Good morning all, I am thinking about the recruitment process, I’d be interested in hearing stories or examples of recruitment exercises that people might use during the process.
Recruitment and interviewing is a sales pitch - people are selling themselves and giving the prospective employer a “reason” to hire them.
What I find - and this will always be an issue - is that people who might be very good at a job can’t, or don’t do a very good job of selling themselves and get rejected.
How can we make the recruitment process more practical and perhaps focused on finding out someones technical or thinking ability rather than about asking questions which we can rehearse answers for, or where someone with the gift of the gab gets the job.
To hiring managers on here, or testers who have been through it, I would be interested in hearing some examples of exercises you do (or have done) to help assess someone.
I often use logic puzzles to see how people think, reason, and communicate. I always open it with telling the interviewee that I do not expect them to get a right answer and that I’m looking for how they reason and communicate. I also tell them that I’ve hired people who haven’t gotten the correct answer for any of the puzzles and declined to hire people who got them all.
For in person interviews it helps to have a whiteboard nearby to work through. It’s very much a conversation and I encourage them to try things out, talk through their problem solving, and write things down. It definitely requires some finesse to coax people out and get them operating well. People are nervous and don’t want to make a mistake. Getting them to relax is key to making this work well. This is where in person really works as you can get up and move around. You can easily narrow down the focus to the task/problem at hand.
I tend to ask about what their current team role/workflow is, what works for them, what their pain points are, and what they would change if they could.
How they talk about what they’re doing, how their team works, how they present the pain points, and how they talk about the changes tends to reveal a lot.
We’ve started a test exercise for interviewee’s, which includes programming for automation testers. We don’t expect them do get it all right. This is done as part of the interview and it’s ok for them to ask questions etc. Takes about 15-20 mins and gives us a good indication if someone really has C# coding experience for 5+ years.
It’s not perfect but its a good start.
We’ve definitely had a few gift of the gab, they don’t last very long
