Your Essential Guide to Hiring Front-End Developers

June 30, 2023 • Hiring Developers

How to hire front-end developers for hiring managers

In today’s article, we’re going to take you from being a bit perplexed every time you hear the phrase ‘front-end development’ to being an expert on the profession. Well, not quite. But we are going to offer you all thest-e essential information you need as a hiring manager or HR professional. We’ll see why you should hire front-end developers, how to go about it, and valuable tips for making collaboration a breeze.

There’s no need to wait around, let’s get right to it!

Why Hire Front-End Developers?

So perhaps in the past you’ve wondered what front-end developers do, and what benefit they provide to your company. That’s what we’re going to explore in this section.

A Front-End developer handles all the visible aspects of a website or application (the User Interface, or UI) that a user will interact with thanks to programming languages such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. They often work alongside the Back-End developers (who handle all the non-visible, or server-side elements of a website), software developers, UI and UX developers and others on the web design team.

We will take a look at 4 key benefits they can bring to your company: improved user experience, responsive design, cross-browser compatibility, and testing and debugging.

User Experience and Interface Design

First up, Front-End devs play an important role in creating intuitive and visually appealing user interfaces. Working with the UX team, they’ll focus on making a website easy to navigate for all kinds of users. This encourages users to explore your website, helping you to retain them and lower your bounce rate as a result. They’ll also help you do this by creating attractive interfaces and animations. After all, who wants to stay on a website that’s an eyesore? And given that every dollar spent on UX brings in between $2 and $100 dollars in return, what is there to lose? (Fast Company)

Responsiveness and Mobile Optimization

A Front-End developer will also assist you in ensuring seamless experiences across various devices and screen sizes. They’ll do this via responsive design. What’s responsive design you may ask? A design approach that mitigates the need to create a new website version for each and every resolution and device. More specifically, front-end devs will make use of flexible grids and layouts, images and CSS media queries.

That all sounds good, but what does it mean for your company? Why are responsive web design and mobile optimization important in today’s digital landscape? It’s once again all about ensuring users have a positive experience, ultimately increasing the amount of time they spend on your website. This will in turn help improve your search engine optimization. What’s not to like?

Cross-Browser Compatibility

Cross-browser compatibility can pose a real challenge to your web efforts. That’s where Front-End developers come in. They’ll carry out cross-browser testing to help ensure a website renders as intended across web browsers and their various versions. They’ll also consider web accessibility to accommodate those with visual, motor or auditory impairments. This is crucial to ensure a positive user experience for everyone.

Testing and Debugging

Of course, throughout all of this work, Front-End Developers will need to spend time squashing pesky software bugs (don’t worry, they don’t feel pain). And as anyone who works in software knows, they’re all but inevitable in the development process. That’s why they’ll use a variety of different methods to test and debug code. Examples include functional testing, where they will look at a specific piece of functionality on your website, and unit testing, which involves examining individual lines of code.

Regardless of the approach they take, they have a variety of tools to make the whole process much simpler. This includes browser dev tools (which you can access by right-clicking a webpage and selecting ‘Inspect’), and code editors such as Visual Studio Code and JS Bin. They will also make judicious use of online communities to find answers when they get stuck.

Each approach has its advantages and disadvantages, but no matter which they fall on, they’ll need to be great at problem-solving. This is a vital skill whether they are cross-browser testing, optimizing performance or bug fixing. How else are you going to find solutions when the going gets tough? The good news is that this soft skill can always be improved.

Building a Front-End Development Team

Now that you understand the value a Front-End developer can bring to your company, let’s figure out how to go about building a team. Don’t worry, it’s not as hard as it sounds!

Defining Project Requirements

Before you begin, you’ll need a crystal clear idea of exactly what it is you’re trying to accomplish. This is true for any business objective, and it’s no different in HR.

So, start by outlining your web KPIs. They probably fall into 4 categories: increasing sales/conversions, improving interaction with existing customers, becoming an authority on a subject, or building your brand image. In more practical terms, are you looking to improve your User Experience? Do you need to work on your search engine optimization? Perhaps you need to improve the support section of your site (by implementing an AI chatbot for example). Or maybe your website needs new features to keep people engaged.

You can then begin to lay out your project specifications, UI/UX design guidelines and accessibility considerations. That way when you reach the hiring stage you’ll know exactly what to include in the job description. For example, perhaps you’ll specify the ability to work with a team of UI/UX designers, or familiarity with SEO principles.

Sourcing Front-End Developers

With a solid idea of your requirements, you can now start the sourcing process. There are many different channels you can utilize at this stage. Let’s review each of them.

