Ask HN: How do you evaluate QA hires?

My small, early-stage software startup would like to formalize and level up the rigor behind the quality of our releases. But all of the companies I've worked for in my career have either A) leaned on engineers to do QA (with mixed success), or B) didn't have QA integrated into an engineering team, as a siloed function.

As a result I don't really have a sharp instinct for what makes a "great" QA specialist stand out from the crowd, so: how do other companies here hire for that expertise?

As in, people who can embed in a product/engineering team, take responsibility for release quality (but not absolve engineers of responsibility for it), and build a team culture around release excellence that is "greater" than what our engineers can achieve on their own. I'm curious how other startups approach this challenge, in 2022.

After reading through recent threads on HN on the subject [1][2], it seems like the crowd here believes that embedding QA in the development process as an equal collaborator with engineers is the right way to go; and also having had our engineers try out several automated test systems like Ghost Inspector, Rainforest QA, getting more in the habit of unit testing and so on, which certainly help—I'm thinking it still makes sense to actually have people embedded in our team, whose focus are on release quality.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27693744 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24546260