I have been interviewing and hiring testers since 1999. Keyence Plc Simulation Software. I like to think that I am pretty good at finding testers who can think, communicate, and fit into the team. I have three questions that I like to ask that really help me determine if the person can think and communicate. I don’t have any questions regarding “fitting into the team”, that is just based on how well I (and any other interviewers) interact with the person during the interview. In the 13 years that I have been interviewing testers I have hired roughly 120 and only regretted the hiring of three of them: One of them quit just before I was going to put him on a PIP (Personal Improvement Plan). This tester was the fourth person I hired and he was the husband of a friend.

He did not answer my three questions well but I hired him because of the friend connection (drat), One was a very good tester but she did not really “fit in with the team”. She transferred from another division and I only did a phone interview with her.

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I am quite confident that if I had been able to interview her “in person” then I likely would not have hired her – but that is pure speculation on my part. One was let go during a round of layoffs. This tester is the only “anomaly” to my otherwise explainable hiring record. In other words, I can explain why I mistakenly hired the other two – but I can’t explain this one. She answered the questions well and then was just a really bad tester – not willing to learn, change the way she approached problems, not a good problem solver, seemed to like documentation over testing.

So, I think that my record is pretty good (a >97% success rate – and >99% if you remove the one who didn’t answer the questions and the one I didn’t interview in person). How did I achieve such a high success rate? Well, first off I did not search for domain experts. I often had to hire for roles that were very specific (e.g.: Physical layer tester for DSL lines – there are not very many testers with that type of experience). I found out fairly early on that in my context it was much easier to find a critical thinker, problem solver that could then learn the domain instead of a domain expert who would not be able to think his way out of any simple issue in the lab.

In my last 4 years at Alcatel-Lucent there were three test managers. John Hazel and I worked very well together and he is the author of one of the questions that I use. Whenever possible, John and I would interview together and we would enjoy the entire process. The other manager never really followed what John and I were doing. I’ll call the other manager Michel (because that is his real name). Michel had a position to fill and he went about hiring a new University graduate without asking for help from John or me.