Purpose of Document

To build upon the job description to help work out what needs to be included in the interview form, to help with selecting candidates and to help agencies with finding the right candidates.

Sourcing candidates

Think about where you’ll be finding candidates.

• Ask agencies/recruiters to find people
  • You can ask people you know well for recommendations
• Internally
• Your company website
• LinkedIn
  • Ask colleagues and partners to share the job ad
  • You can advertise on here too
• Online communities and noticeboards
• Local community groups within easy distance of the office
• You can also think about sponsoring/speaking at user groups and conferences for wider reach

Do not put on generic job boards such as Indeed to allow for targeted advertising. Experience has shown that advertising on Indeed results in lots of people applying who are just looking for any job and not qualified for the role.

What are the Must Have’s for this role?

What are absolute minimum skills/experience? Could you consider someone with potential? What development could you provide them with?

You can consider bringing in some externals to help with any training or supporting the team whilst they help get the new person up to speed.

Think about the things that can be learned, and those that can’t.

Screening questions

If you have a short list of requirements on your job ad, you will want to screen people to ensure they have these at a minimum, and maybe find out more about the other aspects you are keen on.

Sending out a document that really explains the day to day (see below) will help some self-select out as they realise this isn’t a good fit. Holding a quick telephone call with candidates to discuss the required skills/behaviours, but also the role in general to both work out if it’s a good fit and whether to progress.

It may seem like a lot of work, but it does help find the right candidate by lowering the barrier to entry for those with potential and from minorities. Who could help to complete this step? Is it a service already provided by your Talent Acquisition team? Is it a role someone in your leadership team could help with? As you are limited on time, don’t feel it all has to be done by yourself.

Is this really a full-time role?

There’s not many part-time roles out there, but there are some extremely good candidates out there looking for a part time role. People who are carers, people with disabilities, and a growing number of people with Long Covid. You can do an experiment of running the full time role at the same time as the part time role and see if you get different candidates.

What will this job look like in reality day to day? 

Some bullet points here will help bring the job to life for your pre-interview document, but might also help with your must haves.

What different thing is this person bringing to your team?

Look at your existing team – are there similarities between them in terms of gender, socio-economic or even educational background, work experience? Looking at your team in this way can help you hire for diversity of thought. Someone different to the rest will help your whole team. What’s missing from your team in terms of skills, experience or

What does success look like?

In 6-12 months time (or even longer), what do you expect this person to have achieved? What expertise is needed for that?

Example experience

Are there any other jobs titles this person could have had? Consider size of company. Would you consider someone from a smaller organisation? What about a start up? Just from the financial sector?

Do you need someone who has experience being a hands on QA? Or a manager?

What are you not looking for?

Help recruiters discount people, such as those who like to work alone or believe that testers should work in silo’s.

Interview process and panel

Candidates will feel assured to have the entire process spelled out to them as soon as their CV has been accepted.

I like to send out the questions to people ahead of time, as well as an explanation as to why we are asking this, to allow them to prepare examples.  Technical questions are not sent out, as this relies on someone’s knowledge, rather than remembering an example of a time where they exhibited a behaviour.

Also consider your interview panel. Representation matters. Can you find someone else in your organisation who can help you out with interviewing that would give a different perspective? Especially a woman in a senior position.