Recruiting testers is not an easy task Martin Jansson
From what I have seen there are few recruiters that know what testers and test leads do. Considering that we had a EuroSTAR focusing on defining the profession can be seen as that testing as a profession is quite new and can therefore be considered immature.
Many recruiters look for a certain set of skills, education, certificates and knowledge in tools when seeking testers and test leads. The emphasis on tools and certificates seem to be great. They are unsure what keywords to use when searching for the aces in testing.
There are so many parameters to think about when recruiting testers and test leads, which makes this a hard task. Consider that each company is different, each tester might work differently, each object that needs testing is different, and there are a multitude of technology areas that need different skills and so on.
We assume that persons with different background, gender, education, skill sets and so on will generate different ideas on how to test and will probably come to different results. Transferring this fact to recruiting will make it hard for a recruiter.
I have no magic formula for what key words to look for when seeking testers other than that they should be good at testing, which I’d figure is hard to filter out in a job application. Something not directly related to recruiting tester but you may find helpful is SmartRecruiters’s white paper on CRM’s.
Cem Kaner has written a good article about things to consider when recruiting. This is not only for test related jobs, but for recruiting as a whole, which you can find here.
Johanna Rothman has also written a good article on recruiting testers, which you can find here.
Looking at and talking to a candidate as they test a software with some similarities to your own can be a way.
By interacting with the candiate you will gain lots of information. The main problem is the screening done by the recruiter. What do they look for in the application paper? I’ve talked to several recruiters who just do not know and apparently the customer do not really know either, that is customers who do not have a test department or do not talk to them when recruiting. Perhaps that is why there is such a focus on the test tools and ISTQB certs?
Do the recruiters know what to look for when recruiting programmers? Or other software engineers?
One thing that might make it easier when recruiting programmers is that there are university programs in computer science. But what do they look for more than that? Work experience perhaps?
What I mean is, do they really know what to look for when recruiting any software engineer?