TL;DR

The best job interview is when you decide should you start working with a company. The job interview begins by reading your public voice on the Internet. The post is based on a remarkable book written by Chad Fowler, The Passionate Programmer.

You will not get your dream job by applying to job interviews and with your CV. This is for sure. In your journey to a passionate software tester, your dream job interview starts with your first blog entry or meetup talk.

How to start your blog writing? First, you need to find your topic. The best place for topic ideas is to read what experience bloggers from software testing have to say. You read a software testing book, or you had been at a software testing conference. Find those authors’ blogs and put them in an RSS aggregator. RSS is an ancient technology, but it automates the process of monitoring the author’s new blog posts. I am using Newsblur. I would be happy to share with you my software testing aggregation list, just leave a comment below. The best place to start is the Ministry of Testing blog feed. When you like what you read, save that entry in newsblur. This should be your first blog post topic. Start a blog on any of the free blog sites. I started with Blogger, then switched to WordPress on Pagely. I suggest a free option for WordPress.com.

In your blog post, give a comment on the topic that you read. Do not forget to link the original blog post. The author will automatically notice that. Set your blogging pace, once per week is a good start. Comment on blog posts that you read and put in comment links to your blog. This is a start, and to get recognized takes some time. Be patient and increase your blog posting frequency.

Find local meetups and apply a talk based on your published blog posts. If there is no local software testing meetup, start one! Meetups are a great opportunity to get noticed in the software testing community. By giving a talk in front of the audience, you will practice public speaking, and you will gain valuable feedback in the Q&A session. I like to stress that I can be interrupted with questions. Apply this talk for a software testing conference. Some of them yearn for new speakers, some will give you valuable feedback on why your talk was rejected. If your lecture provoked questions at a local meetup, eventually, it will be accepted as a conference talk.

If you will find your blogging pace overwhelmed, or you do not have the energy to go to meet up, remember that the best job interview is when there is no job interview.