First, there is social media. LinkedIn is the leader in the recruitment space and over 74% of developers go there to look for job opportunities. What’s more, they also have their tool, LinkedIn Recruiter, that facilitates the process, or you can make use of boolean search which makes searching for candidates a cinch. Be sure to craft tailored and personalised introductions for each candidate you’re reaching out to.

You’ll also want to consider job boards and online developer communities such as Stack Overflow, Slack, and Github. These will allow you to target qualified candidates instead of sifting through hundreds of applications.

Don’t forget traditional job posting platforms such as Indeed.com and freelancing websites to plug any additional gaps. And be sure to perfect your job descriptions to yield the crème de la crème in terms of candidates. This means using clear and concise language, nailing down the primary duties, and formatting them in such a way that they are both visually appealing and easy to read.

Lastly, you may also want to use a robust ATS system to simplify your resume screening process. This can take out some of the manual effort by preselecting the most qualified resumes based on keywords.

Whichever channel you use, by actively sourcing candidates, you’ll make it easier to find the perfect candidate for the position and save yourself time and money that can be used at other stages of the recruitment process.

Evaluating Technical Skills

With the knowledge of how to effectively source candidates, we can dive deeper into the recruitment process. More specifically, which approaches to adopt to assess the technical proficiency of Front-End Developers.

A front-end developer must have a variety of skills. This ranges from a strong understanding of the most popular programming languages such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, to experience with front-end frameworks and libraries, and knowledge of responsive design principles.

Screening for these, then, is going to take a bit more than just asking candidates simple yes or no questions. That’s where coding tests and reviews come in. These allow you to assess a wide range of skills via coding exercises, multiple-choice questions, and even games. Don’t know where to begin? We’ve got you covered with CoderPad Screen.

You can also structure interviews to draw out meaningful information from your candidate. This may be via behavioral interview questions to get a sense of how they apply their skills in real-world scenarios, to questions for assessing knowledge, skills and experience. The most important thing is to be sure that the candidate you’re considering will be able to meet the requirements you defined earlier.

Managing and Collaborating with Front-End Developers

As you’ve seen then, putting together a Front-End development isn’t as hard as it looks. But what about once you’ve onboarded them? How can you ensure that you collaborate effectively? That’s what we’ll finish up with here.

Clear Communication Channels

Communication is just as important for front-end development as in other, less technical domains. This is even more the case in today’s remote work landscape where employees may not always be available or be working in different time zones. That’s why you need to implement a variety of channels to facilitate collaboration.

The first and most obvious one is face-to-face communication in the form of meetings. As we all know, it can be hard to convey tone and intent digitally. So use meetings to discuss complex or sensitive matters you can’t afford to get wrong. Just be sure to keep them short (15 – 20 minutes is ideal) and periodic (with a few meeting-free days per week).

Next, we have video conferencing tools such as Zoom that allow you to stay in touch with remote workers. You likely already learned how to use these during the Covid-19 pandemic. This doesn’t mean you should check in at every hour though, as Zoom fatigue can be just as detrimental to your front-end developers’ productivity.

Another great tool in your communication arsenal are online messaging platforms such as Slack. These allow you to keep everyone in the loop, and share information and documents. Conversations are secure and can be limited to select team members.

Last but not least, don’t neglect project management tools! Software such as Trello, Asana and Zoho are great for keeping everyone on the same page in terms of tasks. You can also use them to collaborate, share files, or set deadlines.

Collaboration with Designers and Back-End Developers

Fostering collaboration between the web team is another important aspect of managing front-end developers. If you do it right, you’ll speed up workflows and prevent misunderstandings.

For this, there are a few key areas to focus on. You can start by clearly defining roles and responsibilities. This way each team member will know how their work fits into the bigger picture.

Encourage team members to learn as much as they can about each other’s work. This doesn’t mean you should expect a designer to all of a sudden become a coding expert for example, but a bit of knowledge in HTML and CSS goes a long way. Likewise, front-end and back-end developers may benefit from knowing a bit about creating user interfaces that are accessible, and a visual style that appeals to the target market.

Sharing documents and code can help with this, and it has the added benefit of ensuring everyone is on the same wavelength.

Allowing for feedback is also very important and team members often have varying ideas of how much work an idea takes to implement. Brainstorming sessions meanwhile can help members find innovative solutions to problems.

Be sure to promote the use of all the communication channels we mentioned previously to optimize this collaboration.

Ready to Plug the Talent Gap

That about wraps up our overview on hiring Front-End developers. By now you should know exactly why they’re an important part of any web team. But you should also understand how to assemble a team and how to ensure collaboration goes off without a hitch. And given the increasing demand for tech talent, what better timing?So where to next? Get an overview of the tech hiring landscape with our 2023 State of Tech Hiring report. Packed with insightful data, from the most in-demand skills and positions to recruiters’ top priorities, you’ll walk away prepared for whatever the rest of the year brings you.