How hiring a top (freelance) developers works?
Hiring a great developer and working with them is a challenging task. I started as a freelance programmer more than 25 years ago so I’ve been finding work through all kind of freelance platforms during my long career. Up to half of the customers I had come to me with sentences like “Sorry, the budget is very tight and the deadline is already missed because the previous developer(s) disappeared so lot of funds and time wasted”. That made us think — how this problem could be fixed? So we created CrewNew.com — Freelancers’ Agency where there is always a project manager making sure that projects don’t fail and accurate time tracking is used with screenshots, keyb/mouse activity measuring, what programs used, websites visited etc. So you can know that the work reported is actually worked on your project.
Well, but now to the point. How we screen new developers:
1) First of all we “web scrape” potential candidates from various sources including all kind of platforms where developers add their code, answer others’ questions, do any examinations/tests/quizzes, etc. so we know that there is a really huge pool from where to filter/pick the best.
2) Candidates take one or more skill tests that filter out about 60–80% of the candidates so nobody waste their time with further screening process. See an example Laravel test results>>
3) With remaining 20–40% recruiter proceeds with initial check of the previous work. Submits code to the automatic static code checkers, checks online presence, asks and verifies few references (work done by a recruiter), of course verifies identity/location/education/etc.
4) Initial interview with a recruiter to see the person’s personality, soft skills, spoken English and ability to understand more complex customer needs (test project requirements).
5) Developers need to estimate the hours of work they think it will take them to complete the test job so we can see how fast they think they work. When they reach to the point to do the test project then we of course use time tracker and measure how long it actually took to see how well the developers are able to estimate.
6) Now our senior lead developer comes to play and checks the remaining usually 1–5% remaining candidates. He/she checks the Git repositories and most challenging coding parts that developers have picked themselves to show off. For example if we hire NodeJS developer then our in-house top lead NodeJS / JavaScript developer will check the previous code and perform all the further checks from this point on.
For example, downsides of Node’s flexibility is that Node projects are easy to convert to a huge spaghetti because the programmer is free even code just in the initial one JavaScript file that is very bad practice. Professional senior coders use a nice strategy patterns and a modular code. For the lower coders, one of the challenges is how to code without creating spaghetti! And this is just one example what must be checked with one framework. If we hire for example Laravel dev then, of course, our Laravel senior dev will do the checks and check the most common mistakes done in Laravel. It is one of the most important parts of the hiring process to include the top expert hiring the next top expert! All the previous points are just to save top experts’ working hours!
7) Technical interview with the senior programmer where all kind of technical questions and knowledge checks are performed. Including some chat about the latest tech and how often and what the developer studies. Great devs always improve and learn new skills.
8) Team interview with the project manager, recruiter, front-end developer, back-end developer, UX designer and the whole team to discuss the details of the first project and see how the candidate is fitting to the team.
9) If the candidate has reached to this point then the final step is to do 1 day to 1-week coding challenge where task will be provided and there’s limited time to deliver the end result. It’s a dummy work test and we ask a person to spend a lot of time so before this contract is already signed so if the programmer passes this final challenge then he/she is hired!
10) Welcome to CrewNew — the best and the only agency for freelancers!
So, as you can see there’s a pretty complex and tough hiring process if you want to be sure that you get the right candidate!
