the anger. Read the reply they wrote and ask whether a frustrated requester would feel heard and told what happens next. That is the whole test, and The First Sixty Seconds With a Frustrated User explains why those two things carry so much weight.

Clear Writing: The Note a Stranger Can Follow

A support technician writes more than they speak. They write public replies to the requester, internal notes to colleagues, and the resolution note someone will read in a year. Then there is the knowledge base article, and the handover before leave. The desk is a writing job that happens to involve computers. A technician who cannot write a clear paragraph leaves tickets nobody can pick up, and Notes for the Stranger is about what that costs the desk every time someone is away.

Clear writing leaves evidence everywhere, which makes it the easiest trait to screen. The covering letter is a sample. The e-mail they send to confirm the interview time is a sample. The written exercise is a sample taken under something like the conditions of the job. Read each one for the same three things: is it addressed to the reader rather than to the writer; does it say what happens next; could it be shorter. Perfect grammar is not the test, and a fair screen must not treat it as one. A note in plain words with two typos is better than a flawless paragraph that never says what to do.

Every ticket in most help desk tools, QuerySolv included, carries two kinds of writing. There is the public reply the requester sees and the internal note that only the desk sees. A hire who can write one can be taught the other, because the skill is the same. Say the true thing, in order, to the person who needs it. Screen for the skill, not for whether they have used your particular tool's version of the two boxes.

Ownership: The Ticket Is Theirs Until It Is Someone Else's

Ownership is treating a ticket as yours until you have handed it, visibly, to someone who has accepted it. The technician with ownership chases the vendor and tells the requester when the vendor has not replied. They do not let "waiting on third party" become the status where tickets go to retire. Ownership in the soft-skills series describes the trait as it lives on the desk; the question here is how to see it in someone you have met for an hour.

Listen to the pronouns. Ask a candidate about a problem that was not resolved well and notice whether the story has an "I" in it. "They never got back to me" and "the system was down" are true sentences that tell you nothing about the teller. "I should have chased on the Wednesday" is a candidate who will chase on the Wednesday. You are not looking for someone who blames themselves for everything. You are looking for someone who can locate their own part in a story, because that is the person who will locate their own part in a queue.

Ownership also shows in how stories end. Ask what happened to the user. A candidate who knows how the story ended for the person, and not just for the ticket, followed it to the end. One who cannot remember was finished when the ticket was. Neither answer is disqualifying on its own, but the second one, repeated across three stories, is a pattern, and patterns are what the screen is for.

Saying "I Do Not Know": The Trait That Protects the Desk

The willingness to say "I do not know" is the trait most interviews punish and most desks most need. A desk is a place where nobody knows everything, and where the vendor's documentation is wrong about one step in four. The confident guess is the single most expensive thing a technician can do. "I don't know, let me find out" costs ten minutes. "It's probably the driver" costs the afternoon, and sometimes the data.

Create the chance to say it. Every exercise pack should contain one question the candidate cannot reasonably know the answer to, not as a trick but as a door. It could be something specific to your desk, or a fault described with a detail deliberately left out. The candidate who says "I'd need to know whether the user is on the wireless or the cable before I'd guess" has passed. The one who produces a fluent answer to a question with no answer has told you exactly how they will handle the ticket they do not understand. They will handle it fluently.

The desk then has to make the sentence safe to say once they arrive, which is a management job and belongs to Feedback and the Ticket Review. Screening only finds the people who can already say it. There are fewer of them than there should be, because every interview they have ever sat in has rewarded the opposite.

What Not to Over-Weight

Four things carry more weight in most hiring than they earn, and each is a stand-in for something you actually want. The table names each one, what it seems to say, what it actually says, and the weight it deserves on the sheet. None of them is worthless. All of them are shortcuts, and a shortcut taken at the screening stage is a decision you did not quite make.

Years are the worst of the four because they feel objective. "Three years' experience" is a number, and numbers feel like criteria, but the number does not say what the three years contained. Three years on a desk with no ticket discipline teaches habits you will spend the fourth year removing, and Aptitude Versus Experience is about exactly that trade. If you are tempted to put a years figure in the criteria, write down instead what you hoped the years would prove, and screen for that.

Certifications tell you that the candidate studied for an exam and passed it, which is real information about persistence and nothing else. A vendor's entry-level certification does not mean its holder has ever calmed a requester down. A framework certification does not mean they have ever run a queue. Which certifications are worth a technician's time is the business of Certifications and What They Are Worth. The question is different for a hiring manager than for a technician. For screening, treat a certification as a tie-breaker between two candidates who both showed the five traits, and never as the gate.

The confident talker is the hardest to resist, because interviews are a test of being interviewed. The person who performs well in a room is a person who performs well in rooms. The desk is not a room; it is a queue, a phone and a text box. Score the exercises on the sheet with the delivery stripped out, and let the rubric overrule the impression when they disagree. I have hired the room twice. Both times I was hiring again within the year.

Where Each Trait Leaves Evidence

A trait you cannot see evidence of is not a criterion; it is a hope. Before the first interview, write down for each of the five traits where you expect it to show. That way, every interviewer looks in the same place and nobody is scoring an impression. The list below is the one Dana ended up with. Yours will differ in detail and should not differ in shape.

