The jobs market in Belfast is pretty busy right now. A lot of companies are looking for testers. A lot of those companies are also adding technical tests to their interview process.
I think technical tests are becoming a lot more common, more than in Belfast for sure. In your experience of looking for testers what kind of technical tests have you set? What were you hoping to achieve by setting them?
I’ll start off with my own example, it’s not a test per se. I used the idea behind my blog post Dynamic Tables in Automation. The application I used to work on was full of dynamic tables. I wasn’t necessarily interested in their automation experience but more the thought process applied to find something in a table. It was more a pairing exercise, they could keep asking me questions, everything except “what should I do?”.
I would start with an example table from w3schools. I would let them know that the table headers would always be the same but the contents would change. They would need to think about writing some code to search the table. I would then ask them something like “If you wanted to find out how many companys there were in the table in Germany what would you do?”.
The answers to this really varied and it was an interesting way to get an insight into the candidates thought process.