Quality Assurance. Often considered a luxury at many large companies and a lifeline at smaller businesses can undoubtedly make or break a product. Being able to successfully convey all of your skills during an interview and convince a hiring manager (in a short amount of time) that you are the PERFECT person for a highly sought-out position can typically be very difficult. I’ve so far held two QA positions in my professional career and I’ve interviewed for several others. While I can assure you that I’m not an interviewing guru (since I’ve both been hired and rejected from QA positions), I have collected some tips that hopefully you may find useful.

No experience? No problem!

Actually, no. Software QA jobs are pretty difficult to land. Hiring managers really take their time and usually interview A LOT of people . There are several things that can set you apart:

• Besides knowing the ins and outs of the QA process, knowing some programming languages will definitely set you apart. For those of you doing Mac testing, knowing a bit of unix, applescript, and automator can take you pretty far. I would recommend taking it a step further and educating yourself on a few more sophisticated languages such as C, Objective-C, and perhaps Python.
• Know a web language. I’ve recently discovered that a lot of businesses do not have a proper test tracking mechanism in place. While you can go down the route of setting up a custom filemaker database, however, I would recommend learning a good web language/framework. This way you can set up a good test tracking system that you or anyone else on your team can access from anywhere.
• Knowing someone on the QA team or at the company that can recommend you to the hiring manager will definitely give you a leg up on people who are probably just as qualified as you. Email or call this person and let them know you’ve applied for a job at their company. They may know someone who can put you in front of the hiring manager.

Test this “Mug” questions:
You can count on being asked to test something random. Perhaps something like a mug, calculator, garbage can, or a mechanical pen. You get the idea. Just remember that these questions are asked to see how you think and what your process is in cooking up a solution.

A good tactic for this is to draw upon any experience you’ve had in the past that may be related to the problem you are being asked to solve. I usually combine my past experience with some ad-hoc testing procedures I typically may do. You don’t want to focus too-much on the ad-hoc testing since you will most likely sound like a babbling idiot. Instead, highlight scenarios in your professional career where you may have been tasked with a similar challenge. Find similarities between the two problems and express how your solution worked then and how it can work now.

Any questions?

Always, always, always ask questions at the end of an interview. If when you are asked: “Do you have you have any questions?”, you should quickly assess your performance during the interview. If you’re unsure about your performance during the interview, just ask: “Why wouldn’t I get this job?” I picked this up from a good friend of mine (@tebo), who gave me this tip on a position I was interviewing a while back. I think this is a really good response to the ‘Any Questions?’/this-is-the-end-of-this-interview prompt. If you ask this, you’ll have a better idea of what the hiring manager’s thoughts are. You’ll also probably catch him off guard which is always fun.

If you believe you did well during the interview, ask more questions about the company and specifically the person you are interviewing with. How did they get started at company x? Who will you be reporting to? Just think of stuff to ask. Do not ask about anything about money. That should be the very last thing you talk about.

Hope this helps my fellow QA testers out there.