How to evaluate candidates’ Terraform DevOps skills

Terraform DevOps experts have become highly sought after in the software development industry, making it challenging to hire the best candidates before the competition.

Developers have noticed the increased demand for Terraform DevOps skills. In fact, DevOps skills have become some of the top skills developers want to learn.

But what is Terraform DevOps, how does it work, and why do you need a Terraform DevOps employee in your company? We will answer all of these questions and many more in this article. 

First, let’s start by explaining what Terraform is.

What is Terraform?

Terraform is an Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tool that enables developers to upgrade, iterate, and change software infrastructure securely, efficiently, and quickly. 

You use an IaC tool like Terraform to change and update your infrastructure using code instead of manual processes. The changes and commands are all saved in configuration files and can be updated and iterated with code. This helps developers modify the infrastructure in a single place and have it affect the entire organization safely and securely.

With Terraform, you can build and change your entire infrastructure in a safe way. It enables you to change low-level components like instances but also works with high-level components such as DNS entries.

On top of being secure, Terraform is also open source and platform independent. This means you can use it with different platforms and operating systems, which isn’t the case with many IaC tools.

With Terraform, you don’t have to worry about your infrastructure code crashing when you make a change. The tool functions as an immutable infrastructure, which means you don’t need to worry about configuration drift.

Critical Terraform DevOps skills

Terraform DevOps is essential for many development companies. You want to have a streamlined software development process and ensure that your product is tested, safe, secure, and ready for your customers to use.

That’s why you need to hire a Terraform DevOps employee with technical skills like Kubernetes expertise, coding skills, and knowledge of configuration management tools such as Chef. They will also need to have the following set of soft skills if they want to succeed in the role:

• Communication skills. A skilled Terraform DevOps professional requires excellent oral and verbal communication skills. They will be working with many people from different teams. Therefore, they’ll need to listen to their problems and challenges and communicate clearly and purposefully to achieve their objectives.

• Decision-making skills. Terraform DevOps employees have to be able to make quick, efficient decisions because they will face a wide range of challenges on a daily basis. 

• A solution orientation. Every Terraform DevOps employee should have a solution-oriented attitude. They will face novel challenges and obstacles every day and must find solutions that work for your organization’s teams and processes.

• The ability to work under pressure. The many responsibilities of this role can be stressful at times, so Terraform DevOps experts will need to be able to handle pressure well. 

How to evaluate candidates’ Terraform DevOps skills

If you want to hire a Terraform DevOps candidate, you may have to transform your hiring process. This is where pre-employment skills testing comes in.

TestGorilla has helped more than 6,000 companies implement pre-employment assessments in their hiring processes. Here are three of the top benefits of skills testing: 

• Creates a bias-free process. You’re likely to receive dozens or hundreds of applications for an open position, and you will have to review every single CV to find and shortlist suitable candidates. The problem is that most CVs only get glanced over, and most good candidates fall through the cracks. Even once you’ve made a shortlist of candidates, you won’t know whether your decisions were affected by bias. All of these concerns disappear when you use a pre-employment test. You can simply give all of the candidates a pre-employment test and wait for the results, thus eliminating unconscious bias from the hiring process. 

• Easy to use. With TestGorilla, you can send the test to all of your candidates with a single click and wait for the results to come in. The test results are numerical so that you can easily compare the candidates to see who did better.

• Evaluate the right skills. When you use pre-employment tests, there’s no need for CV screening. CVs can only give you a sense of candidates’ writing skills rather than the skills they will actually use on a daily basis.

Use the Terraform pre-employment test to find skilled applicants

TestGorilla’s Terraform test evaluates candidates’ technical knowledge of Terraform. The test takes around 10 minutes to complete. It is suitable for candidates with intermediate skills in Terraform.

The skills the test will cover are: 

• Understanding Terraform fundamentals

• Using Terraform CLI and workflow

• Reading, generating, and modifying configurations

• Proficiency with Terraform modules, Cloud, and Enterprise capabilities

You should use the Terraform test if you’re looking to hire DevOps engineers, SRE engineers, software engineers, cloud engineers, operation engineers, engineering managers, and IT architects.

Hire the best Terraform DevOps candidate for your business

In today’s market, there’s more competition than ever for skilled Terraform DevOps experts.

Don’t leave your hiring process to chance – use a pre-employment test like TestGorilla’s Terraform test, and you’ll be sure to hire the top candidate in the talent pool. 

And remember to take a look at our test library to find other tests you can use alongside the Terraform test, like the Kubernetes test.