I earned my CWNE #51 twenty years ago, worked in the field doing in-person Wi-Fi site surveys for over eight years, and in recent years I've been frequently asked to do interviews of potential candidates. I've screened over thirty Wi-Fi candidates for a variety of companies.
The Fortune 100 clients were: a global investment bank, an American oil and gas company, and the world's largest gold mining company. The Fortune 500 clients were: a biotechnology leader, an American managed healthcare and insurance company, and a media, telecommunications, and entertainment company in the United States.
Each was looking for a strong Wi-Fi candidate to be part of their team, or lead a project to a successful outcome. Hiring the wrong candidate would be a setback and cost the company time and money.
In that time, only once have I had the experience of interviewing a candidate that was clearly using an AI speech to text software. I asked a simple question like "Describe why you would use a directional antenna instead of an omnidirectional antenna." The answer I received sounded more like a list of key words and terminology definitions than a simple answer. With each question I asked, it was clear that they weren't just a nervous candidate. There was something going on that just wasn't passing the sniff test. I thanked them for their time and passed my notes on to the recruiter. I never found out what happened after that.
Stories like that are rare, but finding a genuinely skilled Wi-Fi engineer in the first place is a needle in a haystack search unless you know what you're looking for. I've seen a lot of resumes and I never know if they're in the format the candidate created or if they've been rearranged by one or more recruiters before I was brought in. I scan the resume for the requisite software: Hamina, Ekahau, Sidos, AirMagnet, and perhaps Wireshark. I'm looking for the timeline of work history, what they worked on and for how long. My interviewing style is to get the candidate talking about what they've done, whether they enjoyed it, and what they learned from the project. Questions like that don't have a right or wrong answer, but I'm looking to hear what the candidate did.
I want to hear whether the team was just them, or whether they managed or led other people on it. If they split ownership with a teammate, I want to hear which part was theirs. An honest story has a natural ring to it. If a candidate only ever says "we did this" or "we did that" and never says "I," that's a red flag. That doesn't tell me what this candidate can do and it doesn't tell me when they were a leader or a follower.
My other open ended question is to ask about their home Wi-Fi lab environment. This is also an opportunity for the candidate to tell stories about their lab environment that can't be fabricated.
I rarely find out if one of the candidates I screened got hired. I wonder if they ended up liking the role or if the company liked the candidate. When I'm interviewing, I'm interviewing the person and the Wi-Fi engineer. To me it is more important to hear the human being in the interview than it is for them to recite packet header information fields. That is unless the role they're being interviewed for is a professional Wi-Fi packet capture analysis engineer.
I compare the job description to the resume, looking for overlap and omissions. I ask about certifications too, whether the certs are current or have lapsed. I ask what excites them about Wi-Fi, what they want to learn more about, and which project had them thinking on their feet, putting out a fire in real time. These are the stories that tell me who the engineer is and who they can be in the future.
If you're hiring a Wi-Fi engineer and want someone who can tell the difference between a candidate who knows the material and one who's reciting it, I do this kind of screening. Email me at Jennifer@HuberWorks.nl and we can talk about what you need.