A resume that lists Selenium tells you very little. Plenty of candidates have recorded a few scripts, and far fewer can design a suite that stays reliable as a product grows. Here is how we tell the difference.
1. Resume and portfolio review
Software matches skills and keywords against your requirements first. A recruiter with QA experience then reviews the shortlist, looking for evidence of framework ownership rather than tool names: "built", "designed" and "maintained", not just "used".
2. A hands-on framework task
Candidates get a small task based on your stack, for example automating a login and checkout flow with Selenium or Appium using a page-object pattern. We look at:
- Structure: reusable components, sensible naming, no copy-paste.
- Stability: explicit waits instead of sleeps, and robust locators.
- Reporting: can someone else read the results?
3. CI/CD and strategy discussion
We talk through how they would run the suite in a pipeline, handle flaky tests, split smoke and regression runs and decide what not to automate. Senior candidates should be able to argue for a test pyramid that fits your product.
4. Culture and communication
QA engineers report bad news for a living. We check that candidates can explain a defect clearly, push back politely and work well with developers.
What you receive
Every shortlisted profile comes with the interviewer's notes from each stage, so your own interviews can go deeper instead of repeating the basics.