How to Hire Web Developers: Tapping Into the Best Talent for Your Web Project

Hiring Web Developers: Summary

ScienceSoft is ready to provide all the necessary web talents for hire under both team augmentation and dedicated team outsourcing cooperation agreements. We assist with onboarding and team building of our experts as well as help businesses optimize the costs.

Hiring Models

The starting point of a web developer hiring process is a choice of a hiring model: in-house, team augmentation, or a dedicated team. With its 35 years on the IT market, ScienceSoft is convinced that the key difference between the options lies in who bears legal employment and administration responsibilities as well as how you pay for the services.

If you are still unsure which model fits you best, feel free to read ScienceSoft's list of in-house and outsourcing pros and cons.

Talents ScienceSoft Recommends Hiring for a Web Development Project

The size and composition of your web development team can vary depending on the type of your web project (for instance, web application or web portal), technology stack, and project scale. Here, we provide the roles that ScienceSoft typically has in its medium-scale web development projects.

Why Choose ScienceSoft's Talents

• Conversion-driven UX and UI designers.
• 200+ back-end developers coding in .NET, Java, Python, Node.js, PHP, Go.
• 40+ front-end developers using modern JavaScript frameworks: Angular, React, Vue, Next.
• Web architects with 7-20 years of experience.
• 70+ skilled software testers and QA engineers.

ScienceSoft as a trusted web development partner:

ScienceSoft’s developers used the microservices approach to ensure our Azure-based software’s scalability, which is critical for us as our user base is growing. The software performs stably even under heavy load, which helps provide high quality user experience for our clients. ScienceSoft proved to be a reliable tech partner, and we can recommend other businesses to consider ScienceSoft as a software development vendor.

Wadih Pazos, Chief Operating Officer, Paramount WorkPlace

Consider ScienceSoft as Your Outsourcing Partner

With over 25 years in web development and 35 years in outsourced software development, ScienceSoft offers team augmentation and dedicated team services to outsource web development projects of any complexity.

Full-stack vs. Back-end & Front-end Developers

As full-stack web developers implement both the client side, the server side, and the database of a web project, they are usually equipped with skills belonging to any of the following stacks of web development technologies:

If you already know your stack and see it in the list above, the option to opt for full-stack web development may seem tempting. After all, it implies that you’ll hire fewer resources with more skills and even speed up your project due to full-stack developers’ ability to juggle front- and back-end development tasks. However, possessing a wide range of skills almost always comes at a cost of the level of proficiency in these skills.

Hiring a full-stack developer may cost less than hiring a front- and a back-end developers, yet this hiring decision may be riskier for the quality of your web project. Compared to full-stack developers, front-end and back-end developers zero in on their respective domains and possess outstanding skills for professional development of either the client or the server & database side.

Still, if fast delivery or reduced costs is your first-and-foremost priority, your best full-stack solution would be MEAN stack. ScienceSoft's experience has shown that this stack allows developers to quickly build scalable web or cloud-native applications and – due to being driven by the knowledge of JavaScript language alone – raises the chances of successful, quality development. We've also confirmed that when combined with the use of microservices architecture, this stack provides an opportunity to later easily introduce updates and extensions in other technologies.

How to Hire Web Developers in 5 Steps

1. Define requirements for candidates

All the requirements for future web developers can be divided into hard and soft skills. Hard skills are technical competencies (skills in programming languages, web frameworks, databases, etc.), while soft skills describe a general attitude and approach to work as well as communication and leadership abilities.

The technology stack listed in the software requirements specification (SRS) of your project is the basis for formulating hard skill requirements. The list of soft skills can be acquired from a team lead or a PM.

2. Conduct screening and interviewing

The table below shows key responsibilities for screening and interviewing steps in all three hiring models. Mind that for team augmentation and a dedicated team, your initial step is finding a reliable outsourcing vendor and hiring them by signing a Service Level Agreement.

The questions in the technical interview should cover the general understanding of a candidate’s technology focus (“Describe a web app where you would not use RESTful web services.”) and attitude to coding practices (“How would you introduce 5 CSS styles on a single web page?”). More in-depth code knowledge you can test in a technical task (“Demonstrate the difference between JOIN and UNION in SQL”, “Compare two objects in JavaScript without using external libraries”.)

3. Formalize the employment

With in-house hiring, a certain amount of HR and legal efforts will be spent on formalizing the employment for each new hire. In vendor cooperation, your hiring efforts are minimized as all legal and administrative liability for the talents stays with their direct employer. What’s more – you can scale up or down the augmented or dedicated team just by amending the main Service Level Agreement. No need for a long paperwork cycle each time your web project requires an additional FTE on the team.

The major task you’ll need to complete at this step, however, is setting up the vendor management processes. They will help you control payment dates and quotes, review vendor KPIs, as well as oversee compliance with the agreed-upon schedule during cooperation. By choosing a self-managed vendor, like ScienceSoft, you can count on transparent collaboration and minimize these efforts.

4. Carry out the onboarding process

In-house hiring is sometimes considered to have the most natural onboarding because this is a traditional hiring model that many employees are simply used to. Still, new in-house employees do require active initial support (1-2 months) from a project manager and a team lead to get used to their new workflows.

To web developers for hire at outsourcing companies, the work in augmented or dedicated teams has become their own kind of routine. ScienceSoft's web talents are outstandingly flexible and can fully adapt to a new project in terms of <2 weeks, which can be even further accelerated in case of an on-site visit. So, if you have a tight deadline or want your new hires to jumpstart a web project, we suggest opting for vendor cooperation.

Once you establish a business partnership with a vendor, the vendor sets up two-way communication between your new hires on their side and all project stakeholders (as well as other team members, in case of team augmentation) on your side. This communication establishes the workflow and ensures the transparency of your future collaboration.

5. Build a team

Although communication may flow more naturally among in-house web developers, they still need proper training to become a real team of experts who respect each other’s skills and responsibilities. Some of the best ways to achieve it are hosting supervised gamified activities and letting a team test the waters by working together on a minor web project.

If you simply lack time for both gamified training and test projects, your best choice is to hire a dedicated team. The administration and team-building processes of such teams lie fully with the vendor, so you’ll be able to get a cohesive team of web experts without any time investments.

Benefits You Get with ScienceSoft

Costs of Hiring Web Developers