A beautiful and aesthetically appealing user interface that can instantly engage the user’s perceptions is what website users become impressed with after their first visit. A few moments after landing on a website, it is the effortlessness of interactions and ease of accessing the content they need, that further solidifies this initial impression. Web projects hire front-end developers to shape these user-focused attributes of the web interface.
To build an engaging web UI, you need to hire front-end web developers who are versed with the technologies, tools, and design trends to shape a beautiful and engaging web interface. Besides the skills and capabilities, front-end developers also need enough experience in working with other web development projects.
When hiring front-end developers for your web development project, you need to be aware of the precise steps and practices to get on board the best developer talents. Here throughout this blog, we are going to explain the key things you need to know to hire front-end programmers and the time-tested steps and practices for hiring.
The Key Responsibilities of a Front-end Developer
When you have a comprehensive knowledge of what front-end developers do, you can easily set expectations from them and accordingly can hire developers whom you need. Basically frontend development deals with the representation layer of a website that visually appears before the eyes of the users allowing interactions.
Traditionally the frontend of a website is developed by using three prominent and widely acclaimed languages such as CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. Apart from programming with these three languages, dedicated front-end developers also take care of aligning the design elements with the user interface (UI) of the website. Naturally, they must have a good knowledge of tools, principles, and the latest trends in UI design.
Finally, how much the users can be engaged with a web interface and how long the users can stay engaged, mostly depend upon the work of the front-end developers. Since a business through its website can only convert businesses and generate leads when it can engage a lot of users, the inputs of front-end developers play a crucial role.
Front-End Developer Skills
The basic front-end development skills as we have already mentioned, include three basic web development languages such as CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. Starting from these elementary skills, top front-end developers further can widen their capabilities and skills by learning more advanced languages and frameworks. Some of the modern skills and development capabilities that today’s front-end developers should have included are the following.
- CSS preprocessors such as Sass or SCSS as well as CSS frameworks such as Foundation and Bootstrap
- Adaptive and responsive UI design
- jQuery, AJAX, and Backbone.js
- Front-end JavaScript frameworks such as React, Angular, or Vue
- Module bundlers such as Webpack for streamlining the development process
- Version control systems such as GitHub Integrated Development Environments (IDE) such as Android Studio, Visual Studio, IntelliJ, Codemagic, and several others.
- Testing and debugging tools
Front-end JavaScript developers are in high demand these days because of the popularity of JavaScript frameworks such as ReactJS, AngularJS, VueJS, and several others. Apart from these front-end development stacks, experienced front-end developers can also develop their skills with some popular backend development technologies such as Python, Ruby, NodeJS, PHP, and PHP frameworks such as Laravel and become full-stack developers. Front-end developers should also be versed in some Content Management Systems (CMS) such as WordPress, Magento, Drupal, etc.
A Step-by-step Process to Hire Frontend Developers
As of now, we have explained what front-end developers do and the key skills they should have. Now it is time to explain the steps involved in hiring front-end developers. Remember these steps correspond to both remote and in-house hiring.
Come up with a project requirement document
For the web project, you are hiring, front-end development should be explained in detail along with all the requirements through a meticulous project requirement document. This document apart from explaining the core idea and objectives also needs to explain all the features, user benefits, and monetization aspects.
The same document should also mention the chosen platforms, deployment environments, and required technology stack. Lastly, the document should elaborate on the required resources, budget, and timeline.
Know Where to Find Front-end Developers
Now for best hiring front-end developers, you can either opt for freelancers or hire a front-end developer for in-house positions, or can opt for a remote web and app development team. Each of these options has its respective pros and cons.
- Freelancers: Hiring freelance front-end developers can be tremendously cost-competitive. At the same time by hiring them you can face communication issues, lack of alignment with the project goal, a slower pace of development, and unsatisfactory output. If you can handle these drawbacks well, some of the popular and widely acclaimed platforms for hiring freelance front-end development experts include UpWork, Codementor, Toptal, Fiverr, freelancer.com, and several others.
- In-house developers: In-house developers working from inside your office premise are more responsible and accountable and allow project managers more control over the development process. On the other hand, in-house developers enjoy less flexibility and they tend to incur a higher cost of development. Some of the top job boards and recruitment sites to look for inhouse developer candidates include LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Indeed, Dice, CareerBuilder, and several others.
- Remote developers: By opting for outsourcing and remote hiring of a front-end development company you can have global exposure to a worldwide pool of talents and naturally finding the right talents and skilled developers is much easier through remote hiring. On the other hand, managing remote developers across different time zones can be very challenging. To find the best companies for front-end developer resources for your project, you can always search B2B review websites such as GoodFirms, Clutch, TopDevelopers, and several others.
Evaluate portfolio & experience
Ultimately, for knowing the capabilities of a front-end web developer, it is important to get a first-hand view of their previous app or web projects. These results tell you a lot of things that you otherwise cannot judge. This is why it is important to ask developers to share their portfolio of app projects. As the invariable next step just open these websites or apps and find out the strengths and shortcomings in detail.
As part of this process, you can also approach some of their earlier clients and ask them about their experience with the said developers. As the last straw of analysis, you can also ask the developers to explain the strengths and weaknesses of these projects and how they can improve them further.
Subject Developers to Technical Tests and Interviews
The ability to write code by using a programming language is not enough. The developers must be proficient enough for using the language or framework to deliver the work as intended by the company. Naturally, the technical team needs to interview the developers and subject them to a demo programming test.
The technical interview can be carried out remotely over video conference tools such as Zoom or Google Meet. The interview should be taken by the core technical team headed by the CTO accompanied by some developers having proven expertise in the required tech stack. After the technical interview is complete, the developers should go through a pair programming session on a demo project. Through this, their coding, as well as collaborative skills, can easily be evaluated.
Testing and maintenance skills
The front-end developers are not just responsible for building the web app, but also for testing, deployment, and maintenance of the same. Naturally, you need to find developers who are versed with the QA testing processes and tools and version control mechanisms.
Most web projects these days prefer hiring developers who can take care of debugging and testing alongside development. This is often referred to as the Test-Driven Environment (TDE). While hiring front-end developers, you need to ask whether they are versed enough with the continuous testing approaches or test-driven environment (TDE).
A soft skill assessment
At last, when all the technical evaluations come to an end, it is time to go for a soft skill assessment. These are mainly personality and cultural attributes, communication skills, and collaborative abilities required from the developers in a software project.
Some of the must-have skills include communication skills in the English language, the ability to brainstorm ideas for finding out-of-the-box solutions, team spirit, leadership skills, professional discipline and accountability, etc.
Over To You
All the steps and methods we discussed above for hiring front-end developers, have been tested and tried through numerous successful web projects. Naturally, by following them you are more likely to get on board the best resources for your project. It is always advisable to keep cost considerations at the very end and only consider cost among equally skilled and talented developers.
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