Rob's five tips to getting a job as a senior QA engineer

A part of my job at Kablamo is recruiting, we just opened a Canadian office and I went through over one hundred resumes for the senior tester role, and I have thoughts.

All of the below are honestly my tips, I believe a lot of them are good but I'm not at all making the claim that they are universal. I will try to bring up the limits of the advice when I notice them.

A lot of these tips may feel out of place if you are struggling to get into the shoes of a reviewer. These tips still hold up as a way to make your resume pop with one or two interviews, but they become more important the more applications the reviewer has to go through. I just didn't have the time to scrutinise each and every resume and had to come up with metrics to accurately thin the herd.

Now all of these are tips are heavily influenced by my personal experience. This article could be renamed "how to get rob to hire you" and it would honestly be just as accurate, but I believe even if you read this and disagree with it, it's still moving the conversation forward on how to write better higher quality resumes, and that's good enough for me

1. Show, don't tell

The first of my tips is, that we are developers and our GitHub is our portfolio. But first, a story:

I was lucky enough to have an amazing mentor early on in my career, Donna Kyle. I was struggling with my job as a junior tester she took me out for dinner with her son in law, who was a test manager and was at the time hiring people to become test automation engineers at his company. I saw on his face what I felt last month at 11.30 pm going through my 50th resume. His advice to me though was two things:

• Master git before you start any job - great advice but irrelevant to this.
• If they see a GitHub on a resume, they will look at that first.

As I said your GitHub is your portfolio, so as you go about your career tinker with it, add to it and as you grow your skills improve it. Even if all you have is a few boilerplates and scripts I'm just looking for a feel of the type of coder you are. And I have heard the obvious rebuttal that, "Not all engineers have a GitHub". and my response is "Why not?" There is nothing special about being a test engineer that makes it harder to write code. A senior test engineer surely has some experience in writing some kind of tooling or extension for an unsolved problem. Just show that.

If a resume has a GitHub I will drop the rest of the resume and go look at the GitHub, If I'm impressed with its contents I'll shortlist them. I'll still look for the things below but having some kind of evidence of your skills is worth 100x what I will read in dot point form.

Now to the limits of this advice, this works because I am a tester looking at resumes. If you had an HR rep or an office manager going through resumes it would be a completely different story. I have the ability (and desire) to look at code and determine if it is worthy of the position I'm advertising. It won't hurt you to have it there, but it might not help all the time.

2. Non-technical skills

Ok, now I'm hiring for a senior role. You might think the main part of this is your technical skills, and that is true. Almost equally important, however, are your soft skills. There should be space on every resume to tell me about your soft skills. Talk about your communication, time management, teamwork and leadership.

Test engineers find defects, that's kind of the point of us. Some developers can react poorly when faced with criticism of their work, I'm lucky enough we filter out that behaviour at Kablamo but we are a consultancy so you will work with other engineers. A certain level of bedside manner is important. Honestly, a whole blog can be written on this but I wouldn't want to give away my tricks to my team 😏.

It's not uncommon, but not common enough ya know, and would be great to see on your resume.

Limits - This can often be saved for and is generally the point of, an interview. It is a major component of what we care about as a company at Kablamo so much that we have an interview dedicated to culture and community fit. But win the conversation before you get in the room.

3. Prove your experience

Now with 100+ resumes to filter I had the luxury of looking for the exact skill set I wanted. We are hiring a senior engineer for a project written in javascript. Now testing is a big industry with a lot of frameworks and Most languages and skills are interchangeable. With the number of resumes I was looking through, however, the shortlist was only people with JS experience, coz I could be picky.

Now of these many many resumes I went through I would see in the skills section, see the words javascript and think "ok check, let's see where they used it" then I would go through their work history and it would mention a bunch of frameworks, it would say java and maybe Robot or maybe even cucumber. No mention of any JS framework... So, where did you work on it? Why is it there if you never worked on a single project that needed it? Do you know what would alleviate my suspicion in this case... if you had a GitHub with a JS example 😠.

Basically what I'm saying here (and honestly most of this article) is to make it easy for me as a reviewer to put into context the experience you are claiming to have so I feel comfortable shortlisting you.

limits... none I can think of, but I'm sure someone else could think of 1000.

4. Short roles look bad on resumes out of context

Hiring is an expensive, time consuming and tiring endeavour. It's not something you want to go through multiple times. So when you look at a resume and you see three months here, six months there, and at worst less than a month in a job, it crosses your mind, "I don't want to hire this person if they are a serial quitter just to have to go through this whole process again".

Now this is an assumption, and we all know these can be dangerous, but assumptions become more and more necessary the more resumes you have to go through, and I had a lot of resumes (Did I mention 100+ yet?). Some of the reasons for a short stint include: you were a contractor, you work in consulting, you were on mat relief, and honestly the list goes on and on. All of these are valid reasons, and all would be great in the resume.

Now the limits of this tip I stated above. Australia (where I live) has a small but highly skilled testing workforce. If I go to market here with an application depending on the forces at the time I'll get like 5-10 resumes back, you can usually cut out half of them and interview the rest. This concern would be something to note and then ask in the interview. Even when going through 100 resumes I would never knock someone back just for this, but it puts you one step back in the process and is an easy fix if you know it's there, hence it's a tip, not a rule.

5. Every job has a lesson, every role tells a story

This one is more of a tip that will make your resume pop if done correctly not get it knocked back (hence being tip five). But wouldn't all resumes be better if they gave us a reason to want to read them?

Some of the best resumes I read nailed this! Yes it's important to talk about the project, and the skills you used, but I would be more interested in what skills you developed. What did you learn on that project? what were the ups and downs? were there problems? A resume is meant to give me a feel as a potential employer of who you are and what you know. Give me a hero's journey! If I can see how each role you had created the tapestry of who you are, I will feel like I know you before you even step into the room (or onto the zoom call).

Fine. I guess limits. If you are allowed to write a cover letter you can put your experience into context there, that is usually the best place to tell the qualitative story of who you are. Also, this works for me because I work in a small company where we hire based on culture... Larger companies often require resumes to be formatted in certain ways to make this impossible, also crushing the soul of both the writer of the resume and the person who has to read it.

Thats all folk's

That's it, those are my tips. None of them are rules, this isn't a grand "follow these tips to instantly get a job" situation, but a few small ways to make your resume stand out, and in this day and age of hundreds of applications for a job and standard resume templates that to me is where the value is.

Bonus Tip: Postman doesn't count as automation experience

The amount of f*****g resumes that said they were senior engineers but listed POSTMAN as their API automation tool! Sure, it does the job, and I use postman all the time, but it doesn't replace an API testing suite, and the skills are not transferable to other languages/frameworks. I'm not trying to arbitrarily "gatekeep" automation enginnering. I wouldn't hire a tester with only Robot or Cumcumber experience either. working with a tool that operates on an abtraction while useful does not teach you the nuances of the underlying languages, it's just not as useful. ok. I promise I'm done now. I'll step away from the keyboard.