Hiring Web Developers - Best Practices & Job Description Template

Web services are at the core of everything a modern business does. Whether providing a gateway to users, delivering content to an audience, or creating a service for clients—web developers are key to driving a company forward.

Finding out how to find, hire, and manage these developers is critical to enhancing the services you offer. And if you need help finding said developers, just tell us what you need. We can do the work for you and connect you with up to 5 companies within 72h that match your needs—all for free!

In this article, we’re taking a look at the initial stages of that process. Here, we study the web developers to look out for and how to hire the ideal candidate to fit into your firm. We’ve even included a job description template to get you started in advertising your company as a place for high-quality web developers to bring their skills, talent, and abilities. For more guidance, be sure to check out our article The Do’s & Don’ts of Managing a Remote Web Development Team.

Who to Hire in Web Development

Being clear about the kind of candidate you need is the first step to a successful hiring process. Are you looking for a junior developer to train from the ground up, or a senior engineer to refresh and revamp existing services from the top down? Do you need an experienced designer to build a new system from scratch?

Each path has its pros and cons, and each one is ideally suited for different kinds of projects, companies, and industries.

Outlining what your ideal developer looks like in their years of experience, areas of interest, and technology experience will give you a template to match applicants against.

This advice, however, should come with a small note of caution. When it comes to hiring, rough templates applied too rigidly can often be worse than no template at all. Leave some room for flexibility and take an open-minded approach to allow you to bring in the developer you didn’t know you needed yet.

Full-stack developers often come with a particularly wide range of available tools, skills, and abilities. Your ideal developer should allow you to identify the space they’ll fit into the firm, but also leave room for the right candidate to improve beyond that and exceed your expectations for applications and services into the future.

Advantages of Analysing the Right Web Developer to Hire

• Save Time. If you are clear about your company’s expectations and requirements upfront, your full-stack web developer can spend less time doing initial discovery and learning at the start of the project
• Improved Estimates. Knowing the detail and scope of the projects they’ll be undertaking allows candidates to make better estimates about time-frame, costs, and complexity
• Clarity. Creating these requirements would be a good exercise even if you weren’t hiring at all. These tasks help teams think carefully about what they are trying to accomplish and identify the steps towards achieving their goals

The Role of a Full-Stack Developer

A full-stack developer operates in a relatively unique space in web development projects. Front-end developers are experts in user interaction, design, accessibility, and usability. Back-end developers place most of their focus on delivering everything a site needs to work as efficiently, fast, and reliably as possible.

A full-stack developer works in both of these areas and, most importantly, acts as a bridge between the two. Such developers are a critical ally in ensuring front-end and back-end services work together as an overall picture. They are also responsible for maintaining up-to-date knowledge of the latest technologies and frameworks—including those listed in our article Interview a Web Developer and What to Look For?

Often considered a generalist in modern web development, a strong full-stack developer often has the broadest ‘big-picture' view of a project and an opportunity to ensure services are delivered with the quality and consistency expected by users.

Things to Consider When Hiring a Full-Stack Web Developer

A handful of things, considered at the beginning of your hiring process, can go a long way to improving the decisions you make going forward. These factors, though they can seem trivial and obvious at first, should be thought about carefully when it comes to analysing your future hiring decisions.

• Project Scale. The single most critical factor when it comes to your hiring decisions, the size of your future projects will determine the number of developers you hire as well as their levels of experience and proficiency
• Technical requirements. The more in-depth and complex your upcoming projects are likely to be, the more specialisation and experience your next hire will be required to have. Extensive and detailed data visualisation, for example, will require a developer with experience in the field
• Existing Tech Stack. A great deal of time can be saved by onboarding a developer with experience and working knowledge of systems and processes used in-house. Reducing the learning curve and time taken to onboard a new employee is one of the easiest ways to improve short-term efficiency and ensure a new developer can hit the ground running

Hiring A Full-Stack Web Developer

By both being at the core of your business and having a big picture view of your web services and their implementation—full-stack web developers have a uniquely critical role to play.

Carefully considering the factors above and sitting down to discuss them with colleagues, hiring managers, and outside expertise is a great way to ensure all the appropriate considerations have been made before moving forward. Even better, just tell us what you need. We can do the work for you and connect you with up to 5 companies within 72h that match your needs—all for free!

Once you’ve done that, our job description template below can help you to reach out to a wider community and advertise your firm as a secure home for high-quality full-stack developers to bring their talents.

Full-Stack Web Developer Job Description Template

Web Developer

We are looking for an exceptional web developer to take up an exciting new role within our firm. Part of a dynamic team responsible for the design, implementation, and testing of our web-based services—the right candidate will have an eye for fine detail, aptitude for creative problem solving, and an ability to work well in a fast-paced team.

You will be reporting to our web services system manager and working day-to-day with a handful of engineers responsible for our web applications. You will have an in-depth and practical knowledge of HTML/CSS, JavaScript, C#, .NET, Python, MySQL, JQuery in addition to current version control, issue tracking, and project management packages.

The ideal candidate will be able to take ownership of the work they produce to solve technical challenges and take responsibility for the systems they manage.

Duties

• Writing well-designed, efficient, and testable code to good working practices and standards
• Creating modern and dynamic user interfaces
• Integrating data from back-end services and databases
• Meeting with clients, colleagues, and shareholders to outline and plan the requirements of a project
• Keeping shareholders up to date with progress and issues
• Project planning with current and up to date tools and technologies
• Maintain knowledge of web accessibility standards and current data protection requirements
• Maintain long-term relationships with clients and industry partners

Skills and Qualifications

The ideal candidate will have a bachelor’s degree or higher in computer science, software engineering, or a related discipline.

• Several years experience in delivering web applications with a rich portfolio of applications to demonstrate their abilities and talents
• 4+ years experience in web development and creating web apps
• A good working knowledge of two or more programming languages
• Experience working with third-party libraries and APIs
• Experience with agile development
• Previous professional experience with automated building and testing
• Background using modern version control tools
• Proven track record in writing readable code maintaining good working practices in projects

Location

• [Office Location]

To apply

• Please send a CV and covering letter which highlights relevant experience and why you’d be a good fit for the role to: [HR@company.com]

There you have it! A ready made template to attract your perfect web development candidates. Next, check out our article Interview a Web Developer and What to Look For? for sample questions you can use to screen them.