Who you choose to work at your company will determine its success - it is as simple as that. If you don’t choose the right person, you cannot expect good results or fulfillment of your goals. You’ll have to look for a new candidate, and we all know how costly and time-consuming the onboarding process can be.
On average, it costs around $4,000 to replace an employee at a company. This doesn’t even begin to cover lost time and possibly the impact of mistakes done by the wrong person. If you want to avoid this from happening and make your business a success, you need to find the perfect person for the position.
This is even more important if you are hiring someone for a position as demanding as that of a web developer. Tech teams require highly skilled developers to do their job properly.
That’s what we are here to help you with - figure out how to evaluate applicants and find the gem in the crowd.
Top ways to evaluate the capabilities of applicants before hiring
Traditional methods of hiring might work for the simpler positions but nowadays, you need to look at more than just the resume to pick the perfect person for the job. A good developer will have a problem-solving aptitude, excellent debugging skills, framework and language proficiency, pragmatic code optimization and structure, and more.
So, how do you go about hiring the best candidates for the job?
Use programming tests for candidates
Web development is a demanding and highly-paid career path. The people who apply for this position need to be serious about it. By incorporating testing into your hiring process, you can immediately determine what candidates are truly interested in working with you.
The resumes are not always reliable. Hence it is best to use quality programming tests for candidates before you shortlist them or pick your favorite.
Creating these tests is not easy and it can take a lot of time, but not if you use TestGorilla’s templates. Thanks to their quality and easily customizable templates, you can create tests within minutes and make sure that they include the vital questions that will tell you how skilled the candidate is for the position in question.
On the website, you can find different tests for all sorts of positions, including that of a web developer. You can pick a template based on your company’s specific needs, customize it as you wish, and automate everything from the test implementation to the screening process to the decision-making process.
Optimize the hiring process
When it comes to hiring, employers often think that it is the job of the candidates to reach out and impress the company they’ll work with. Things are much different these days. Since there is a high demand for web developers and a limited number of truly qualified professionals, it is the task of employers to attract, engage, and convince experts to work for them.
It all starts with the job post. If you write a simple post that doesn’t provide any specific information or make people want to work for you, it won’t attract great candidates. Your search will end before it begins. That being said, you should consider using Homerun’s iOS developer job description to attract the right employees.
Homerun is an excellent tool to facilitate the entire hiring process. This tool will centralize, organize and streamline the hiring process in a single dashboard where you can clearly see all your open jobs and the applications for them.
Thanks to this tool, you can customize and create attractive job descriptions and grab the attention of the best candidates. You can optimize their hiring and onboarding process, create a good work environment, as well as get all the data in a single place to make the smartest decision.
Check their portfolio thoroughly
You’ll be hiring for a position that requires quality work and allows for no errors, so naturally, you want a person with expertise and experience. People with experience have a portfolio of their work for you to see. When you’re hiring for the position of a web developer, this is more useful than the resume or any other application document you get.
Great candidates will have rich professional portfolios that include open-source contributions. In addition to this, you’ll be able to see personal side projects as long as the candidate provides you with links to them.
To save some time, you can check the profiles on trending platforms like Stack Overflow and see if the candidate has shared some of their projects with the public. You can also use this opportunity to research their reputation since Stackoverflow contains all kinds of data in the form of testimonials and upvotes.
It is wise to request a link to the portfolio in the job description to save both sides some time. Make sure to check their portfolios thoroughly to determine if the candidate has the necessary coding you need for the job in question.
In fact, the portfolios can show you more than just the coding skills of the candidate. You can look at how the candidate describes each project, learn who they collaborated with, and determine if they have good communication skills.
Based on what you learn from the portfolio, you can also prepare more specific interview questions that will show you if the candidate is perfect for the position.
Research them online
Stack Overflow is just one place where you can see the projects that web developers worked on. You can also check their LinkedIn profile, do a bit of a Google search, and also take a look at their account on GitHub.
GitHub is one of the best resources when you want to hire developers. It’s an online showroom for developers that want to present their work and land a good position. You can use it to research candidates that have already applied for a position at your company or to find candidates and ask them to work for you.
On platforms like these, recruiters can check a variety of metrics that go beyond the quality of code the candidate wrote. For example, you can check the number of followers they have, the number of projects they’ve worked on, their public activity, and more.
Try pair programming interviewing
Have you heard of pair programming interviews? These are live coding exercises where the interviewee and the recruiter code in real-time on an online shared IDE.
In the past, coding interviews were conducted on a whiteboard or a Google Doc file. Nowadays, there are plenty of tools that are more advanced and offer a seamless experience.
Regardless of how you choose to do this, pair programming interviews always have two parts - the driver and the navigator. They can take up to around an hour during which the interviewer is the navigator and the candidate is the driver.
What does this mean?
It means that the recruiter will articulate the problem and observe how the interviewee writes the code. This is the perfect way to filter out unqualified candidates and determine different skills in your new employee. Since you’ll be working together, you can also evaluate their communication, critical thinking skills, and more.
This is a highly beneficial way of finding web developers, but it takes time, requires some investment, and you can expect many candidates to back off before they even give it a chance. Thankfully, this is an opportunity for you to find the candidates that are truly interested in the role and confident in their abilities to work alongside you.
If you decide to do this, you should keep in mind that such interviews add tons of stress on the candidate, so they might not be free enough to work as they would on their own. It is your task to make this experience more flexible and pleasurable for them all whilst observing their coding skills, logic, and communication skills.
In most cases, live coding today is done via screen sharing and facilitated by online interview tools. The interviewer provides the applicant with a brief and stands back while observing them in their work. Both sides can communicate during this process, which makes it more pleasurable and fruitful.
At the end of the day, such tests aren’t aimed to produce perfectly neat and constructed pieces of code. If you add the stress into the equation, many of the candidates wonót do their best during these evaluations. Even so, the nature of this interview will tell you a lot about the candidate, as well as allow you to get to know them better.
Ready to hire the perfect web developer for your company?
If you do all this, you’ll end up with a candidate or two that are truly deserving of the benefits you have to offer them. Make sure to engage them and reward them for their hard work because excellent people in this position are really hard to find nowadays. Good luck!
