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Four Screening Questions to Filter Out Fake Test Automation Engineers in Interviews
Hiring a fake automation tester can be costly. These four simple screening questions may help prevent that.
🥇 1st most popular article of the 127th issue of Software Testing Weekly.
This article is one of the “Be aware of Fake Test Automation/DevOps Engineers” and the “IT Interview” series.
Update 2023–06–22, related article, One Simple Test Automation Scenario Interview Question that Most Candidates Failed
A job interview aims to determine whether the candidate is suitable for the role. The interview time is short, therefore, choosing high-quality screening questions is important. Here are the famous 3-questions in “The Walking Dead”, a popular post-apocalyptic TV show.
Rick [and later on other members of the group] started asking potential newcomers three questions as a kind of screening process:
1. How many walkers have you killed?
2. How many people have you killed?
3. Why?
Some fans even made a T-shirt with them and sell on eBay.
Screening Questions shall be Simple
Here is another famous simple question, this time, real (you can hear, clicking the link below):
“How many houses do you and Mrs. McCain have?”
“I think — I’ll have my staff get to you,” John McCain, 2008 US presidential candidate in the interview with The Politico, August 20, 2008
Good screening questions are simple, easy to understand, and difficult to talk around.
In one “Yes Minister” episode (UK Comedy show), the minister complained that “kids asked difficult questions”. He really meant simple but hard-to-answer questions.
I have interviewed many automated testers, and frankly, most of them were not qualified. That’s not their fault, really. Where can software engineers/testers learn test automation (not taught at Uni)? Few software professionals witnessed one successful Test Automation. In 2005, I was extremely fortunate to pair program with a world-renowned Java programmer, from whom I…
