Sharing experiences in exercises in recruiting

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People here may be well aware with this resource collection:

Within it, there is To Do List interview, and for today at least, I am fascinated by it.

How would y’all improve the exercise if you used it for recruiting? Would you use it for recruiting, given it is on such a publicly available site? How do you personally feel about being subjected to these kinds of exercises in recruiting?

To offer you my experiences - I use various targets of testing in my teaching and recruiting practice. While exercises for teaching are my most definite go-to, I am always on the fence on the use of these in recruiting.

I have used extensively in both teaching and recruiting:

  • Emily Bache’s Gilded Rose, which requires you to work on coverage and code
  • Alan Richardson’s EPrime, which requires you to model something unknown to all
  • To Do MVC -project’s reference implementations
  • A self-made Text Field, which requires you figure out not all test targets are complete
  • GitHub Copilot -generated Roman Numerals, which requires you to own the whole quality

I have come to an approach where I use take home exercises to filter / select when looking for newbies to testing (1st contact after application) as I have ongoing now, and as conversations framed to practice when looking for experienced testers. Deciding to not bet on someone based on an exercise never stops being difficult to me, and I have observed hundreds of testers on these exercises over the years. The route you take does not tell about the destination you are heading to.

The most recent form of this take home assignment is one where I give two implementations of To Do App, and explain they are what developers use to show off their best practice for applying front end frameworks.

  1. Elm: https://todomvc.com/examples/elm/
  2. Angular: https://todolist.james.am/#/

I ask for three outputs:

  • A clearly catalogued listing of identified issues you’d like to give as feedback to whoever authored the version
  • Listing of features you recognize while you test
  • Description of how you ended up doing the assignment

I am in process of making more recent and thorough listing of how I assess this exercise, but you can already get a hint from my most recent blog post: A Seasoned Tester's Crystal Ball: That Pesky ToDo app

My style of how I think and test (with constraints) is available in long for at Exploratory Testing Foundations - DEV Community

On my answer to the answers available on such. publicly available site - I wish one of the people over the years would have either done this before or searched for the answers. I still wait for that day. Maybe it’s in the batch of 12 I have in my inbox waiting for Monday. :slight_smile:

But today, I am just curious on how others are using these, and if I should be learning something about using them.

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Hi Maaret!

I would first like to say waking up to this in my inbox this morning truly made me smile. I’m new to testing and MoT so I was not aware of the resource you shared but I’m super excited to check it out as I feel it will add immense value to my knowledge.

Secondly, I wasn’t aware that recruiters use test during interviews but I can see the benefit and I’m glad you also brought this aspect to my attention.

My question for you is in regard to new or jr testers, which test would you use for them or would that depend on the type of job you’re recruiting for? I’m curious to know. Others feel free to share your expertise also☺️

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When I was a new tester (ahem, 28 years ago), I got my job through doing one of these hands on testing tests. The job I applied for back then was localization testing, and the test was about comparing English and localized versions of a smaller Microsoft product, and reporting discrepancies. Back then they reported having tested thousands of people to a small but relevant portion, and they swore that it correlated well.

I would like people to do something they are expected to do at work. If they are expected to find problems, I like them to find problems. If they are expected write automation, I like them to write automation. However, I have come to learn that I prefer them maintaining and extending automation over writing it in the first place.

I try to not give people more than 2 hours of work. Then again, realizing how few people practice if not given take home assignments like this, I have been changing my mind a bit.

A friend of mine uses an invoice as a recruiting test, and her question around it is on identifying the variables you can recognize on the invoice. There is a lot of modeling for features that are there but not listed by someone else in testing, like with the to do app - select all, delete and edit are all there but take insight to discover.

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In case it would help you (or anyone for that matter), I posted the assessment grid I drafted for this exercise in my blog.

I might evolve it next week when I get to look at my current dozen of responses.

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Both of these messages are extremely helpful as they provide a perspective from a recruitment side of things.

I’m also going to check out the blog post for further insight. I appreciate you taking the time to chat with me and thank you for sharing your feedback!

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I decided that making the assessment grid and known issues list is a worthwhile effort.

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Hi @maaret - great post! I read the blog post and some way through the Dev Community link. The blog post shows a great exercise for ‘sharpening the axe’ as well as a useful exercise for recruitment or training

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