What is more important than a client’s trust in your product or service? Well, nothing, you’d say. It is important to sustain a client’s trust in your business and QA Engineers play an important role in doing so. A product that is thoroughly tested ensures the development of a high-quality product that gives the client what they would’ve asked for.
Imagine spending valuable time of your developers developing a product only to realize it is full of bugs and errors. This will not only cost you iterations of development to solve those bugs but can also cost you losing your client. This is why hiring the right QA engineer is of utmost importance. How do you do so?
Needless to say–hiring is a two-way street. You need to show why you are the best for the candidate and the candidate needs to do the same. Showing an employee that you care for him/her motivates them to work better.
While there are many ways to show the candidates why they should choose you, one way is to provide employee assistance with an employee assistance program in the UK and elsewhere. Mental health issues are common these days. Through these EAP (Employee Assistance Program), you can help your employees prioritize their health. After all, a healthy employee is a performing employee, right?
Providing these employee benefit programs is one way to make the right hire, however, there are other things that you should keep in mind too. Let’s have a look at five ways to successfully recruit QA engineers.
5 Ways to successfully recruit QA engineers
To make the recruitment process fast and simple–you can use some recruitment tools and have clarity on what type of a candidate you’re looking for.
Here are five ways to successfully hire a QA engineer. You can use use any or all of them to make the hiring process a tad bit simple and easy.
1. Use the cost per hire metric
Cost per hire is one of the most common recruitment metrics used by recruiters to know how much money is spent in hiring candidates either internally or externally. The cost per hire formula is:
Hiring the right candidate may be time-consuming and cost you a lot. Through this metric, you can calculate costs for both–internal and external recruitment. The metric provides you with data. You can analyze it so as to avoid hiring the wrong people. Since you are spending time and money on hiring a candidate, you want to ensure hiring the right one with minimal cost and time.
There are many other recruitment tools available today to make the process from posting a job requirment to finally hiring a candidate smooth.
Pointer: Do not ignore already existing team members for the role of QA engineer. Chances are, you might find the candidate you’re looking for from your team itself.
2. Make an outreach strategy
You can create a full-fledged outreach strategy to hire candidates. This can include designing an email campaign and sending them to the people from your industry. You can personalize emails, add a catchy subject line, add CTA and send emails. Also, do not forget to track the status and take follow-ups if needed.
You can recruit candidates internally or externally. Internal recruitment is considering your existing team and find out if any member is suitable for the job role. While external recruitment means filling the position from any suitable candidate from outside the business. You can get a candidate through:
- Workshops and conferences
- Social media posts
- Website
- Referral programs
- Informal get-togather
In this modern era, you can network and invite QA engineers from various workshops and informal meet-ups.
You can also outsource quality assurance if you do not want to hire a full-time QA. For that, you will need to reach out to a reliable software development agency and provide them with a description of your requirements.
3. Interview like a tester
Using cost per hire will help you calculate the cost of a hire. However, there are certain things to keep in mind even at the time of interviewing. You should know–interviewing is not a static process. While there is no such thing as conducting the an interview the right way, you must follow different interview approaches for different candidates.
A right QA engineer is the one who not only detects and eliminates bugs, but also detects potential bugs that could break the system. So, interviewing a tester like a ‘tester’ essentially means–ask the candidate questions that provokes him/her to think fast and within a certain timeline.
For instance–you can give them a simple login page and give them 10 minutes to come up with as many test cases as they can. The job of QA testers is to “break” the code, right? This exercise will let you know how fast can they come up with scenarios that may break the code. Though this exercise, you can know:
- How well do they trust their initial instincts?
- Do they ask questions before attempting questions?
- Do they cover the wider and deeper approach or come up with repetitive scenarios?
- Number of scenarios they come up with within a given timeline
4. Make the candidate work with the team
As a recruiter, you should bear this in mind that QA engineers need to be good at their job but should also know how to work in a team. After all, a project is delivered with efficient team work. As part of the hiring process, you should offer potential candidates an opportunity to work with a test automation team.
This way you can test the candidate’s skills as a QA and as a team member. Plus, it lets you observe the performance of each candidate and get feedback from other members. You can easily find the right candidate that handles a variety of technical tasks over a working day and his/her actual skills.
5. Check technical skills
Domain knowledge is an important parameter to consider before hiring a QA engineer. He/she must have some knowledge about the product domain and also about SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle). Although a QA is not expected to code, he/she must be aware of coding terminologies and fundamentals so that they can accurately create the test plan and conduct testing.
To check the technical skills of the candidate, you can set examinations that will test their ability to design a test plan, his/her ability to use QA automation tools, ability to think critically on choosing the testing paramenters and several other aspects.
These skills are required for testers so that they can discharge their job responsibilities.
Find what the candidate is looking for
A candidate can certainly be the best but still not be the right one for you!
Find the right candidate is also about understanding and providing him/her what he/she wants. You need to check if your business values align with your candidate and if he/she would fit well in your work culture. Because, although a candidate might be the best at his/her job, he/she might not be the right one.
You should be on the same page in terms of salary expectations, work ethics, working hours/days, working style, etc. If not, it will only waste your and the candidate’s time. So you need to have a clear set of requirements that need to be cleared very initially to avoid iterations and save time.
Conclusion
This is all to keep in mind for successfully recruiting QA engineers for your business. Remember–recruiting a good QA is a two-way street. You need to make sure to make a good impression and show why working with your will benefit a potential QA candidate.
Also, you need to know that the job roles and responsibilities might change depending on if you want a manual QA tester or in automation testing. However, three things–critical thinking skills, inquisitiveness and technical knowledge will be common skills required in a QA for any aspect. So, follow these tips and make the right hire!
Author Bio:
Parita Pandya is an Engineer turned Writer. She usually finds herself writing for businesses. When she is not writing, she is either strumming her guitar or penning her thoughts down on paritapandya.com.