Are you a recruiter from a non-technical background? Are you struggling to hire a web developer for your organization? Well, you’re not alone.

Web developers play a crucial role in every organization as they are responsible for web development, web designing, fixing errors, website maintenance, etc. Hence, it is important to hire the right web developer team; otherwise, you risk harming your business and wasting time and money seeking a replacement.

Research states that 7 out of 10 recruiters have no or least technical knowledge and often struggle to onboard the right developer team. But do you know, you can still hire a technical team with no technical background? Yes, you read that right!

This article will discuss some of the best tips on conducting coding interviews and a technical assessment that can help you streamline the hiring process and hire the right web developer for your organization.

Understand Your Company’s Requirement

Before initiating the hiring process, you need to understand your company’s requirements. Why do you need to hire a developer?

Also, you need to decide what kind of project you need a developer for, such as:

• A Simple Web Project: It includes building a simple website or adding extra features to the existing one.
• Medium Web Project: It includes the development of static or dynamic web apps, online stores, and other services which require third-party integration such as APIs, CRM, CMS, etc.
• Large-Sized Web Projects: It includes sophisticated technologies and integration with cloud hosting servers to store the data.

Knowing your company’s requirements will help you narrow down your searches and streamline your hiring process.

Go Beyond Recruiting Sites

Recruiting sites are, of course, the means for hiring employees, but some of these sites required membership – which every organization can’t afford. Hence, if recruiting sites is not an option, you can use the following platforms to hire the web developer:

• LinkedIn: The first on the list is LinkedIn. It is one of the most trusted platforms for hiring, which you can leverage to onboard the right talent for your organization. Its strength lies in your ability to use your network, with options to get introduced by a mutual connection or find profiles based on the developers you’re already looking at.
• GitHub Jobs: GitHub Jobs is a prominent place to hire a technical team for a company’s open software/website development positions. They have the most prominent developer groups that a company can use while hiring front-end, back-end, or full-stack developers.
• Stack Overflow: It is a website to search for qualified yet talented web developers. Stack Overflow is also used by some big tech giants such as Microsoft, Sachs, Goldman, etc.

Never limit your searches to recruiting sites to hire the right talent. Developers are everywhere - you just need to choose the right platform to connect with them.

Screening

The technical skills screening of a web developer is a crucial part of recruiting process. It will help you to assess the coding skills and experience of an ideal candidate. But how to conduct a technical assessment test for developers?

Setting up a technical screening test is easy, there are multiple tools that help you screen web developers. In a screening test, you can ask a developer to write a code to fix an error or give a real-life scenario to resolve an issue. With this, you will get a deep knowledge of technical skills and the problem-solving and communication skills of a developer.

There are several skills assessment test which you can leverage to assess a candidate’s technical skills. For example, you can use InterGuard, which is ideal for remote candidates and is also used to track employee productivity.

Check Developer’s Online Portfolio

Unfortunately, a portfolio is not a resume. Developers create their online presence and portfolio to showcase their technical skills on platforms like GitHub, Stack Overflow, etc. These are the platforms where developers engage with a community to help other developers through their technical skills.

By checking their online presence and portfolio, you will get a deep insight into a developer’s technical knowledge.

Coding Interview

To avoid the high costs of a bad hire, you still want to re-examine how you vet job candidates for a specific role. Here are some of the questions which you can ask a developer in an interview:

• Tell me about your previous projects. Which approach did you take from start to finish?
• Which strategy do you follow when a website stops working?
• What are the biggest challenges of working as a web developer?
• What APIs have you worked with?
• Which content management systems (CMS) do you use?
• How are your SQL skills?

With these questions, you will get a brief idea of a candidate’s technical and soft skills.

When hiring a developer for your organization, you need to assess some of the technical skills of a candidate. Let’s discuss them in detail.

Responsive Design Skills

In today’s modern world, people are accessing websites via their smartphones. So, the web developer you hire must be fluent in responsive mobile design skills to improve the user’s experience. If your website is not mobile-friendly, then you might lose many opportunities. Consider this skill as a priority.

HTML/CSS

A developer must have hands-on experience in front-end programming languages such as HTML and CSS. These two programming languages are the backbone of any successful website.

Testing & Debugging Skills

An error may occur at any time and anywhere in your website/application. So, you want someone well-versed in testing and debugging the website and fix all the possible errors. Being able to consistently and effectively test and debug your website is important for a web developer.

Knowledge about SEO Optimization

Apart from knowing programming languages, a developer must have basic SEO knowledge, which is a process of ranking a website to attract more traffic – which is important to companies. As more and more companies look to have good SEO, it’s an essential skill to consider while hiring a developer.

To sum it up, you need to have a clear vision of what you want to achieve for your business. Whether you need to make small changes or create a complete website, you can easily hire a web developer for your organization with the tips mentioned above.

Apart from assessing the technical skills, it’s also important to consider soft skills – which can have a great impact on your existing or upcoming web development/designing projects.