No recruitment process is perfect, for several reasons, and neither was the one I described i the previous three posts. While I think we had pretty good success with it there are certainly things to consider and modify, and it needs to be adapted to suit your context. Let’s have a look at some of the challenges:
Continue reading “One Approach to Interviewing Testers: The Epilogue”One Approach to Interviewing Testers: Episode Three
Getting to know your potential future colleagues a little better can be a valuable thing. Seeing how they react to and interact with other people in “realistic” situations somewhat resembling the work they will be expected to do can give insights that change uncertainty into “hell yeah!”… or thumbs-up to thumbs-down. While the process was costly in terms of people’s time (on both sides of the table) we found the “Sprint In A Day” format to provide a lot of useful information we could use to make a more balanced decision.
Continue reading “One Approach to Interviewing Testers: Episode Three”One Approach to Interviewing Testers: Episode Two
So, now that we have thoroughly and unequivocally defined what “good results” mean (yeah, right) in Episode One, let’s return to what we did out in Richmond to achieve just that. Hopefully this approach gave our candidates the opportunity to express what they felt was their strong skills and let them “sell” themselves in a best possible way, as well as getting a feel for what our organisation had to offer in return.
Continue reading “One Approach to Interviewing Testers: Episode Two”One Approach to Interviewing Testers: Episode One
Interviewing testers, or anybody really, is a challenging task and it can be expensive to get it wrong. On the other hand, being interviewed, and showing who you are and what you can do is not straight forward either. The interview is generally led by the recruiting company, what they think they are looking for and what questions they think will reveal any valuable insight regarding the candidate’s fit for this context. Pattern recognition tasks, logic puzzles, and other relatively narrow “tests” still seems fairly popular among those few who don’t just go down the “how would you automate filling in this form” route, and It’s all relatively contained so you can time box everything in 10-20 minute sections. Add to this the desire, usually on both parts, to keep things short and “efficient” and it’s easy to start sliding from what you think is “a well considered empirical evidence based decision making process” to something more related to “lottery”.
Continue reading “One Approach to Interviewing Testers: Episode One”This Testing Thing
A recurring question in discussions, tests, books, interviews, and blogs is “How would you test this?”.
But two questions of perhaps equal importance is “why would you test this?”, and “what do you actually mean by test”? Continue reading “This Testing Thing”
+1 Testing 