This blog gives you an update on Hiring at Qxf2 from 2019 until now. We believe in trying out new things and keep evolving from these experiences. So we tried the popular job portal Indeed, a startup hiring consultant called Hiring Monk and we also updated our Careers page as Qxf2 has evolved over the past years.
Indeed:
I was browsing for job portals as we were on the lookout for QA Managers and Senior QAs. We had already tried Naukri earlier and the next obvious choice was yet another job portal, so we picked the popular one Indeed. It was a breeze to navigate through Indeed. We placed an ad for both the roles QA Manager and Senior QA. There were about 50 applications that applied for each role. The candidate pool was very good for both roles. Indeed was easy to use and user friendly. I like the interface as it lets you update the candidate status and send out responses from Indeed itself. We ended up hiring two very brilliant QA Managers Rohini and Rahul. The hunt for a Senior QA was unsuccessful though we took many interviews. I would definitely recommend using Indeed as it’s a good hiring tool.
Indeed
Hiring Monk:
As we were done with all the popular job portals, we wanted to try a different approach in hiring Senior QA. We thought of looking up for freelancers too. As we looked up for some ideas, we saw a few ads on hiring consultants who are startups. Since we are a small business, we thought a startup would probably understand the job profile that we are looking for, much better than the rest. We found a few, emailed them as well and Hiring Monk was the first to respond back with their plan. Their website was attractive and points were clearly mentioned. So we connected !! It was very easy to talk and connect with the team from Hiring Monk. They clearly understood our job profiles and sent across batches of candidate profiles. We reviewed resumes, conducted interviews but unfortunately didn’t hire anybody from the pool. We tried it for about 6 weeks. I would recommend teaming up with Hiring Monk once at least as they have a good pool of candidates, working and non-working too. The candidates are more aware of remote work culture and start-up environments.
Hiring Monk
Post this, we stopped our hiring process for Senior QA and QA Manager due to several other reasons.
Careers page:
In the year 2020, we started by updating our Careers page on the website with the recent updates. In our interview process, in the first round, we ask the candidate a few basic HR-related questions. We wanted to grab this information before-hand. So we looked up for a couple of Career pages and forms across certain Companies. This gave an idea of creating a certain candidate form that would fetch the basic information of the candidate’s career experience, managerial experience, startup experience, number of companies worked for, the reason for the change, and current CTC. At the bottom of the careers page, we created a form called “Apply here”. This form takes you through 6 questions and once submitted, we review the submissions. Once the candidate fills up this form, you can just send us an email stating your reasons to join us. We review the basic information, your email, and action the next steps accordingly. This “Apply here” has helped us in a good way for our interview process. Now, these questions are not being asked from our interviewers in any of the rounds.
An additional motivation for the Careers page change was to give the candidate a chance to self-filter themselves out of the process. We give back information to the candidate based on their answers too and re-iterate some downsides of Qxf2 that we want them to hear.
Careers
My takeaways from the above experiences are to try new approaches, get creative, implement them, good or bad. We ended up trying new things i.e. a traditional approach to hiring, a new one, and built something in-house too. If an idea pops up then just go ahead and try it out. It might work out well or bad, you never know it until you have tried it.
Where are we headed from here…..we are looking to hire someone outside of the QA space and figure out how best we can utilize them at Qxf2. Also to hire without posting any ads !!!
Thanks for reading! If you have any suggestions, go ahead mail me at [email protected].
I’m a software tester with more than 10 years of software testing. My experience has been with functional testing, regression testing, test management and defect management. I have had a great journey in the testing world with products inclined towards Banking and Insurance domain. I have excelled in test processes, methodologies, offshore delivery for application/product testing. I enjoy testing in terms of test execution and finding defects. My other interests include watching movies, painting and sketching.
