Through the joys of RSS I keep track of the QA/Test jobs in my area (the theory is that companies I deem as ‘cooler’ will be posting there vs. other places — or at least in addition to). Adding onto Guy Kawasaki’s How to get a job on Craigslist and How to not hire someone via Craigslist I’ll add a couple tips of my own.

Title your job appropriately – There is a post currently advertising for ‘Rational Testers’. Now, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that this means that you are skilled in the IBM Rational toolset, but that is not explicitly called out so it might mean that they want someone that is agreeable to reason. If it is the former, then I guess I can hence forth label myself as an irrational tester since I have no experience there.

Spelling / Grammar counts – There is also an ad in the services section promoting someone who will do testing for companies. Their ad is riddled with spelling and grammatical mistakes. I’m certainly not perfect in either of those regards, but you can be darn sure that if I was posting an ad about how well I’m going to find issues in your product that I’m going to make sure it is grammatically correct. Yes, I know, not everyone has English as their first (or second, or third) language, but Toronto is a predominantly English market so that is the context you are stuck with.

Don’t raise flags – The first thing I do when I am evaluating a person or organization is spend 5 minutes digging everything I can up on them in Google. The person offering the testing services lists himself on other testing boards as being in India on various testing boards and in fact is currently looking for an apartment in Bangalore. If I am looking for services on Craigslist, odds are I expect them to be local; especially when they are flagged as being ‘Toronto’. The Testing market is pretty tight right now (at least here; finding available people with a clue is hard and I have a couple companies sniffing around me now) so if your ad or my searching raises even a yellow flag I’m going to pass you over and move onto the next candidate / company.