Reader, When I left my last job in March ‘25, I was burned out. 70+ hour weeks.Undercompensated.And nothing lined up. I hadn’t really looked for a job in a decade. The last time I truly looked for a role, I was 22. The market was different.The competition was heavier.And even with 10 years in recruiting, I wasn’t immune to the chaos. I knew I wanted sales: either staffing expansion or B2B tech sales. But beyond that? I had no sourcing strategy. No geographic focus.No clarity on remote vs...
11 days ago • 1 min read
Reader, In Part 1, you saw how a bleeding-edge tech assessment for a QA Engineer looks in 2026. Now you're going to learn why this is something you can expect to see more of. "The share of new code relying on AI rose from 5% in 2022 to 29% in early 2025" —Complexity Science Hub (Jan 2026) And the trend is expected to continue growing. Sure, there's skepticism about how much AI can speed up high-quality code generation, but AI's ability to do so has only increased. I'm not a believer that...
15 days ago • 4 min read
Reader, I've saved the best for last, truly. This one was a software testing services firm. For the last several emails I've written about interviews from my job hunt, I provided the req. Well, this place didn't have reqs. You didn't find them -- they found you. It's a cool story, but it makes it harder to write about the interview process objectively. Subjectively? It was awesome. This firm wanted to hire Quality Engineers who are mature enough to make solid judgment calls about testing and...
18 days ago • 3 min read
Reader, In Part 1, you saw how a facilities management SaaS had to take a leap of faith because they didn't assess the technical ability of their candidates. Quick recap on the technical skills the req asked for: fwiw, not all of this seemed necessary from the conversations I had These were the skills the role actually required based on the conversations with the hiring team: Maestro or Appium (mobile app test automation scripting & debugging) Mobile testing TypeScript CI/CD for running tests...
21 days ago • 4 min read
Reader, Wow, are we halfway through February already? That was fast. Hope you had a great V Day over the weekend 🫶 Let's talk about another interview I had back in December.This was with a facilities management SaaS company for an SDET role. A friend from a past job referred me, so I thought it would be a walk in the park.(This is a terrible posture to take when getting referred, by the way. Great recruiters often speak with referrals so make sure you educate your candidate on mindset before...
25 days ago • 4 min read
Reader, In Part 1, we talked about Jake, one of the best recruiters I've ever worked with as a candidate. He was great, but ultimately had a "miss" in his hiring practice which cost his team time. Jake spent hours sourcing and interviewing candidates for this role, only to see every finalist rejected because they failed the assessment. At first, Jake thought he was just sourcing the wrong candidates. When we took time to compare the assessment to the actual job requirements, the misalignment...
28 days ago • 4 min read
Reader, Hey again. It's Steven, the QA Engineer who thinks he can talk about recruiting (I kid, that's what Jaclyn's here for lmao). Story time. While on the job hunt -- between November and January -- I interviewed with a productivity SaaS I shall not name. You'd know who they are, probably (maybe not, some folks I talked to hadn't heard of them). Anyway. I got all the way to the end of their interview process but flunked their Leetcode challenge. I almost wrote about this interview...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Reader, In Part 1, we talked about a bad tech assessment. Let's see how it could be better, 1 skill at a time. Recall that this was the list of skills they needed to assess for the role: is screencapping our own newsletter considered "newsletter-ception"? QA Automation (Playwright & POM) These fall under the QA Automation umbrella in the 1st item. Like I said in Part 1, they did a good job of testing the candidate on Playwright best practices. But they can do better. Instead of asking the...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Reader, Steven here. So, let's talk tech assessments. I was recently on the hunt for a new job thanks to my previous employer making some questionable business decisions in 2025. One of the first interviews I got was for a "field service management SaaS" company. AKA, they serve landscaper business owners who need help managing their operations. (No names 😉) But you're here because you want to know what their tech assessment looked like. It was a 2-parter: 1. Playwright expertise (refactor a...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
