TECH RECRUITERS WHO DON'T KNOW TECHNOLOGY...and other little things and rants that I wanted to share while looking for a job as software QA

I keep reading those “things” articles here on Linkedin, you know, those pieces titled “8 THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT…”, that attempts to give you some secret recipe on the dos and don’ts when you are doing a job interview or talking to a recruiter. Now, we all know that most recruiters are salesmen, they make money out of quantities, so they often spam a huge pool of possible candidates in the hope to at least reach a suitable number of potential sales, however, people are not commodities, predictable machines to install on this or that company and assume they will all perform at the same level in different environments. The candidate personality is a crucial parameter that a good recruiter should know, because skills can be learned, added, removed, improved, but the person’s character is a thing that cannot be taught, it’s there and we must deal with that, and this is a thing that both recruiters and candidates alike should be aware of. As a job seeker, you should know where you can work and be happy, whether at the rigid corporation with all its politics, dress code, performance reviews, “job safety”, etc. or at the young fresh startup, where everything can happen, become rich with stock options and equity or back to the job market because the company failed. Another important thing that I noticed, is that recruiters don’t know the techs they are hiring for, myself as a software QA architect, I can list a bunch of examples that, at first, could make you laugh, but they made me cry because I realized that we are not in good hands, and that is bad for the recruiters trying to sell an airplane-candidate to a shipping company rather than an airline and for the airplane-candidate that won’t get a job matching his/her skills.

Recently I got on the phone interview for the role of QA Automation Engineer, interviewed from the VP of development while he was driving, asking me to solve mathematical puzzles in order to determine my critical thinking skills. Asked to explain on the phone how to sort an array using Java. Asked also if I know how to write test cases and test plans (!). Dear sir, yes I do know how to write test cases and test plans, are you asking the plumber if he knows how to install a pipe? When I interviewed QA candidates for my company, I didn’t need to ask them to write me code, if they knew test cases and test scripts or what the difference between a functional or regression test, what I did was to have a bar conversation on how the industry has evolved, how software QA is done today and what technologies, tools and philosophies he/she likes and why.

Having a candid and friendly conversation is the best way to assess a candidate, you can measure their energy, passion, knowledge, how and if are a good fit to your team.

Also a recruiter, was kind of giving me the job description but he didn’t really know what stack the company used, what size was team, company direction, etc., I even had to correct him because he was telling me that I should have prepared the unit tests while those are a developer’s responsibility. On the other hand, I also had another recruiter sending me a really good job description, with team size, stack, goals. That was actually the first time I saw something useful like that.

They don’t understand that, if you use TestNG vs JUnit, you can easily swap it, or if you use Bamboo instead of Jenkins, the concept is the same and you can easily align with this or that tool, but it seems like they see only black or white. Well let me tell you something, we are not a digital entities made of ones and zeros, yes or no, black or white, on or off, we are analogical and discrete systems, we know this and we can learn that, if we use JavaScript we can definitely understand C#, if we know how to test a mobile device, we can even test a desktop app and so on.

I personally ask more questions to the recruiter/employer because I don’t usually beg for the job, I want to know first if I can be a good fit and make a difference to the prospective company, not vice versa, I want to make sure that I will be happy and challenged if I come to work for you, because if I will be happy, you will be happy with me too.

Sometimes going through recruiters can be a real headache, at the point that I have to do my own intel gathering to find the company they advertise and apply directly myself, because, yes, they don’t even know how to screen the proper candidate!

Bottom of the line, dear recruiters, think before ask, if you spend a little time to read our resume, I’m sure you will get all the info you need to get a basic idea of who we are and what we can bring to table.

Ah, one more thing, if your post states that a college degree is required, you don’t need to put on the job post: “Proficient with Word, Excel, PowerPoint.”, do you?