| Michael Bolton 2005-07-24, 9:12 pm |
| This is a rephrasing of a message that I sent privately.
If the HR department is not sufficiently aware of what you're looking
for, then you face two positive outcomes and two risks. The first two
are what you want:
1) They will accept qualified candidates.
2) They will reject unqualified candidates.
3) They will reject qualified candidates.
4) They will accept unqualified candidates.
Your test will help them to reject qualified candidates by mistake, and
accept unqualified candidates by accident.
If your HR department is unaware of the testing process, then they're
the
wrong people to be filtering candidates. A smarter approach than
writing a
multiple-choice test with multiple correct answers per question would
be to
make the HR department sufficiently aware of the requirements and
skills
needed for testers so that they can make better judgements.
As a start, you could point them to Cem Kaner's articles on hiring
testers in Software Development, called Recruiting Software Testers.
The first part of that article is here
http://www.sdmagazine.com/articles/...9912f/9912f.htm
and the second part is here
http://www.sdmagazine.com/articles/...0001e/0001e.htm
In any case, as a test manager, I would not be remotely interested in
the answers to questions that you posted. Instead, I would instruct
the HR people to read the resumes. Any that were inconsistently
structured, I would have HR throw out. Any that were in badly-written
English (adjust for your local language), I would throw out. Any that
had a large number of spelling mistakes, I would throw out. (A tester
has to be able to communicate clearly and accurately; if she can't do
it on a resume, which is marketing material for herself and her career,
she's not likely to be able to do it in a bug report or a test
debriefing.)
Instead of a quiz, I would have HR chat with the candidate. Is she
capable of a reasonable conversation? If not, I would treat that as a
warning sign. Is she capable of expressing herself clearly? Can she
describe her last test project and communicate it articulately to an HR
person, such that the HR person can get a clear understanding of what
she did? If not, that's a grave warning sign. (A tester has to be
able to explain his or her work to non-technical people; that's a big
part of the job.)
The most important test for a tester, I think: I would have HR ask the
tester "What sorts of questions should an HR person or a test manager
ask a tester on an interview?" The list of questions that I got back
would be extremely revealing, and would tell me pretty much everything
I needed to know in order to decide whether that applicant should get
another interview.
---Michael B.
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