Expert: Shauna Anderson - 5/15/2009

Question
Hi,
I am just hoping for a bit of advice if you can.
Our company is hiring it's first draftsperson for mechanical and electrical drawings and design. We do not have much in-house expertise with dwg programs at present. I will be forced to interview candidates and wondered if you could give me any direction or advice on the type of questions, or skill sets, I should be asking about or checking regarding AutoCad (or Solidworks) ability. Difficult to interview personnel without knowing the programs they must deal with so any suggestions you have would be most appreciated.  Dave.

Answer
Hi Dave,
Thanks for the question.  Since we know what software we will use, we give a two part test. The first part is a written test, the second part is a isometric view of an object and they are asked to draw the top, front and right sides of the object and to put things on the right layers, and dimension it. It is very obvious which layer is which.

We do not expect this to be done - it is timed to try and prevent that. We save a copy off and then we go back through the drawing and see how they constructed it. This is easily done with the undo command.

We are looking for a few things in this - one is their overall knowlege of the software. The written test has some difficult question and so far only one person has gotten 100% (and it was not me). With the drawing test we are looking for skill, timeliness, ability to follow direction, understanding of layers.

There are tests that can be purchased on-line and I can't tell you how much trouble you may save yourself by finding one.

Those who do well on the test get the face to face interview.

I am not familiar enough with SolidWorks, but for AutoCAD we ask about:
-their experience with model space and layouts (paper space)
-their experience with using external references
-if they have ever used excel files to bring data into ACAD
-what release they started on and what release they used last

We also ask them to tell us about a project where they had to look at several options and pick the software or tool that was the most useful.

We ask them to tell us about a project where they worked with a team and what kind of advantages and drawbacks come with that. Then the same thing for working alone.

We ask about anything they have done that required following a clearly spelled out set of rules, such as codes or laws. I hope to hear about CAD standards in this as well.

We also ask about a project where there was a lot of ambiguity - or things were not spelled out very clearly - and how they dealt with that.

Your selection criteria also depends on what is most important to you.

We have been willing to hire a lesser skill set when we were looking for someone to specifically fit into a team. That was very important. We have also hired lesser experience to be able to train to what we wanted instead of hearing how it was "at my last job."  We have also had times where we were looking for someone who could hit the ground running and did not need a lot of direction. What are your priorities?

I hope that is of help to you Dave. Good luck in this!

-Shauna