How to Hire a JavaScript Developer
The JavaScript ecosystem has come a long way since its humble beginning and experienced explosive growth over the past couple of years – and for good reason. Today it’s used as a full-stack language, allowing for the creation of client applications, server applications, and everything in between. Its flexibility, ease of use and large developer community makes it the ideal tool for software projects.
With such a vast community, the challenge isn’t finding candidates but instead finding top candidates with the right balance of technical and soft skills within this crowded space.
This guide will explain how to find the best developers for your organization, what questions to ask, and what qualities to look for to make sure you’re on the cutting edge of JavaScript development. We’ll also cover how Javascript can supercharge your business and how to secure the best talent within an environment where you cannot quickly determine how experienced a candidate may be.
Table Of Contents
Background & Relevant Experience
Experience Working with Teams
One of the main things to look for is how well a candidate fits with your current development workflow. Check what kind of teams they have worked with previously and how similar that is to your existing structure.
Communication within the team is incredibly important, so you want to make sure that they are familiar with agile development methodologies, pair programming and more.
Knowledge of Project Management Software
Consider how familiar they are with the software used internally and how it fits your processes. The person you hire should be familiar with at least two or three project management tools, such as Trello, Jira, or Workday. They should also be familiar with the ceremonies that are conducted and how to manage their time around this.
Time management is also essential. The next JavaScript developer you hire must know how to manage their time efficiently amongst their regular meetings, deadlines and other responsibilities they will face along with their seniority.
Ability to Pick up New Tools and Frameworks
As we’ve already seen, JavaScript provides an incredibly diverse array of tools and resources to create applications for any platform. Several of these have been released in the last five years, so it’s paramount that you build a team of JavaScript developers that are willing and able to learn new skills or technologies when necessary.
Different versions of frameworks can come with massive differences and work that will need to be carried out. When hiring new JavaScript developers, you need to verify that they can adapt and learn quickly and efficiently. You can do this through various means, such as placing them in new scenarios they haven’t seen before or asking them about previous experience in integrating new tools into their projects. They should know what to use and when to use it, so they can help maximize your team’s productivity and supercharge your projects.
A Strong Sense of Good Judgement
The JavaScript ecosystem can also be very distracting for developers, and it’s easy to get carried away with the shiny new technologies and frameworks, but they should know when to follow the trend and when to aim for established solutions instead. It’s easy to overcomplicate JavaScript projects, so building a team of experts that know how to solve problems with the right tools is essential for your business.
It’s a good idea to gather why the candidate may use some technologies over others. You can check whether they can spot the advantages and disadvantages that apply to your business. One of my favorite questions is:
“what would you change based on what you already know about the current development stack, how would those changes help the customers, and how do you think it would work out in the long term?”
Ability to Communicate, Collaborate and Lead
Finally, it’s crucial to verify that the developer you’re hiring brings about change and leadership at the team level. This means that whether by using shift left methodologies or other best practices, they have the experience to lead when necessary and apply new industry solutions to your business and projects. By spotting this kind of knowledge early on, you can build a team of developers that will upskill not just other JavaScript developers but also your entire business.
Strong communication skills and the ability to mentor others are crucial to your company’s long-term prospects, as you can provide and foster an environment of progression and self-development. It is essential to retain the team you are building and provide ample opportunities to exercise the skills they are bringing to your organization.
Technical Skills For JavaScript Developers
Hiring JavaScript developers can be complex, as it’s difficult to gauge how experienced an engineer may actually be with the technologies your company uses. The environment changes so quickly, that you may be looking for five years of experience on something that has only existed for two.
Luckily, there are several things you can evaluate to help paint a better picture and identify the experienced developers you are searching for.
JavaScript Fundamentals
One of the main things to look for is a solid knowledge of JavaScript fundamentals. This means that the candidate should know how core vanilla JavaScript works, its strengths and weaknesses, and how it should be used.
It’s essential that you test a candidate’s knowledge of the latest ES2015+ (currently ES2021/ES12) features to see how well versed they are with the language and how to use it in order to solve moderately complex problems.
After this, you can verify if they have knowledge of the frameworks and tools you are using, as it allows you to hire people who can easily pick up anything that’s needed. Your goal should be to hire strong JavaScript developers that can easily move from team to team or project to project, allowing them to be exposed to a variety of projects and helping maintain their interest and hunger to learn.
Build Tools and Workflow
The candidate should know how to utilize different build systems such as Webpack and Gulp, and how to work with the version control system your company uses.
Experience setting up a build system is a big bonus, as it shows that the candidate has the capability to work in DevOps, which is a huge benefit to any development team.
They should understand how to work with different package managers, such as NPM, and any associated transpilers or build tools you may be using. If you’re hiring for a greenfield project, then it’s crucial that you verify that the JavaScript developer has familiarity with setting these up from scratch.
JavaScript Frameworks
Working with JavaScript allows for developers to work in a variety of different settings, so they should be well versed in a number of tools within different categories. This means they should have exposure to front-end frameworks such as React, Vue, or Angular, as well as back-end frameworks such as Express or Hopi. They should know how to tie all of these pieces together to create a reliable application.
Going back to language fundamentals, it’s important that you use technical interview questions (we’ve provided some sample questions below) so that you can verify if the candidate is well versed in all the features JavaScript has to offer. They should have a solid knowledge of asynchronous programming, working with promises, method chaining, currying, destructuring, object literals and more.
They should also have a solid grasp of arrays, objects, iterators and all the quirks of JavaScript, that would otherwise make it very difficult to debug and how to get around this by using a variety of testing and debugging tools, such as Jest or Cypress, apply a test-driven approach to development, and verify it works in different environments. A key way to do this is to check the candidate’s previous work or open-source contributions and ask them to take part in a pair programming exercise. Applying pair programming to different scenarios wil allow the candidate to showcase their skills as well as their thought process.
Technical Questions for JavaScript Developers
Question: What is an arrow function?
Answer: An arrow function is a way of declaring a function that is lexically bound.
Question: How can you import a specific object/variable/function from a module?
Answer: Use the import keyword, specify what needs to be imported using a destructor or object/variable/function name.
Question: What is the difference between var, let and const?
Answer: Const cannot be changed after being declared, var is global and can be redecorated or changed anywhere, let can be declared once but changed in the block scope.
Question: Why would a project use TypeScript over JavaScript?
Answer: JavaScript does not provide a built-in type system, making it difficult to debug and test applications reliability. TypeScript is a transpiler that introduced strong typing to JavaScript and allows for this.
Question: What are promises?
Answer: Promises are objects that will return values sometime in the future. It allows for non-blocking functionality so that your application does not hang, and to deal with operations once they have been completed.
Final Thoughts
As we’ve seen, hiring JavaScript developers can be a daunting task. With such a diverse and open ecosystem, it can be hard to differentiate between developers who are just getting started with modern tools such as React or Node and those that have long-term experience with JavaScript and a deep knowledge that can be beneficial to your business.
By hiring the best and the brightest people within such a large ecosystem, combined with the power of JavaScript, you’ll have the potential to increase productivity and build a solid team that’ll help take your projects to the next level.
As the JavaScript landscape changes, it can be a challenge to hire the best possible talent, but hopefully, this guide can be a helpful resource as your hiring process unfolds.
