How to Hire Good Quality Assurance Personnel

Manfred Kets de Vries said, “First class people hire first class people.  Second class people hire third class people.  How do you put this maxim into action?

Hiring the right personnel is always critical.  Hiring good QA personnel has a unique set of problems.  And – not to put too much pressure on you or anything – your department IS who you hire.

The three most important characteristics of good managers are:

Who you hire, who you hire, who you hire.

The mistake that most hiring managers make is that they treat hiring like they’re purchasing a raw material.  They develop a detailed set of specifications in their own mind, then set them down on paper.  The specs go to HR and the wheels are set in motion.

Typically these specs are based on the job description.  Maybe somebody good just got promoted.  Maybe your department has received new responsibilities.  Nevertheless, you worked hard to get the position approved, so you better get the right person.  The last thing you want is to ruin your reputation by hiring a loser.

If you’re the manager, you get a pile of resumes that allegedly meet the specs that you set down.  You sort through them, weeding out the ones that don’t exactly meet your specs.  Your pile is a third its original size now.

It’s a daunting task.  You throw out the ones that dwell on the positions that the candidates held.  The ones that focus on what they accomplished get favored status. 

Now you’re down to the tough decisions.  But let’s back up a second and look at the surviving resumes.  Do you see any patterns?  Look at their experience, the schools they went to, their style of writing.  Notice anything familiar?

Could you be hiring your own clone.  Really?? Is that what you want? More of yourself?  Isn’t one of you enough?  How about someone who brings a different palette of skills to your department. 

Let’s back up further. If you wrote your hiring specs based on the job description, you might have fallen into a common trap.  You are looking for a specific set of characteristics in your candidate.  You’ve defined some oddly shaped hole and you want to find someone uniquely shaped to fit it perfectly.  Good luck.  You’ve just driven yourself to hire some third rate slot filler.  What does that make you?

Don’t paint yourself into a corner with your job specifications.  Do you really need 500 years of experience writing Non-Conformances?  Do you really expect someone to walk into this job and start performing the next day?  Couldn’t you spend some time and money training the candidate?  Wouldn’t it be worth it to wait just a little bit longer to fill that NC writer slot and get someone who is supremely talented?

Don’t lock yourself into a rigid set of specifications.  Your job as a hiring manager is not analogous to the disposition of incoming raw materials. 

Now is the time to think about how you are going to build your department into a force to be reckoned with.  Instead of narrowly focusing on the one job you’re trying to fill, expand your thinking to the current and future needs of the department. 

• Who is going to lead your department if you get promoted?  Shouldn’t you begin to stockpile latent leadership potential?  Don’t inhibit your own upward mobility because management is concerned about who will succeed you.
• What other skills is your department lacking?  Do you need someone who can write extraordinarily well?  Is there someone in the resume pile who maintains a fishing blog?  Read some of it.  Does it hold the interest of someone who only wants to see fish in a restaurant?
• Why does your department fall into squabbling if you’re not there to give them a stern look?  Is there a peacemaker in the pile? 

You probably already know whether you have the skills to recognize who you should hire, and who you should leave out of your organization.  If you aren’t so good at judging talent, get help!  Find out who you have available that can judge talent and put them on the interview team.  I knew someone once who couldn’t evaluate anyone.  At least he recognized it, though.  He used to take candidates to dinner with his wife, who was a good judge.

In summation,

• recruiting talent is terribly important. 
• If you’re not good at it, get help.  
• Hire people with great potential that you can train up.  

John Wooden, winner of ten NCAA basketball championships, said that his first priority when he was recruiting talent was shooting potential, shooting potential.