To hire a QA engineer, decide first whether you need manual exploratory testing, test automation, or both, because they are different hires. Recruit from testing communities and support teams, screen with a live bug hunt on your own product, interview around test strategy and bug reporting, then check how they behave when a release is at risk.
Testing has its own community, and it is not on the general developer boards. Ministry of Testing, the Association for Software Testing, local testing meetups and testing-focused conference talks are where practitioners with real craft show up. Two underused pipelines convert well: customer support agents who file the most precise bug reports, and technical writers who already read specs closely. Both know the product and can be trained on tooling. For automation-heavy roles, look at people contributing to Playwright, Cypress or Appium ecosystems. Bootcamp graduates flood entry-level applications, so screening volume matters more here than in most engineering searches; an [applicant tracking system](/ats) that keeps every applicant scored against the same criteria stops good junior testers from being lost in the pile.
Be explicit about what kind of testing you want, because the title covers three different jobs. Manual and exploratory testers find the bugs automation never will. Automation engineers build and maintain suites. Software engineers in test build the tooling and frameworks other engineers use. Asking for all three at one salary is the most common reason strong testers ignore a post. State whether QA is a gate before release or embedded in the team, say who writes the test cases today, and be honest about how much legacy regression work exists. Describe the product surface, since testing a payments flow demands different instincts than testing a game. A well-scoped [QA engineer job description](/job-descriptions/qa-engineer) filters the pile before you read it.
Give them your product and thirty minutes. Ask them to explore a specific flow, then submit whatever they find in whatever format they choose. This single exercise reveals more than an hour of questions: how they prioritize, whether they think in edge cases, and whether they can write a bug report a developer can act on without a follow-up conversation. Read the report as if you were the engineer receiving it. Look for reproduction steps, expected versus actual behaviour, environment details and a severity call they can defend. For automation roles, ask for a small existing suite and have them critique it rather than write one from scratch. Reviewing someone else's brittle selectors shows judgement fast.
Three rounds work well. Start with a scoping call, run the exploratory bug-hunt exercise, then hold a test-strategy conversation with the engineering lead. In the strategy round, describe a real release you shipped and ask what they would have tested, what they would have skipped, and where they would have accepted risk. That last part matters, because a tester who wants to test everything will become a release bottleneck. Ask how they handle a developer who marks their bug as "works on my machine". Add a short session with an engineer they would pair with daily. Structured [QA engineer interview questions](/interview-questions/qa-engineer) keep the loop consistent, and scheduling the rounds in one batch removes the back-and-forth that stalls testers who are still employed.
Junior and mid-level manual testing roles usually fill quickly, because the applicant pool is large and includes many career changers. Senior automation engineers and engineers in test are the opposite: that pool is small, they are paid close to developer rates, and they field regular outreach. Budget accordingly rather than assuming QA is a cheap hire across the board. Sifting a large applicant volume is where most teams lose weeks, so automate the repetitive stages with [recruitment automation](/recruitment-automation) and spend your time on the bug-hunt exercise instead of inbox triage. To close a senior tester, show that quality has real authority: a testable release process, developer respect for bugs filed, and time budgeted for maintaining the suite.
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