• Curiosity: the questions the candidate asks about the desk, the "what I found out" in their stories, and the questions-before-actions count in the troubleshooting walk-through.
• Calm: the recovery after a stuck moment in the walk-through, the tone of the written reply to an upset user, and how they handle a question they cannot answer.
• Clear writing: the covering letter, the e-mails they send you, and the written exercise, each read for reader, next step and length.
• Ownership: the "I" in a story that went badly, whether they know how it ended for the user, and what they say they would do when a vendor goes quiet.
• Saying "I do not know": the response to the one unanswerable question in the pack, and whether they ask for the missing detail rather than guessing.

Notice what is not on the list: the handshake, the eye contact, the suit, the accent, the pace of speech, the job title at the last place. Those are impressions, and impressions are where unfairness lives, not because interviewers are bad people but because impressions are made of familiarity. Evidence written down in advance is the only reliable antidote I know of, and it has the useful side effect of being quicker.

The Fairness Rule for Criteria

Every criterion on the sheet must be the same for every candidate, written before the first application is read, and about something the job requires. That sentence is the spine of this whole series, and it is as much about accuracy as about fairness. A criterion invented after meeting a candidate is usually a description of that candidate. A description of a candidate is not a standard; it is a preference that has found a form to fill in.

Nothing on the sheet may touch what a person cannot change or what a fair employer would not ask about. Age, origin, health, family, beliefs and the rest are not criteria, not proxies for criteria, and not the subject of small talk in the waiting area. The list of what may and may not be asked is owned by your HR function, varies by place, and is theirs to give you. Ask for it, read it, and put your sheet in front of them before you use it. This article owns the craft of choosing good criteria. HR owns the rules, and you want them to.

The fairness rule has a quiet bonus: it makes the screen faster. With five traits and the evidence for each written down, Dana's twenty-three applications took an hour to sort into "exercise", "maybe" and "thank you". There was a one-line reason beside each name that she could show anyone who asked. Nobody asked. The reasons were still the best thing on her desk that week.

A Short War Story: The Five-Year Rule at Tollgate Foods

At Tollgate Foods, a food distributor with a four-person desk, the lead, Ruth, wrote "minimum five years' help desk experience" at the top of the criteria. The previous lead's sheet had said so and nobody remembered why. The rule filtered out a candidate called Amara, who had three years on a call-centre floor and had written the clearest covering letter Ruth had ever received. It let through Kyle, who had six years on a desk where every reply was a one-line template. Every ticket there was closed on first touch whether or not the user agreed. Kyle was hired, was fast, and could not write a public reply a requester understood. So for six months Ruth rewrote his replies before they went out, which cost her about an hour a day. The desk's reopen count rose by a third over the same period. Amara took a technician post at the hospital across the road and was leading its desk within two years. The five-year rule had been written to prove something, and the something was clear writing and calm, neither of which the years had delivered. A criterion that stands in for another criterion screens for the wrong one every time.

The Screening Criteria Sheet

The sheet below is one page. Fill in the top three sections before the first application is read, show it to HR, and then use it unchanged for every candidate. The last section is one line per candidate, filled in against the same evidence for everyone. The "not criteria" block is there to be read aloud at the start of the decision meeting. That is the moment someone will say "but he just seemed so confident".

SCREENING CRITERIA SHEET — ONE PAGE, AGREED BEFORE THE FIRST APPLICATION
Role: ______________________   Desk size: ______   Written by: ______________
Reviewed by HR on: ________     Used unchanged for every candidate:  [ ]

MUST SHOW (the hire fails without these)
  Trait                   Evidence we will look for                 Where
  [ ] Curiosity           asks what changed; questions before fixes  screen, walk-through
  [ ] Calm                recovers after a stuck moment; tone        written reply, walk-through
  [ ] Clear writing       reader first, next step stated, short      letter, e-mails, exercise
  [ ] Ownership           an "I" in the story; knows how it ended    screen, interview
  [ ] Says "I do not know"  asks for the missing detail              the unanswerable question

HARD FACTS (from HR; the job cannot be done without them)
  [ ] ____________________________   [ ] ____________________________

NICE TO HAVE (a tie-breaker, never a filter)
  [ ] ____________________________   [ ] ____________________________

NOT CRITERIA (do not score, do not discuss)
  years as a number, tool names, certification count, interview fluency,
  "fit", anything a person cannot change, anything on HR's do-not-ask list

PER CANDIDATE (one line each; the same evidence for everyone)
  Name: ______________  Curiosity __  Calm __  Writing __  Ownership __  IDK __
  Decision: exercise / maybe / thank you    Reason in one line: ______________

Dana invited both of her top two to the exercises, because both met the sheet, which was the point. The sheet had not chosen the pharmacist over the eleven tools. It had made the pharmacist visible beside them. The exercises did the rest. The way they are built, scored and kept the same for everyone is the subject of the next article in this series. The feeling Dana had on the Tuesday turned out to be evidence she had not yet written down. The sheet is how you write it down before the feeling arrives.

Frequently Asked Questions