A Comprehensive Guide to Hiring Web Engineering Teams

Hiring web engineers can feel as complex as starting a company itself. With so many developers specializing in different technologies, frameworks, and disciplines, finding the right fit for your company can be a daunting task. The process of finding, interviewing, hiring, and managing these talented engineers is challenging, and doing it well requires expertise that comes from experience.

That’s where our comprehensive web engineering hiring guide comes in. We’ve gathered essential knowledge to help you build productive and powerful web engineering teams. If you need extra support, just let us know—we can connect you with up to five companies within 72 hours, all for free!

Our guide starts by exploring top web development frameworks and helps you decide whether to use one or go without. We also cover how to choose between hiring freelance developers or partnering with an outsourced team, breaking down the pros and cons of each option.

Next, we dive into best practices for interviewing and managing web development teams to ensure your business continues to grow and thrive. We also highlight key web technologies, techniques, and trends to keep you ahead of the curve.

With our guide, you’ll have everything you need to find and build the perfect web engineering team for your company.

Pros and Cons of Web Development Frameworks

One of the first things a web developer does when presented with a new project or task is to outline the most suitable tools and frameworks to assist with its challenges.

Web development frameworks are a go-to solution when it comes to these projects. They are highly appreciated by web engineers for their ability to create a high-quality scaffold to build productive and reliable web apps around. They are not, however, entirely without drawbacks.

For experienced web engineers, there are a lot of questions to answer before investing in any given solution. How much time should you invest in evaluating frameworks against each other, for example, and how much time should you invest in whether or not you should use a framework at all?

For some projects, a rigid framework may not be the best solution. Allowing your development team the freedom and flexibility to create their own customised solution may be better suited to some complex, specific, and unique tasks.

Choosing the right framework to use for the right task and matching up the right developers with the right framework means careful analysis of every project and weighing up the benefits and drawbacks of every approach.

Starting at the very beginning, our guide takes you through what a framework is, what advantages it can bring, and the drawbacks of employing one over a more customised approach.

The Pros and Cons of Web Development Frameworks provides everything you need to begin evaluating when and how to deploy a development framework for your projects and which framework to use when you do.

The Ten Best Web Development Frameworks

Having an overview of the available frameworks out there and the values that each of them provides can help you and your teams to make the best possible decisions to bootstrap your projects in the most productive way.

The best web engineering frameworks should be capable of unlocking greater speed and reliability in the projects they underpin while solving more problems than they create. In the early stages of development, frameworks should simplify common tasks and decrease the amount of manual coding and setup required. In later stages, they should serve to simplify testing and long-term maintenance.

From JavaScript’s ever-popular ReactJS, Python’s Flask or Django, and the ever-present Ruby on Rails—every web development language has frameworks and tools to suit a wide variety of projects. Choosing the right solution is just one critical component towards future success.

Our article on the Best Web Development Frameworks to Use outlines some of the most productive, efficient, and capable frameworks to take into your next projects.

Should You Hire Web Development Freelancers or an Outsourced Web Development Team

Web developers are responsible for some of the most critical gateways and services that a firm provides. Hiring the right developers for the role should create a key asset and ally at the very centre of your business. This means the decisions you make around hiring web engineers are especially critical ones.

Creating strong web services means hiring an engineering team that aligns with your vision, goals, and values. As one of the most significant hiring challenges you’re likely to face—deciding between freelance web developers and outsourced web engineering teams is critical to the direction your company takes in the future.

There are, of course, some key factors to consider. The budget available for both the teams themselves and future maintenance on the project, the technical requirements and goals of the task, and the amount of risk acceptable when it comes to delays and downtime.

There are advantages and drawbacks to each approach. For example. a freelance web developer is often a low-cost, flexible solution that suits a wide range of small projects and discrete tasks.

An outsourced web engineering team, in contrast, is a more heavyweight solution that makes it easier to communicate with teams, manage development, and undertake larger projects with less risk. If you need help finding the best remote teams, just tell us what you need! We can connect you with 5 web development companies within 72h, all for free.

Both options have their own places and projects which suit different kinds of development firms.

Our guide on Should You Hire Web Development Freelancers, or a Remote Web Team takes a deep dive into these issues and picks apart the critical factors that go into turning both options into development success.

