Amazingly, the people I have been interviewing have not discovered my website and/or blog; or if they have, they have not mentioned it. As the interviewer though, I research each of my candidates to find everything I can about them online before meeting them. Given this astonishing fact, I feel safe in sharing the format and questions I use for candidates of testing positions without giving people the chance to prepare.

Format
I was once on an interview where the agenda was written on a whiteboard in the room. That gave me the initial impression that the company was well organized and had it’s act together. While I do not go to that length, the first thing I do is tell the candidate the structure of what the next 45-ish minutes are going to look like. More on each section later.

  • Company/Position overview (15 minutes)
  • Elevator Pitch (5 minutes)
  • Bounce around resume (10 minutes)
  • General questions (10 minutes)
  • Ask questions of me (5 minutes)

Company/Position overview
Here I outline the structure of the company and the role I am hiring for. I explain my leadership style and the sort of projects we handle. At the end of it, the candidate should know enough about the company to have a pretty good opinion of whether they want to work for the company. This is key as an interview is actually a two-way sales pitch: they have to convince me to hire them, and I have to convince them they want to work for me.

Elevator Pitch
Step 1, in my opinion, when starting on a round of job hunting is to develop a sales pitch for yourself. I want to hear it, so I phrase my question along the lines of “In the valley it is hard to get a VC to call you back, so if you find yourself in an elevator with one, you have 2 minutes max to say something to get them to call you when they return to the office. Pretend you are in a similar situation; why should I hire you?”. As with most things, especially testing, there is no right or wrong answer. There is however right-er and wrong-er answers. I don’t want to hear “Well, I have been testing for 8 years and know how to write test plans, test cases and can use WinRunner”. Thats not going to knock me off my feet. For the record, my elevator pitch is something like “I learned testing in a highly regulated, mature testing culture (banking) and went on to be the first non-founding hire, and first QA member in a start-up. The start-up followed the bubble and ended up at HP. I have since gone on to another company where I am growing the QA group from complete ad hoc, to more formal testing approaches. Having seen both ends of the formality spectrum, and having grown 2 QA organizations I can apply the lessons learns and approaches I have developed to your organization.”

Bounce around resume
In this section we do just as the heading implies; we bounce around the resume to clarify certain things. For instance, in this round I have been asking at the bare minimum:

  • When it says Java on your resume, what do you mean?
  • When it says SQL on your resume, what do you mean?
  • I see you have WinRunner listed…
    • Describe to me how you process you use to create a script
    • Were you involved in creating the infrastructure / framework for the scripts, or just reuse what someone else created?
  • Do you know Unix? (bonus marks for anything other than linux)
  • Do you know any scripting languages?
  • Have you ever used Selenium?

General questions
These questions are designed to give me insight into how they think, their beliefs and biases around testing. There are again, no right or wrong answers, but right-er and wrong-er ones.

  • You have been testing for x year according to your resume. What is your definition of quality? — You would be amazed how often this trips people up. C’mon people! If you are looking for a senior testing / qa position, you have to have a definition of what it is you are trying to achieve.
  • Testers can fit in-between two extremes. A complete techie tester will approach a new task by looking at the code and implementation. A complete analyst will approach a task by understanding the business need for what is being produced. Where do you fit in this paradigm? — FWIW, I’m about 65 of the way to techie, but you again would be amazed at how many people pad their answers and dodge the question. They only will commit to somewhere on the scale with prodding.
  • (I then show them a slide from Bret Pettichord’s Four Schools of Testing presentation) Given these broad descriptions of types of testers, where do you fall into? — So far everyone has said the Quality School. I think this is likely due to it’s name and they think that the other 3 are not about Quality. Again, FWIW, I’m a mix between the Context and Quality schools.
  • Who are your mentors when it comes to Testing and Quality? — While I don’t expect them to rattle of the ones I have, but I expect (apparently too much) they have someone that influences them. This shows that they have done a bit of research on the field outside of work. I want people who are passionate about QA.
  • (I haven’t ask this one, but was asked it in an interview, and it’s stuck since) Are you smart? — It’s great in it’s simplicity and how it forces you to think on your feet. If you just say ‘Yes’, then you say ‘How do you know’? I answered this when asked with a Dungeons and Dragons reference which the interviewer seemed to buy.

Ask questions of me
This is the part where I would hope that the applicant would have questions for me, but usually they just clam up. See Louise Fletcher’s article for more on what questions they should be asking.