What makes great hiring managers?

Hiring managers are Owners, not Clients

Who owns the recruitment process? Recruiters?

While there is a lot of debate around that, I can't think of hiring managers as a customer to whom we try to supply candidates. The customer is always right, as you know. Would this work to thoroughly engage hiring managers and succeed in the hiring process or, contrarily, spoil it out?

I think of hiring managers as the owners of the recruitment and I'm a partner with them. By no means can I project onto them my understanding of how a good software tester should look like. Even though my deep research into the software testing field taught me very well the differences between real testing and a fake one, I can only suggest that to them.

My role is rather to guide them towards designing and selecting the right profile for the role, the project, the team, and the overall mission of the company. To execute on a shared strategy, define the type of testing they would like to adopt for their project, draft the job description that reflects the specifics of the role, and not be an order taker.

Why is it important to make hiring managers engage?

What makes overwhelming successful hire? Recruiter? Wrong!

There is no doubt about the role of the recruiter and the recruitment team especially in:

• Attracting great talent
• Branding
• Strategies
• Processes
• Tools

But there is no company on the planet that has a high hiring board at the scale that has no highly engaged hiring managers. So as a recruiter, one of my biggest tasks is to engage hiring managers by speaking to their higher-level motivators.

As a lifetime tester, I do believe in the testing value to the project, and so do software testing managers and leads. We know that we are on a mission to find bugs that matter before our client does. We understand that the machine can't take any responsibility for succeeding in the testing process. Human does. And this mindset is what pushes us to select really really good testers to work with.

I'm not exaggerating if I say this responsibility is much more crucial when it comes to testing fintech apps. Because margins of errors are too tight and our clients expect zero error from us.

It's an honor for us to do such important work for the company. Be it challenging and requires leadership qualities, hiring good testers for a fintech has a great impact on its reputation and success.

Techniques to help test leads/managers commit to the hiring process

Isn't recruiting a task that most test managers do outside of their day job. This makes interacting with a new candidate feels like doing us a favor.

For that reason, I use a number of techniques to frame the hiring-related activities in a leadership stance. I do that for example through leveraging:

• The cost of a bad hire (up to half a million for a 150k * 3,5y) will be the responsibility of the hiring manager who accepted this candidate into the project.
• The impact of this hire on the brand of our employer, which is critical to our long-term success. So let's do it carefully and wisely.
• We know how fake testing is spread in the market. We don't want to end up with a candidate who only adds scripts to the pile.
• Recruiting the best and brightest candidate isn't easy, it's incredibly competitive and doesn't happen by accident.
• Hiring the next team member is a high impact and thus requires high engagement and good leadership and judgment.

Designing the testing challenge

While creating content around the announced role will definitely attract great testers, I have another preference on that. After running dozens of testopsies and interviewing hundreds of testers around the globe, I can confirm that the "talk" is widely different from the "walk".

In fact, a testopsy is a testing experiment where a tester is given a link to an online and simple program to test while watching him doing so. I designed forms of questions before and after the experiment and was astonished by the results. There is actually all the type of combination of testers regarding talking the talk and walking the walk.

1- There are testers who are very good at testing and spot problems, who don't know how they did it or how to explain their results.

2- Others who test very well but also explain their thinking models and go beyond the simple experiment to what they can do further or suggest to the product owner.

3- There are also those who can powerfully speak about what testing should be and do, without having the ability to target their minds to what can go wrong in the app.

4- Ironically, there are those who have zillions of tools under their belt and get lost when asked to run a simple exploratory test.

What a hard task is to hire a tester, then!

Hiring a tester isn't something easy or comfortable to do. Yet what I love about the process is that it is agile. The more we (recruiters && hiring managers) work on our hiring strategy and select possible candidates, the more we understand our needs and how to quickly spot the right candidate.

While qualifying MPCs is what the majority of recruiters focus on, disqualifying non-fits is what really helps fasten the process.

Have you been hiring testers anywhere in your work history?

I would welcome to hear your take on that.