Hiring network engineers

For today’s businesses, interoperability is the name of the game. You want a network engineer who is experienced and comfortable with combining multiple systems and managing hybrid environments. This will help your new hire ramp up to full productivity faster and be able to handle a wider range of tasks.

Increasingly, companies are seeing the benefit of integrating development and sysadmin teams. This approach brings greater efficiency to an organization’s IT efforts. DevOps means collective responsibility, which leads to better team engagement and productivity. Product knowledge is no longer scattered across different roles and departments, which fuels better process transparency and decision-making.

Fundamental shifts in the location of business processes and how they’re accessed is changing how we connect our locations together, how we think about security, the economics of networking, and what we ask of the people who take care of them. The larger the network, the more moving pieces — and the more opportunities for problems and vulnerabilities.

Network and connectivity issues are a constant source of frustration for employees and companies. That’s just the nature of work in the digital age. The key here is to press your candidate for specific and varied examples. Every system and network poses its own unique challenges. What tools did they use to test? How did they isolate the issue? And how was it ultimately resolved?

Slow or unreliable IT systems can hold an entire organization back, so the best network engineers make it their mission to optimize network performance. You want to know how your candidate goes about identifying areas for improvement and securing buy-in from stakeholders to bring their ideas to fruition.

Cybersecurity is more important than ever. How would your candidate protect against a data breach? Attacks from cybercriminals? Increased vulnerabilities due to the Internet of Things and mobile? You want a candidate who has a broad understanding of what it takes to keep a network secure, even as technology evolves.

Today, IT is integral to every facet of a business. You need network engineers who can communicate the value of what they do to a non-tech audience — especially when it comes to presenting ideas to an executive team. Here you’re looking for a candidate who can make complex engineering terminology simple and understandable to a layperson.

Great customer service is at the heart of every successful business — especially in the connected age. One wrong move, and your brand could be torn to shreds on social media. You need to know that your new hire will acknowledge and respond appropriately to a client’s concerns — and earn back any confidence that’s been lost.

IT used to be a siloed department. Nowadays, tech underpins everything a company does, so you need to make sure your candidate has strong collaboration skills. Can they see a project through to completion alongside others? Do they play to everyone’s strengths? And did they learn anything from the experience?