About this post
I’ve been working in the field of software quality since 2013, starting out as a junior QA engineer/analyst doing a lot of manual grunt-work testing. Over the years, I’ve grown as an engineer, worked in a few different automation tools and moved around between companies. Now, as a Lead QA at Pointivo, it’s my job to hire engineers and bring them into our organization. Here are some of the questions I like to ask.
General intro questions
These are questions that you might ask of any new hire, but I’ve heard so many bad questions in interviews, that I like to keep these fairly simple and straightforward.
Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your career so far?
I like to allow candidates to introduce themselves at the beginning of interviews, as it can be an opportunity for them to tell their story, explain why they’re looking to join our team, or showcase any particular research they’ve done into our company or industry.
What I’m looking for here is honesty, and ideally a sense of personal directionality. I want to get the sense that this candidate is trying to move forward in their career and takes their work seriously. It’s not a dealbreaker if this doesn’t come across, as I’ve had my own periods of career drift in my life, and some folks simply aren’t great at telling their story – but I’m looking for any clues here that will help me understand if this person will align with the role I’m hiring for.
What has you looking for a new job at this time?
This is usually my second question, and I’m trying to determine if the candidate is looking to change their career path, has had some undesirable work situation, or perhaps isn’t doing well in their current role. Again, no specific dealbreakers here, but I can often tell a lot about a person’s current relationship to their work life from how they answer this question.
Questions about general testing concepts
These questions are more specific to the work of a QA engineer or SDET.
What is testing? What is testing NOT?
This is a very open-ended question, but it can lead to some interesting answers. Really, what I would like to hear from a candidate is some understanding of test effectiveness, meaning that they write and execute tests that deliver real value in knowing the truth of a system. We’re trying to avoid tests that only provide surface coverage without depth.
Can you talk about why testing is important? What are the benefits of testing?
Things like providing confidence in delivery for the Dev team, ensuring product quality, decreasing the loop time between development and feedback, or improving against other business-level KPIs are all good things to hear in a response.
Can you describe and give me your thoughts on The Testing Pyramid?
Here, I’m really just looking for familiarity with some of the basic concepts we use as QA engineers. I want to know that the candidate understands that all work environments will be a blend of unit, integration, and e2e tests.
What are the basic types of tests? (Open-ended)
In addition to the broad categories described by the Testing Pyramid, I would like to hear a candidate talk about the differences between functional, UI, security, smoke, and other types of tests. There is less of an officially defined list of these types, so this is a good way to learn what categories the candidate has experience with and how they think about organizing tests.
What can you tell me about software development lifecyles (SDLC) you’ve experienced in the past? What do you think works and what doesn’t?
Here, I’m looking to see if the candidate has experience with the basic concepts of Agile, and if they’ve worked in a scrum environment before. It’s okay if they haven’t, but it’s usually an advantage if they have.
What are the main QA and test apps/platforms are and what do they do…
Zephyr, TestRail, Qase, Selenium, Playwright, Appium, etc. I usually don’t care what systems a person has worked with in the past, but I might want to hear their opinions about what they liked or didn’t like. If someone really hates a tool that we use, that might be an issue for them as a member of the team.
What is test automation and why is it important? What is your experience in test automation? What is your favorite test automation framework? What is your favorite feature of that framework?
Again, here I mostly just want to find out what prior experiences a person has had, and determine if there’s going to be any opportunities or conflicts for them if they come on board the team.
Talk about how you approach flexibility in your testing efforts. What would you do if you needed to get a release out tomorrow and none of your regression testing was done?
Sometimes we have to face unrealistic deadlines, and I want to know how someone will respond to pressure and a ticking clock. I’d like to hear about how they would prioritize their testing efforts, and how they would communicate to management about their feelings of readiness for a release. I also want to know that if they feel that a release is unsafe, that they’re willing to throw up a red flag and inform the rest of their team.
Final thoughts
Hopefully there will be some value in this post, both for hiring managers looking to screen candidates, and for candidates preparing for a job interview. These questions are derived from my own personal experience on both sides of interviews.
Before going into an interview, some research in advance is important, for both sides. If you are hiring someone, make sure you’ve taken the time to look over their resume, read over their LinkedIn profile, and if they have a personal site or blog, taken some time to get as familiar with them as you can. If you are going in for an interview, make sure you’ve read over the company’s website, are familiar with what they do, and can at least bring in some guesses about the challenges they face.
Lastly, it’s important to remember to approach the process with kindness. Hiring is critically important to the ongoing health of your organization, and a person’s work life is critically important to their overall well-being and life satisfaction. Approach the process with kindness, and even if you can tell that a person won’t be a good match for a role, try to make the interview process worth their time and give them feedback or exposure to concepts that will help them in future. If you’re a candidate and you get the sense that the company isn’t for you, use the interview as an opportunity to learn more about what you’re looking for or what you want to avoid in a workplace. Remember that we’re all just people, trying to get our work done, trying to find the other people we want to work alongside.
My thanks to everyone who provided ideas for this post by commenting on my LinkedIn post asking for suggestions.
