How to search for a tester?
- by MainMa
As a freelance developer, a few times I tried to find some testers to be able to let them test my software/web applications. If I try to find them, it's because most of the customers are not intended to hire external testers and don't see why this can benefit to them, so products are UI-untested and buggy.
I tried lots of things. Discussion boards for IT people, specific websites for people who search for a job. Every time I clearly precise that I'm looking for product testers. I completely failed to find anybody for this job. I found instead two types of people:
Non IT people who try to qualify as testers, but don't have enough skills for that, and don't really know what testing is and how to do it,
Programmers, who are skilled as programmers, but not as testers, and who mostly don't understand neither what testing is about (or think it's the same thing as code review, or it consists in writing unit tests). Of course, they submit general programmers resumes, where they describe their high experience in Assembler and C++, but don't tell anything about anything related to the job of a tester.
What I'm doing wrong? Isn't it called "tester"? Is there at least a tester job, different from general programming job? Is there any precise requirement to require from each candidate which can eliminate non IT people and general programmers?