Anyway, as far as recruiting goes, I have a large contingent of interns that work on my team. It’s actually a great thing! A lot of the time you get pretty good people and they still have a spark of life in them. Plus, the ones that work out well and are willing to come back for a second term, are on that satisfying course to becoming an SQA. So once they’re done school, you’ve groomed them to be the best damn tester that anyone has ever seen! So if you have an opening, you will also, usually, have an opportunity to bring some of those fresh minds back into the organization on a full-time basis. I mean you spent time training them, so you should at least get first crack at them! :)

Thanks for the comment Brent, always nice to know I can make people cry a little. Interns sound like an interesting idea – a lot of work – but since I started in a similar way, it always seemed like a win-win situation.

I counsel all new testers who come through one of my courses to get a web presence, and fast. It’s one of the cheapest returns you can have when marketing yourself IMO.

Thanks Adam. Hopefully people heed your advice. Unfortunately candidates then expect interviewers to have read their websites and the next thing you know we’ll have testers writing blog posts like “Company calls itself passionate about testing – they didn’t even read my blog”. So I hope you also prepare them for the reality that even though they will list their web info on their CV, many interviewers won’t read it.

Passion is great for the bedroom, but in the office, well…

Hi Sam, thanks for taking the time to leave a comment.

Feel free to supply any hints that you have learned over the years to evaluate a candidate’s professionalism when reading their CV or during an interview.

I find as well that recruiting firms are part of the reason so many inadequate candidates are presented to companies looking for a tester. I once had an interview with a candidate that lasted an impressive 3 minutes: first question I asked was “why do you want to work in testing?”, and the answer I got was something like “testing? Hmmm…, well doing the same thing over and over is a bit boring, isn’t it?”. The candidate (an experienced programmer) was sent by our recruiting agency on the basis that, on her resume, she had done unit testing on previous jobs (and the interview scheduled by my manager, before I actually had read the resume. Fortunately he realized the mistake as well and didn’t happen again). Many recruiting agencies specialized in technical recruitment have no idea of what they should look for when asked to fill a tester role; this together with a funky manager that will hire the first person that comes along has resulted in a lot of wrong people for the right job, and a lot of so-called “testers” with no passion for testing, ’cause they didn’t want to do it in the first place!

Thanks Marta. Great comment. I can’t compete with a 3 minute interview record. I can relate to the recruitment agency experiences and I confess I have made some funky hiring mistakes myself. Testing wasn’t my first choice of career. But I soon learned that my pursuit of “World Domination” demanded too much of my time. “Evil Killing Machine” turned out a wee bit too dangerous. “Tester” back in the ’90s seemed to combine the best bits of both my first choices and very quickly turned into a highly demanding, creative, enjoyable and never-ending learning experience. Hopefully other people will discover the inherent joy that we have found in the art of Information Providing. As a more serious side note…I found useful information in this Cem Kaner paper.

thanks,

Thanks swamy, I’ve just subscribed to your RSS feed – best of luck with ETAF