How should an employer validate one's skills/knowledge?

yeah solo, I quite agree with you that when interviewing thousands of IT applicants, a basic test like verbal an aptittude, or quantitative test need to be conducted and those who pass should be invited for the real IT technical interview.

I recently attended an aptitude test, my federal government is recriuiting IT personnel for a very important parastatal, we were more than 10,000 that applied. we were given some financial quantitative test and some logical reasoning, plus we were crowded for time .I did not answer half of the questions before the time elapse. curse that aptittude test!!!, well, I hope the time will come when we will see each others eyes in an IT interview.. hahaha it will be a different story

I've found that when I've been asked to do a technical interview, most of the "filtering" has already taken place in our shop. I expect the people with whom I am speaking to have passed the "test" technically. What I look for:

a. practical knowledge of how the network functions. I'm not really interested in too many details, at the start. I look for a comprehensive knowledge. I may take an example from our everyday work, and ask the applicant to describe how they would troubleshoot the issue. I'm not concerned they be 100% correct, but that they have a sense of process.

b. if I feel that I am being "BS's" then I begin to dig deeper in that area. I try to get the application to be very specific, perhaps asking when they ran into the issue, how the solved it then, and what tools or techniques did they use.

c. Although a technical interview, I am very aware of how this person will interact with our team. Are they a "know it all?", will they listen to what we need, or just try to do it "their way"; How will they discuss issues with our customers?

d. Sometimes, I realize that they reason someone is hired is outside my control. The pool of candidate is small, the amount we are willing to pay is too low.

hope that helps,

John

Other than the case when the employer intentionally wants to find a Junior instead of a Senior

This is so incredibly rare which is a big reason for my own personal unemployment. From a managers point of view there is no disadvantage in hiring a Senior IT person.

What counts is the real-world experience

How do you go about getting real-world experience with less then 5-8 years field experience?

'Gotta have experience to get experience ...or at least that's how the industry believes it to work

This is so incredibly rare which is a big reason for my own personal unemployment. From a managers point of view there is no disadvantage in hiring a Senior IT person.

One disadvantage of hiring a Senior IT is that you have to pay him high. He simply won't join if you don't, because he can find better positions easily.

I recently tried to apply for a new job at a research institute, they were searching for one senior (DBA) and two juniors (Network specialist and IT technician). I tried to apply as a network specialist, but they won't let me since I had a 9 years experience!!!. they said they don't accept seniors for this position.