So, I’m trying to hire a couple of QA engineers for my team, and I started with what I thought were reasonable expectations. But after going through several interviews, I’m realizing that maybe my expectations was set pretty high. With each interview, I find myself gradually lowering the bar just to find someone who fits. But at the same time, I don’t want to go too low and compromise on the quality or standards I expect from the role.
I’m torn between being realistic about what’s available in the market versus maintaining the level of quality I think the team needs. Has anyone else been in this spot? How did you handle it?
Would love to hear your experiences or any tips on how to approach this without either being too picky or ending up with someone who can’t handle the work.
I’ve hit this too. It was usually because of a screening problem (we were letting people through who were never going to work out, but we didn’t know it).
But yeah, not always. How are you figuring out what your team actually needs? And splitting that up into a reasonable amount of work and/or set of skills for each role?
Don’t lower the bar - you will only regret it. There are good testers out there, but not very many. Interviews take a lot of your time, so I recommend filtering CVs ruthlessly. I probably rejected 99% of those I received, usually very rapidly, based on a variety of heuristics such as if they contained an ISTQB logo or if they were stupidly long or used a tiny font or if they listed the same bullet points for every job or if there was more than one spelling error. If a tester expects to earn perhaps £50k a year and will stay 3 years, they are expecting you to pay them £150k so there is no excuse for having a crappy CV.
My interview process was pretty tough, but the result was that I recruited a lot of very good testers. A few were less successful, and that was always when I had lowered the bar because we needed someone urgently. I never do that now.
Quite a few of the testers I recruited were not yet at the level I wanted, so the purpose of the interview was to assess whether they had the potential to get to the level we needed. You can’t assume you can just train people because a lot of them have already reached their maximum potential, albeit at a disappointingly low level.
It’s difficult enough to assess someone’s current capability, so assessing their potential is even more difficult. I look for criteria such as curiosity and inquisitiveness, tenacity, assertiveness, consistency, honesty, commitment to personal development and community involvement.
FWIW, I used to reckon that 1% to 2% of testers are very good, another 3% had the potential to be very good, 20% were never going to be more than mediocre, and the other 75% should go and do something else.
The one attribute I would never, ever lower the bar or compromise on is curiosity. So many other testing skills can be taught, but if they don’t light up at the idea of digging in and finding problems? They shouldn’t be in testing. To me that applies whether the position requires coding or not. It’s also part of why I tend to prefer hiring people fresh out of college for testing roles—too many candidates with 10+ years of experience seem all too content to turn the crank on test cases and have long since lost the spark of curiosity.
Love that you’re going on a survey here to check what expectations are too high or too low for a QA role! Now if only more Hiring Managers do this…
If you know your team well enough, their expectations is probably a great baseline for your next hire. They are the one who’ll directly work with the new guy anyway. I hope you find the best fit!
We had the same thing at my work. Last I heard management were going to possibly increase the salary but I’m not sure what’s happened as the job hasn’t gone back on the market yet.
A friend who’s head of engineering elsewhere said he was struggling to find decent QAs recently. Lots of applicants but not meeting the standard (admittedly, I think his works standards are high, possibly unrealistic)
A lot of good replies here, but I’ll add a few more thoughts.
Your expectations may be high, or they may actually be incorrect. It may be that the best candidate can fulfil your actual needs while you are asking for what you assume your needs are. It may be a difference between how you perceive a quality candidate and an actual high-quality candidate. As a basic example many of the best testers I’ve ever met and worked with do not hold a certification in the field of software testing, but many people ask for them. There are excellent testers who do not hold a university degree, but it’s still used to filter candidates.
The second thing is that you may be attracting the wrong candidates. Firstly if your advertising is geared towards the wrong kind of candidate, and secondly if you’re not offering people who know they are good the opportunities they would crave - good working conditions, fair pay, training budget, community, and so on. If you’re asking for a self-starter but don’t offer training then you’re asking someone to cut into their paycheck to stay relevant and self-improving.
