Your own worst enemy

Landing your first job or two is usually the hardest. You have zero experience, no referrals and no connections. Wouldn’t it be a pity if on top of all that, you will also get in your own way? When recruiting for a junior position, the interviewer has so little to work with, that the slightest fault is enough to differentiate you (for the worse). On the bright side, if you can avoid steamrolling over yourself, you have a starting point higher than some of your competitors. You can start by avoiding these self sabotaging ideas:

1. Listing experience and knowledge in your résumé, that is just not true

As I already mentioned , reliability is the QA person’s most important characteristic. If your CV claim something you cannot backup in the interview, any tests you might be surprised with, or even during your employment, there goes your reliability.
This includes listing things that you once knew, or had very limited experience with. Sometime during the last century (while dodging saber tooth tigers), I completed my first university course in Pascal. Sure, it will be technically true to claim experience in Pascal, but the truth is, that the time it will take me to regain competence in Pascal is more or less the same as it will take me to pick up a simple language I don’t know at all. It will be just as dishonest to claim experience in something I forgot ages ago, as it is to claim experience in a programming language I never learned. Almost all the CVs I get for junior QA engineers claim some experience in SQL. Most of them cannot differentiate between inner and outer JOIN.

2. Claiming to be fluent / native speaker of a language, when you are not

Unless you are writing an episode of Friends, this is a rookie mistake that is bound to bite you in the ass sooner or later, probably sooner. Even if you job will never require that additional language skills, you can still embarrass yourself when put on the spot. If your second (or third) language is actually needed for the job, overselling your abilities will only set you up for epic destruction of your image. I used to believe that candidates that described their second language level as “fluent” or “as native” should not be required to demonstrate it during the interview. Then I helped to interview people for someone else’s team, and encountered candidates that could not talk their second language and walk in the same time.

3. Guessing stuff

How would you feel if your doctor stared at your X-Ray, then googled something, and then produced from her pocket a 20 sided D&D dice and consulted a random chart for your diagnose? This is how you should feel when you ask a QA engineer a question, and she guesses the answer. Randomly choosing an answer on a multiple choice test can be forgiven, since this is the common practice when not in a QA context, but in a QA related test, not to mention real QA work life, it is the exact opposite of the job description. It will also cost you the any chance of landing the job. “I don’t know” is a valid answer.

4. Cheating

This should go without saying. Cheating on a test will not save you. If you need to cheat on your test, even if you manage to get away with it, you will fail on your first day. Failing a test will save you from a job you are not equipped to handle, and will show you where your weak spots are. Cheating on a test will cost your reputation, and cost you your future jobs as well.