Hiring an IT support technician
Two hundred and sixty applications, a job that is half technical and half human, and a screening habit — filter on certifications — that quietly deletes some of the strongest people in the pile.
The volume tempts you into a filter that costs you the best candidates. IT support draws enormous application volume because it is the recognised entry point into technology, which means the pile contains career-changers, self-taught fixers and people who have supported a family business for years alongside the formally certified. Facing 260 CVs, almost everyone reaches for the same shortcut and requires CompTIA A+ or an MCP — and that single decision removes a disproportionate share of the people who are genuinely good at this job, because the actual predictors are patience, clear explanation and the discipline to write things down, none of which any certification tests.
The filter Selene talks you out of
Selene asks what the support load actually looks like — and pushes back when the first requirement offered is a certificate.
Users, systems, and who they answer to
For a support role the useful facts are the shape of the demand: how many users, what they run, whether tickets come from colleagues or paying customers, and whether anyone senior is behind this person. Those decide the level far better than a certification does.
One sentence changes the guide
It is also the answer that explains why support teams either shrink their ticket volume over time or never do. The person who resolves fifty tickets a week is valuable; the person who resolves forty and eliminates the reason for ten is worth considerably more, and nothing on a CV template ever asks about it.
Exceptional, not just good —
“The one who fixes it and then writes it down, so nobody has to ask again.”
→ Writing fixes down became a must-have; the certification the manager opened with stayed a nice-to-have.
What the guide ends up measuring
Seven criteria, and the certificate the conversation opened with sits at the bottom on weight 1. That is the single most consequential thing on this page: on a pile of 260, the difference between gating on A+ and scoring it is most of the good candidates.
Deliberately no gate — and this is the page’s whole argument
The obvious thing to put on the application page here is the certification, and Selene argued against it in the conversation above. It is worth being explicit about why: an eligibility question is right when the answer is a fact that makes someone unable to do the job — a licence, a right to work, a shift they cannot cover. A certificate is not that. It is evidence, so it belongs in the scoring where it can be outweighed, not on a gate where it silently ends applications.
Scored on the fix, not the certificate
Selene never receives the candidate’s name or the raw CV. She scores a blind, structured profile, with any stated age, sex, nationality and religion stripped out before scoring runs.
On a role drawing career-changers and self-taught applicants in large numbers, stripping the identity also strips much of what makes a non-linear CV read as weaker than it is.
How the blind scoring works →What stays with you
Selene's half
- Challenging requirements that would over-filter, before they become gates
- Reading all 260 against the same guide, blind, with the evidence attached
- A ranked shortlist, with the self-taught candidates still on it
- Drafting the declines, so a very large pile still hears back
Yours
- Advertising the role — Selene doesn’t post to job boards or sourcing sites
- Any practical test or scenario exercise, with her brief in hand
- The interview, and the judgment about patience that only a conversation shows
- Every hiring decision, and any override — stored with your reason
Nearby roles
Half debugging, half diplomacy — and the CV only ever shows one half.
A tooling list anyone can write, and incident judgment nobody can fake.
The largest pile on the site, where eligibility questions resolve most of it before scoring starts.
Try it without the certificate filter
Describe the support load and see what the guide ranks when the certificate is evidence instead of a gate.