The best tester I ever worked with would have flunked your automation interview.
She couldn't write a Selenium locator to save her life. What she could do was sit through a requirements review, go quiet for a minute, and then ask the one question that made the whole room realise the feature didn't actually make sense.
Plenty of people can automate a test. Very few can tell you which test was worth automating in the first place.
Most teams hire testers for the wrong skill. We screen for tooling syntax and call it competence. Jerry Weinberg worked this out fifty years ago: testing is fundamentally a human activity, and quality is "value to some person", not lines of code executed overnight. You cannot grep your way to that judgement.
Hiring a tester for their automation framework is like picking a London cabbie for the shine on the bonnet. Impressive in its way, and beside the point. The value was always The Knowledge.
What I screen for now:
- Hand them a half-built feature and watch what they ask before they touch a keyboard.
- See whether they can raise a risk with a developer without it becoming a turf war.
- Ask about a bug they're proud of finding, and listen for curiosity rather than process.
- Check they can say "I don't think we should test that" and defend it. The good ones know where not to look.
Tooling you can teach a sharp person in a fortnight. The instinct for where the bodies are buried takes years, and no bootcamp sells it.
Automation gets you a tester who can check what you already thought of. Judgement gets you one who finds what you didn't, and only one of those keeps you off the Monday-morning incident call.
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