TL;DR: Both parties should focus less on tools and more on impact.
One of the things that bothered me while job searching is that it was really difficult to find a role to be excited about. In general, but particularly in this landscape of mass redundancies, it seems like companies think they hold all the cards and that everyone should want to work for them, without them giving any real reason. This means that, even if a candidate accepts an offer, they probably won’t be as motivated to add value as they would be if they understood what impact they could have, both internally and externally.
Job descriptions are usually an unrealistic list of tools, which often show a lack of understanding for the role. Moreover, there’s rarely any indication of what problem any successful candidate should help to solve. It reminds me of a user story which focuses only on the how and / or what, and neglects the why. Without the why, the how and what could be completely useless.
As a former IT recruiter, my experience has been that both hiring folks and candidates focus too much on buzzwords and tools, and not enough on skills and impact. For candidates to really shine and highlight what they can bring to a role in a meaningful way, they need to know why the position is needed, and what their goal(s) might be. Only then can they properly express why they’re the right person for the job.
Actually for hiring testers, the hardest part was finding the right candidate.
We are not that demanding but I play a few games in the interview to test their testing skills and like 95% of the people Junior/Medior/Senior fail these games completely and show no testing skills.
I test them on if they make assumptions or not, I test them on creativity.
For example an exercise would be:
You have a form with 1 field, which is mandatory and can only contain 30 characters.
You can do any test what you’d like, I’m looking for creativity go nuts!
And people only come up with like 5-7 tests while some get 62 unique answers. It’s insane how many people rolled into testing without actually having testing skills or at least try to think for themselves.
I don’t care much for hard skills like “Cypress/Playwright” because I can teach them those easily if they are interested, so I’m not so picky just test skills matter to me
So answering with my recruitment hat on, I can honestly say I hate CV’s as a recruitment tool. I want to know about people and the vast majority of CV’s I see tell me nothing about a person. So the big skills lists of “did this”, “did that”, “ISTQB - especially the badge in the corner of the CV ” lose my interest pretty quickly. But, that is the vast majority of CV’s I see. With 100 CV’s I can get down to 10 in minutes. So what am I looking for?
I want to see potential, enthusiasm, ambition, honesty, collaboration, personality, mentorship, ownership, leadership, your story and your wants and needs in a role and yes I’m interested in what you’ve tested and how. How easy is that to get all that from a CV? The ones that make it are the ones where I get a picture of the person that I think could fit in our team as a person first, tester second.
So I spent time writing screening questions to open that style of communication with our HR team. Those questions are meant to be open enough that there isn’t a right answer, there is your answer. Instant turn off are those candidates that believe there is a right answer and try to make one. Also the questions evolve, some work, some don’t so be prepared to adapt them as you try them out. Ultimately, do I see the same person in those answers as I do on the CV? Is that the kind of person that will fit into the team and our culture? If yes, I want to talk to you.
So on advice, its difficult because the above is insight into how I recruit, so it would work on me (I’ve given all my secrets away ). But that won’t work for those recruiters searching deliberately for skills lists, specific qualifications, languages, tools etc. The game won’t change unless recruiters search for the human qualities first that fit the culture and candidates proudly talk about themselves without feeling they have to redesign their CV’s to get their foot in the door.
As a hiring manager: The challenge I’ve found is that I had hundreds of candidates apply for one role. 500+ Linkedin is very easy to apply for roles, which may have contributed to that. The next time we did it, we ended up adding some screening questions, along with a recruitment team that we use that are top notch.
As a tip to those looking for work. Have a think about what services you can provide and back it up with evidence. This gets the message across quickly. I feel old CV formats and what we’re taught in school are not good enough.
SO for example on my CV i have:
Services i can provide: Create effective test strategies that support the business goals and objectives.
Experience: At EasyJet I was a Quality Engineering Manager for a Customer Data Foundations programme where I set the Test strategy and led a team of quality engineers across distributed locations. In the project we found issues across quality areas, such as security, compliance, performance, logging and monitoring and more. This resulted in mitigating risks and early resolution of issues.
while some get 62 unique answers. It’s insane how many people rolled into testing without actually having testing skills or at least try to think for themselves.
” lose my interest pretty quickly. But, that is the vast majority of CV’s I see. With 100 CV’s I can get down to 10 in minutes. So what am I looking for?
). But that won’t work for those recruiters searching deliberately for skills lists, specific qualifications, languages, tools etc. The game won’t change unless recruiters search for the human qualities first that fit the culture and candidates proudly talk about themselves without feeling they have to redesign their CV’s to get their foot in the door.
