I’m recruiting at the moment and am thinking of going down the “certification required” recruitment route. (i.e. all applicants must have many certifications). Is this a good strategy or should I be looking for others skills instead or as well as?
Answer: Maik Nog – hanseatictester.info / @maiknog
This is definitely Best Practice. You should indeed proceed and progress this certification route.
Start a company subsidiary who specialises in offering training courses and exams for the very certification your main company requires for their recruiting.
That way, you make additional money AND make sure the candidates get formed to your needs. Plus, if you fire them and they start in a new company, they will do viral marketing and more people will attend your courses.
Answer: Rob Lowry – roblowry.wordpress.com
Certifications show that the person is good at taking tests and getting certifications… they really don’t show the quality of work the person will do. I’d ignore the entire Certification requirement unless the project really REQUIRES someone to be certified.
Focus on skills and the desire to grow, learn or advance. Curious testers are better testers than someone with papers and no interest in learning or growing. Find people thirsty for opportunity to grow and you will find excellent testers.
Answer: Sakamoto Kazuma – sakamotokazuma.com
If you are getting too many applicants, then going down the certification required route will be a good way to weed out a lot of applicants. This does not necessarily mean you will be weeding out all bad applicants, as you could be dropping out people who are better at what they do than people who are certified.
Answer: Christian Baumann – agile-and-testing.chriss-baumann.de
It depends. First of all, you should have clearly defined what profiles you are looking for.
Then you can check if at least parts of this profile you´re looking for can be covered by available certifications.
If so: How much do you trust this certifications? Is it really hard to get them? Is it essential to have a lot of experience in the area of expertise to get the certification? Or is the exam a non-brainer and everybody can get it, just by attending a 1-day-seminar? If the certification is kind of ‘worthless’, forget it…
What in my opinion is more important than having a certain certification is the willingness to learn and a general understanding on the area of expertise. This is what you should talk about with a potential candidate during the interview, e.g. for testing: Has the candidate a sense for quality? Is he interested in delivering unit tests in addition to his code? Is he willing to learn more about that