Red flags include:
- ISTQB logo in the header of the CV. Those go straight in the bin.
- Stupidly long CV. I received one that seemed odd because there were about 25 words per line. Turned out they had set the page size to A3 in order to keep the document down to 4 pages. It was more like 10 pages when converted to A4. Another one had set zero left and right margins, so the text went right to the edge of the page and there was no vertical line spacing. Another was in 8pt Arial Narrow.
- Repetition of mundane experience in bulleted lists. I receive CVs with 20 or 30 bullet points per job role, all of which are the same. Most are context-free trivial things like “Wrote test cases”, “Executed test cases”, “Logged bugs in Jira” etc.
- Spelling errors in the CV. I can just about tolerate one. More than that and you’re clearly not paying attention to detail.
- The phrase “had exposure to…”. This usually means you were working on a project where someone else was doing that thing, maybe not even in the same room, building or even country. If you didn’t do it yourself, I don’t want to know.
- During the practical test, telling me what you would do, but then not doing it. Anyone can blag their way through an interview. The whole point of the practical test is to see if you can do it.
- During the practical test, guessing things instead of asking me. I get applicants to test the contact form on our website, which just writes the submitted data to a text file. You would not believe how many applicants have said “I assume the data goes to a SQL database…” and proceed to do SQL injection attacks that aren’t going to have any effect.
- During the practical test, inventing rules to test against. A tester should treat testing as an investigation to find out what the product does. Then they should look for oracles - there are often many they could find. Only then should they decide if the behaviours are correct or at least acceptable, but that’s not so important - the whole point of testing is to find out things you don’t know.
However, almost all testers are stuck if they don’t have documented requirements to verify, so they invent them, such as name fields mustn’t allow numbers, or UK phone numbers must contain 11 digits.
Green flags include:
- They know who James Bach and Michael Bolton are and can explain their testing philosophy.
- Big extra points if they have done the RST course and/or the BBST course (ideally, the tutor-led version run by the AST).
- During the practical test, doing something that surprises me in a good way.
- They argue their case persuasively when we disagree.
- They are not interested in doing test automation, but recognise when it would be useful so they can get someone else to do it. I want people who love the infinite challenge of exploration rather than the mundane task of automating a finite set of (mostly uninteresting) checks.
- They bring doughnuts.