Recruitment Stories - Ahnaf's Experience at Cefalo Bangladesh Ltd.

Kazi Ahnaf Alavee is currently working as a Trainee Software Engineer (QA) at Cefalo Bangladesh Ltd. She has completed her Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from BRAC University. Prior to landing a job at Cefalo, Ahnaf interned as a Software Quality Assurance Engineer at Alesha Solutions Ltd.

Ahnaf applied for the role after coming across the job circular that was posted in a Facebook group. The application required to submit the candidate’s resume and an assignment. This assignment was meant to assess the skill of the candidate and thus, consisted of three tasks based on a given scenario - test plan strategies, type of testing required, and corresponding input values.

Ahnaf qualified to go through the next phases of the recruitment process. They were:

Phase 1: Preliminary HR Interview

After submitting her resume and the assignment, Ahnaf received a phone call from the HR department within a week. They wanted to schedule a short discussion with her regarding all the fundamental information. The discussion lasted for about 30 minutes and the HR representative asked some general questions like why did Ahnaf choose to be an SQA and why did she choose Cefalo, what were her future plans, and so on. At the end of the interview, the HR representative assured her that there would be a technical interview in the following week and if Ahnaf could get through it, the HR would reach her again.

Before the technical interview, Ahnaf received an email from Cefalo which contained the syllabus that she needed to grasp. Since she had approximately 4-5 days in her hand, Ahnaf utilized the time to prepare contents from the syllabus and some of the things outside the syllabus. For preparation, she used the following resources:

• Software Testing Tutorial: Free QA Course and GeeksforGeeks to learn all the theories on database testing, security testing, manual testing, and automated testing
• SQLZOO for SQL queries, joins, aggregate functions, wildcards
• HackerRank for practicing Java

Besides, she went through some tutorials and videos to grasp the concepts of mobile testing, web testing, JMeter, JUnit, Selenium, and Postman.

Phase 2: The Technical Assessment

This phase happened online. It consisted of a technical interview and a written test, lasting for 1 hour each.

During the technical interview, Ahnaf had to write some testing scenarios, pseudocodes, test input values, and had to answer some general knowledge questions based on the topics provided. She also got asked about API testing and JMeter. After she was done with the technical interview, Ahnaf received access to a shared document where she had to write test cases and test input values.

Phase 3: The Final HR Interview

A day after the technical assessment, Ahnaf received a phone call from the HR who asked her to join a video conference at Google Meet. In this assessment, her psychological and communication ability was put to test. Ahnaf got asked about her educational background, her hobbies, her family, and her future plans. Followingly, there was a perfunctory salary negotiation. After that, the MD of Cefalo joined the interview who discussed the working culture and their clients. Finally, on the following day, they offered Ahnaf to join Cefalo.

Special thanks to Kazi Ahnaf Alavee for taking out the time to share her recruitment experience with me.