It’s also very difficult to judge the quality of a candidate, and testing has so much mental/internal processes that it’s hard to see it happening. It could also be that the way you’re evaluating your candidates doesn’t allow them to perform, or to surprise you. It may be too closed-ended.
And lastly every job role will have a lot of unsuitable candidates. There are just a lot of people who want jobs. Testing suffers here a lot because it’s considered low-skill or easy. A candidate once told me, the head of the testing department, that “a monkey could do it”. That accidental insult has stayed with me for years. That isn’t fixable, exactly, but it does help to know that you’re going to have to do a lot of filtering and some work on your advertising to attract good people (not just reject the bad people).
It’s extremely tempting to look at the barrage of bad candidates (which are always there) and despair, but that can be a smokescreen that stops you from examining your own expectations and practices that might get you the candidate you actually need.
I don’t think my expectations are too high. I’ve been in their shoes before, so I try to be fair. What I care about most is how someone approaches a problem, not just whether they know the right answer. I’m not trying to test memory—I want to see how they think.
Here are some of the questions I ask:
You visit a page and it shows a 404 or 500 error. How would you approach this?
You’re testing a login feature and it fails sometimes but not always. How would you investigate?
You find a serious bug two days before release. What do you consider before raising it, and how would you communicate this?
Can you design test cases for a basic feature like a search box? What would you test, and why?
If an API returns a 401 or 500 status, what does that tell you? What would you check first?
I’m looking for people who think step by step. Do they try to reproduce the bug first? Do they check error logs? Do they ask good questions about how the system works or how users are affected?? Are they trying to understand the “why” behind the issue?
As for coding, I’m not expecting advanced leetcode level algorithms. I just want to know if they can:
Read and understand a basic API response.
Know what status codes mean.
Write or explain a simple automated test.
Write logics for string manipulations
What’s been frustrating is that some candidates struggle to think through these scenarios step by step or they freeze when asked to explain their reasoning. It makes me wonder if I’m expecting too much for the level I’m hiring ( I’m hiring for a mid-level position with 3-5 yrs of experience).
Are your job adverts reasonable and representative?
I tend to see two distinct types of roles being advertised.
One still common model is script focused testing where test cases, automation, programming languages and often older certifications are popular filters. Its a model that has a known risk bias.
Some other models tend to favour testing as more of a learning activity with technical exploration, investigation and experimentation as the key skill areas often with things like automation being a secondary yet highly valued skill.
Would either of those models match what you are looking for.
Mismatches can occur when those are not clear on the advert so you attract someone with a bias towards one model whilst your expectations have a bias towards another.
The former type model has additional risks that a lot of testers who put themselves closer to the second model might just not apply.
Now if you are looking for that combined superpower strong script focused skills including coding but also with the critical thinking, exploration, investigation type skills your advert may have inadvertently resulted in a shortfall of the latter applying which could result in your expectations not being met.
This then brings things back to adverts and expectations being realistically matched.
Would you mind sharing where your expectations are not being met and if any of the above could be relevant with your role advertising?
I just went through a hiring for a QA automation engineer role. I interviewed about 15+ candidates. When I look back, the best ones, i.e. the ones that stood out:
gave me the feeling of being competent(either right away or after a quick ramp up)
gave me the feeling of a good personal fit(in terms of professional culture and inter-personal symapthy).
In a way, I want someone who is competent (or will soon be) AND someone with whom I’m happy to work with (within my team). After all, I’ll spend many hours with them and I’ll manage them.
And I used the word “feeling” very intentionally. It is not very measurable. It is completely subjective. But that’s what made them stood out.
Finally, I totally agree with c32hedge (Caleb Crandall) that curiosity is a must have. Though for me I considered it within my two parts: skills and fit. To be skilled long-term, you must be curious (and take initiatives). To be a good fit with me and my team, you’ll need to be curious (and enthusiast).
