How to Hire Good Testers: Part 1
How to Hire Good Testers
Recently, I guested on Joe Colantonio's Test Automation podcast. We talked about how to hire good testers. If you haven't listened, I encourage you to check it out. I'll post the link here when it's published.
I wanted to elaborate on mine and Joe's conversation in this series of posts. I'll share more insight about how to hire good testers than what we were able to cover. Find Part 2 - Why “Tester’s Mindset is Garbage” here.
What’s Changed in Hiring?
If you're a hiring manager today, you know, it's harder than ever to hire good people. I attribute much of this to remote work. Remote work has opened the doors to people all over the world to participate in the US IT workforce. That’s not a bad thing - there are, of course, many many great, smart people all over the world. But, lots and lots of people are abusing remote hiring.
I only hire in the US for US companies. All my job postings state this. So when folks pretend to be in the US, pretend to be from a particular locale, it’s a problem.
What's difficult for hiring managers is that many of these folks who are pretending, are also pretending to be interested in doing the job. They are pretending to have certain skills. Some pretend to be other people. Many are pretending to build a career.
What they aren’t pretending about is getting a paycheck.
For many of these folks, getting a US-based wage for a few months can massively change their standard of living for the better.
These folks or organizations use other people's identities, fake identities, or they rent other people's W2s. There is an entire industry committed to flooding job postings and hacking them until they get the job, at which point work may or may not get done.
I receive emails all the time from questionable head hunters, offering that I can use my own W2 information for their people. Keep in mind, agreeing to allow someone else to use your information like this is illegal.
So while this post, the first part of a series on "How to Hire Good Testers" isn't the most positive, it is the most important and every person hiring remotely should read it.
Knowing about what's going on out there will help you in hiring.
Filter through the liars
Everyone wants to look good on a resume, on LinkedIn and in interviews. But there is a difference between hyping your experience a little and blatantly lying.
I can't understate the prevalence of outright lying in interviews these days. Let me give you some examples from real interviews I've done while hiring Testers, Software Engineers and other IT positions for clients...
The google coder
When I'm interviewing for positions where people need to be able to code, I partner with interviewees and work together to help them show off their skills during interviews.
I gave "Denny" a coding question. He paused, typed something, and looked to his left. He hadn't looked to his left up until this point, including when he screen-shared his preferred IDE. He was looking at something new. Perhaps another monitor?
After typing, he paused for a bit, did some clicking and paused some more looking to his left. I asked "everything ok? Do you understand the question?" He looked back at me and said "yeah just thinking through it".
My "he's-googling-it-alarm" went off.
I googled the question as he began typing his answer. He typed the entire code block from start to finish, in sequence with no mistakes and no re-writes. This is not normal. Usually people start and stop. They see a mistake and fix it, they work on different parts of the code as they go. Never fully from left to right, top to bottom, completely in sequence. And almost never with no mistakes the first try.
He would look to his left, pause, then looking back to me and type.
I read the first response on google. It wasn't what he wrote. I looked at the second. It didn't match. The third result matched exactly, except with different names for variables. Even the syntax and line content was the same.
When he was done I asked him "is this your work?" He said yes. I asked him to talk about it and he got stuck. I tried to help him talk through it with hints - it didn't work. I asked him again if it was his work. He said "yes". I asked him how he knew to write the part that he couldn't explain. He was quiet.
I moved on with the interview, but marked his profile in my system with "DO NOT HIRE". In the future, it will be difficult for he and I to work together.
The woman from Boston
I once interviewed a woman from Boston, MA. Her resume indicated she had been there for at least two decades, even going to college there for 4 years (wicked smaht).
When I interviewed her, she shared that she had lived in Boston her entire life. I expected a Boston accent (“pak the cah in the Havad yahd?”), but her ability to speak English was rudimentary at best. English was not her first language.
I fully understand that there are parts of the US where people speak one language in their homes, maybe even in most of their schooling, but it's incredibly rare that a person who lives almost 3 decades in the same American city, has a foreign accent, and English is not spoken as if native.
Knowing a little bit about Boston, I told her I had a friend in Cambridge. She was quiet. I asked how far from Cambridge she was. She said “6 and half hours”.
If you know Boston, if you've lived there almost 30 years, you know Cambridge is a township close to Boston. And you know that because two of the most highly regarded educational institutions in the world reside there. And you know it's not 6 hours away. Only someone who had used google maps and typed in "Cambridge" would think I was asking about the Cambridge in England and wanted to know how long it would take her to fly there.
Reflection
During a technical interview, I once found the interviewee was struggling and waiting to answer questions, looking up above his camera and monitor. You start seeing little things like this when you interview enough people.
It also appear when he spoke his mouth didn't move like the words he was saying. Normally, I would attribute this to a lag in the connection. But I've noticed two things:
There is less lag with people nearby than overseas (and all my hires are for people stateside)
Your brain figures out the delay and syncs up the visual and auditory pretty quickly for you.
This person wasn't saying the words that I heard, and the lag was really really bad. Also, the lag time varied. Sometimes the answer came fast, immediately after a question was asked and sometimes it came really slow, seconds afterward.
Later in the interview I realized there was a reflection of two people in the room. They were standing in front of the interviewee - behind the webcam.
I asked if this person was alone during this interview, he said "yes" after a long pause in which all the blood drained from his face.
My guess, is that the person was lip-syncing, the people in the reflection were answering for him.
Hiring is difficult
Hiring is harder than ever. The whole world wants the salaries American IT jobs offer - and many are getting them without qualifications.
Look for clues in your interviews. Get face-to-face, in person if possible. Spend five minutes doing research on some innocuous boring part of a person's background. Give yourself a fighting chance in these interviews. Allow red flags to pile up and then move on after making your notes.
If you're prefer to avoid all of this, let us take the burden hiring off your shoulders.
If you're a job seeker - be different. Just tell the truth. You may be surprised how far it gets you.