Nine tips on hiring Quality Coaches (can you make it ten?)

If you're working in a company that is scaling rapidly and using the quality assistance model, at some point, you'll need to hire a quality coach (or two or three...).

It can be tricky hiring a quality coach for several reasons:

• First, if you are working with a talent advisor (TA), they may not fully understand the role and find it difficult to distinguish between the experienced tester and a quality coach.
• Some software testers who call themselves quality coaches don't work with multiple teams. Instead, they sit within a team and occasionally coach people on software testing. While there's nothing wrong with that, it's not a quality assistance model where the team is accountable for all software testing.
• Not all quality coaches have the same level of experience. Therefore, avoid assuming that a quality coach who works at a team level is suitable to drive strategy at a senior level.
• The pool of quality coaches is not huge, so finding the right skillset will be challenging.

The good news is that recently I've been doing a lot of hiring. So I've had an opportunity to learn a few things.