How to hire a QA Engineer

Ask these after the screening pack, not instead of it. A candidate who has already scored on QA Test Engineer, Selenium With Python, Attention to Detail, Jira Software Cloud has shown they can do the work, which frees the interview to do what a test cannot: find out how they think, how they explain themselves, and how they behave when something goes wrong.

• Ask every QA Engineer candidate the same questions in the same order. Comparable answers are the whole point; a different conversation with each person tells you who you liked, not who was strongest.
• Look for a specific example with a result, not a description of how the candidate would approach it in principle. Follow up once with “what happened next?” and stop talking.
• Score each answer before moving to the next question, and write down what was said rather than the impression it left.
• At volume, record the first 4 of these instead of calling. Candidates answer on their own time, the answers are transcribed and scored, and you keep live interviews for the shortlist.

The pack takes a candidate about 42 minutes, so a QA Engineer applicant arrives at this interview already measured on the parts you can measure without a meeting.