Software Testing Job Candidates

When you apply for a software job, regardless of the experience you have or the jobs you can show you have successfully held down in the past, prospective employers often like to give you a software test.

Obviously, interviewing prospective candidates for a role in your company is a time consuming process, that takes up the expensive time of relatively high level personel.

I have seen it done badly much more often than I have seen it done well.

When done well, a little bit of extra effort will need to go into choosing a question or task that actually has relevance to what the person you are trying to hire will be doing at your company. This is more effort because not only do you have to come up with the questions but you have to have the skill to assess the result.

When done well, it leaves the job candidate with a good feeling about the prospective employer. They feel as if they may be treated in a decent way, that their contribution would be respected, that a modicum of thought was put into the process to give them a fair chance to show off their real skills. You’d both be off to a good start.

The alternative is to do it badly, offend or humiliate your prospective employee, get off to a bad start or more likely just make them not want to work for you.

The most common way I have experienced this happening is to be given a URL to a web form, with a generic computer-science type question and given 15 minutes to fill it in, as a way to “understand the way you think”.

Most roles in software development do not require people who are able to flesh out solutions to typical computer-science questions. They require a mix of skills far more nuanced than this. Most interesting problems that would show you how I think would not be solvable in 15 minutes (or be able to be looked up on the net).

This type of test just shows the prospective employer to be lazy, disfunctional and/or insensitive. Is that really what you want to be the first impression an employee has of you?

Capable software developers who can work well in teams are in short supply, don’t put these people off so early in the process.

Some of the best companies I have worked for never tested me, they could see that if I had worked on project A for company B for 6 months or more, then I must be able to do my job, so what they really want to know is, will I fit in with the company culture?