Hiring Web Development Developers—Best Practices & Job Description Template

When it comes to making hiring decisions, web engineering is one of the broadest fields in software development. The wide array of frameworks, tools, and specific industry practices a developer can be familiar with inside of a single discipline is staggering. These things combined can make finding out precisely how to find, hire, and manage a developer that aligns with your requirements and goals feel like a tall order.

Looking at just the initial stages of the hiring process, it helps to be clear about the expectations you have for your next developer and precisely what kind of skills and experience you expect them to come with. Internal conversations at the early stages of the process can save a lot of time for both you and your applicants further down the line.

Some helpful conversations to have, for example, is in creating a detailed profile of what your ideal developer will look like in terms of their past experience and favourite frameworks. An outline of the projects they will undertake and the requirements they will meet can also help you to be clear with both your candidate and your internal teams.

Our article on Hiring Web Developers - Best Practices & Job Description Template takes you through the advantages of creating and analysing these requirements and provides the key things to consider when hiring a full-stack web developer.

How to Interview a Web Developer and What to Look For

The next stage in the hiring process is conducting an interview that identifies the perfect candidate for your role. This is a stage of hiring just as difficult as the first. Identifying high-quality candidates from the crowd isn’t an easy task, but here too we’ve created a technical interview guide to help.

The ideal interview starts by creating the right set of questions for the role. Taking into account every applicant’s past experience and education, we can create an interview to fit. This may mean shifting to focus on skill-based questions for newer graduates or leaning towards more experience-based questions for senior developers.

Both kinds of developer will play a significant role within your teams. Finding out about their practical experience through technical tests and their soft skills through targeted questions can help you identify who will fit into the firm with ease. Each should give suitably strong candidate’s the chance to put their best foot forward.

Taking our guide step by step, you should come away from a successful interview able to answer in-depth questions about every candidate.

Detailing these questions and creating a complete guide to conducting a well-planned interview, our article on Interview a Web Developer and What to Look For has everything you need to get through some of the most difficult stages of the hiring process.

The Do’s and Don’ts of Managing an Outsourced Web Development Team

The pace and upkeep demanded by web engineering projects makes them ideally suited to outsourced web development for many firms. With specialist skills and combined decades of expertise in the field, these are teams capable of creating robust and reliable web apps to achieve remarkable results.

For management, however, the seemingly daunting task of managing an outsourced team keeps many from realising these results in projects of their own.

Whether new to managing software developers or aiming to refocus existing skills towards a remote team, the shift between managing in-house developers to an outsourced one is a surprisingly small one to make. Our guide takes you from the very first question: why choose a remote team in the first place, through to successfully managing them when you do.

As part of our guide, we outline some of the simple rules to help you unlock the highest quality, most experienced, and most specialised developers worldwide.

Some simple do’s and don'ts such as keeping tabs on time zones, making use of common tools and resources, and being clear about your goals can set you up for future success. Things to avoid, such as micromanagement and abandoning the face-to-face meeting entirely, can help you sidestep some of the pitfalls that others fall into when it comes to remote management.

Our helpful guide on The Do's & Don'ts of Managing a Remote Web Development Team will help you reach these highly capable, accomplished, and experienced web engineering teams with the ease you reach your own colleagues now.

A Glimpse Into the Future of Web Development

With the right kind of developers hired into your firm and your web engineering teams working hard on all areas of sales, marketing, and content delivery—it’s helpful to continue paying close attention to the way technologies and trends are shifting into the future.

Web technologies have changed over time to be almost unrecognisable from what they were in the early days of the web. That shift is only expected to accelerate from here. The changes in the future web are likely to be radically more substantial than the changes between the web of the early 2010s and today.

As a guide, we’ve collected some of the most advanced new technologies, tools, and techniques to keep on top of your web engineering teams. Combined, these can increase accessibility, create more engaging user experiences, improve performance, and generate more traffic for your business in turn.

Starting with technologies of today, such as progressive web apps and single-page applications, we take a close look at what makes these technologies so powerful and how they’re expected to grow in the future.

Our article detailing A Glimpse into The Future of Web Engineering looks at the emerging technologies of serverless applications and the trends likely to define the web development industry in the years to come.

Hiring Web Engineering Teams

As we’ve covered extensively throughout our guides, good web engineering has the potential to define your firm and drive it far into the future. Great engineering can only come from hiring great engineers, employing the right technologies, and creating effective management to bring it all together.

With our guides in hand, you should be ready to go out and tackle all three—delivering results that previously seemed out of reach and building things previously thought impossible.