ExamopotamiaWhy test QA skills before you hire?
Testing looks easy from the outside, which is why QA job adverts draw so many applicants with very different backgrounds. The useful ones design tests that hit the edges, report bugs clearly and tell the team honestly what has not been tested. A short assessment checks that way of thinking, so your engineering leads only interview people who already have it.
What this template covers
- Test design: boundary value analysis and equivalence partitioning with concrete examples.
- Test types and levels: smoke, regression, unit and integration testing.
- Bug reporting: what a useful report contains and how to handle bugs you can't reproduce.
- Triage: the difference between severity and priority.
- Judgement under pressure: risk-based testing before a deadline and dealing with flaky automated tests.
How to run it well
Allow 15 minutes for twelve questions. A pass mark of 65% works for manual and junior QA roles; for automation engineers, raise it to 75% and add questions on your test framework and CI pipeline. Shuffle questions and options so candidates hired in the same round see a different order.
The questions are mostly single-choice, with one select-all on bug reports and a true/false on what testing can prove. When you go through the results, spend time on the deadline and flaky-test scenarios. They show how a tester will behave in the week before a release, which is when you need them most.
Who this test is for
Use it for manual testers, QA analysts, test automation engineers at junior and mid level, and developers moving into quality roles. Product teams without a dedicated QA function can also use it to check how well developers understand testing before they own it. Because none of the questions depend on a particular product or tool, it suits candidates from very different industries, from games and e-commerce to banking software. That makes the scores easy to compare across a mixed applicant pool.
Make it yours
Add questions about your own product: a form with your real validation rules, a screenshot of a bug, or your definition of done. For automation roles, include questions on the tools you use, such as Selenium, Playwright, Cypress or your API testing setup. The AI generator can draft more test design questions for you to review and edit. A short user story with acceptance criteria also works well: ask which test case is missing.