Also, every time I was ready to lower the bar because I feared I wouldn’t find anybody, then a good candidate arrived on my radar and reassured me that I didn’t have to in the end. So it is also a question of timing, luck, or randomness.
Don’t lower your expectations, but perhaps use a different method to find candidates.
The condition of the job market in some parts of world is impacting those recruiting and those looking for work. If I had a role I was looking to fill I would think twice about advertising it on some of the big sites as I know I would be flooded with applications many of which would not be suitable. The problem with this is that the amount of time I would need to review the CVs would significantly be reduced and good candidates could easily slip by. I know this should not happen, but this is the way things are just now in some places.
Here is an example: I am currently looking for a role myself and spotted job advertised at a location which has a limited pool of available people. This was also a hybrid role which required two to three days on-site. Due to the location if you did not live locally it would not be possible to commute from a larger city for days you needed to be on site. The skill set, experience, and industry were very specific. In reality only a handful of people should be applying. In under 30 minutes over 100 had applied. It is very likely that the majority of people would not meet my needs.
Using local trusted recruiters or getting in touch with people in my network would be by far the best way to ensure that when I interview someone they would have a fighting chance of having the skills/experience I needed.
As someone who is job hunting myself continuously having a feeling that many of those who are applying for the same jobs as me will probably be not suitable, and having to keep my fingers crossed that my CV is spotted amongst the masses is extremely disheartening.
I can tell you straight, one of biggest recruitment mistakes I’ve made is (a) Being lead by the market vs urgency to fill the role and (b) Focusing primarily on skills that a tester commits to memory.
Yes depending on the role level you may need people with testing experience, but the most important hire in a team is a person who:
Loves testing
Is passionate about making quality software
Fits into your overall culture
They bring a different perspective to the team
They have those characteristics, they’ll go and learn anything missing from their skillset. You have to balance the skills assessments you give candidates with your expectations of what skills they commit to memory for an interview, to what will happen in the real world (i.e. if they don’t know, they’ll look it up - because their love of testing means they don’t like being in the position that they don’t know).
The times I’ve been desperate to recruit, couldn’t find the ideal candidate and just recruited on their skills still haunt me. Because ultimately, they may have had the skills, but they didn’t fit in the team or the culture. That is very difficult and painful to fix.
So I learned to be patient and involve the team in the interviews, because ultimately its in everyones interests to find someone they’d love to work with.
I would say not to set your standards too low, as you may face issues while working with them after hiring.
Instead of lowering your bar for your interview, set your bar higher while selecting a resume. At least you will invest your time in worthy interviews. However, even that won’t work. In that case, I would advise showing patience, as the market is tough for both the interviewer and the interviewee.
And if possible, add an initial round of interviews with an AI assistant at least, then you will end up having an interview with potential candidates only.
Have you ever considered that your bars are set appropriately but not in the right direction?
You might be looking for very specific skillsets that you see fit for your org, however those might be very narrow and tightly tailored to your specific needs.
I would ask myself these questions in your shoes:
Do the candidates have a solid foundation?
Do they have the capacity to learn what I want to teach them?
Roughly, how much time would I need to invest into this person?
Is this person inquisitive enough? do/will they ask the right questions?
TLDR: Try to look for qualities beyond those on paper. Strength of character, open-mindedness, sense of responsibility, etc.
We also have to keep in mind that tech skills are becoming gradually less valuable with the progress of AI.
Everything technical I do, AI does on par. Hence I focus more on management and problem solving side of things rather than tech chores.
The traits that you want from your tester is how keen they are and do they like to investigate.
I’d much rather take on people with less experience and more thirst. You can nurture someone that has these attributes to be a good tester or have someone that does the basics that you churn through in a few months.
Granted it takes longer to get junior engineers making valuable contributions to projects but the alternative is burning time repeating your recruitment process looking for the right fit.
Absolutely this. My favorite early screening questions center around these things. The ‘loves testing’ part is huge - I can teach someone tools and processes, but I can’t teach genuine care and curiosity about how things break.
