Therefore, it is especially important that you hire the right talent the first time. Otherwise, you risk ruining your business and wasting time and money looking for a replacement.
Here are few tips that can help you through the selection process:
Hire DNA first, then work experience:
When I hire web developers, their personal DNA is the most important consideration. While experience is important, the biggest predictor of success is someone’s innate DNA and how they fit into your business. Are motivation, determination, persistence, curiosity important to your culture? Or are you a quieter and more laid-back person when it comes to time and deadline management? Regardless of your culture, you want to make sure that a web developer will fit in.
For example, a brilliant web developer who used to work at a large financial institution may not be successful as a startup. Why? starting a business
often require qualities such as flexibility, adaptability, risk-taking, and a self-directed personality, but these may be less important in a large company. Try a new developer with a small project first:
While you may think you’ve identified your ideal candidate, to be sure, you should give them a small, unimportant project. This can allow you to observe the person’s actions and provide additional information beyond the job interview.
You can see how effective the candidate is in delivering the product and how defective the final product is. Do they try their best to deliver the product? Creative solutions like? How well did they work as a team and how did they communicate problems and delays?
Choose a capable developer, not a specific skill set:
In the tech space, skills become obsolete every two years, more or less. So it is better to hire a web developer who can learn new technologies more easily than someone who currently knows a particular technology but cannot adapt when a new technology comes out.
The easiest way to detect if someone is adapting well to change is to ask questions that will reveal whether a web developer is interested in learning. Eg:
What new programming languages have you learned recently? What’s your favorite place to learn new tech tips and tricks?
What’s your favorite tech conference?
Don’t ask trivial programming questions:
Here are examples of trivial questions you want to avoid asking when interviewing web developers:
Who is the main author of the Java programming language?
PHP was released in what year?
What is the origin of the Python scripting language name? While such information may seem helpful, trivial questions are often a lousy way to determine if someone is smart. They distinguish only those who can memorize things.
As a general rule, when I do technical interviews, I never ask questions that can be easily searched and found online. Instead, I focus on open-ended questions and listening. what i watch
because it’s the level of passion that candidates show in their answers and how well they communicate and interpret technical terms. Some examples of open-ended questions:
How do you handle conflicts in a web application when different people modify the same data?
What design patterns have you used and in what situations?
Can you cite the difference between object-oriented design and component-based design?
Hire slow, fire fast:
Take your time when hiring, but if you find the person is untrained, let them go as soon as possible. An inefficient web developer can disrupt an entire team and potentially an entire project. A few years ago, I made a big hiring mistake and let this person stay too long. Although he is a talented lead developer, he sometimes disappears for days, missing important deadlines. Failure to meet possible deadline.
