Although hiring Node.js developers is quite challenging these days, it doesn’t mean that it’s impossible. You can still find the right specialist to join your team, but you need to know how to do it right.
In this article, we will go through the process of hiring Node.js developers to help you find and hire the best specialists on the market.
Step 1: Define your current needs
To make your recruitment process efficient, you have to know what you’re looking for. So, the first thing you should do is to understand and define your current needs and describe your ideal candidate for Node.js developer.
One of the first things you should ask yourself is whether you’re looking for a team player or a rock star to join your development team. Rock stars are great at solving problems in a short time and usually are brilliant consultants but, unfortunately, in most cases they aren’t good team players.
If you want to build a team that will be able to work on a long-term contract, it will be better to search for talented mid-level specialists who want to grow and expand their expertise. With the right approach from your side, an effective and interesting training program, they are more likely to become a high-performing and independent expert. And, what’s great, they will remain good team players at the same time!
Do you need to hire a senior Node.js developer?
The answer is simple – yes, you do. When building a team of Node.js developers, you’ll need at least one, depending on the size of your team. You can hire a senior developer or external consultant and expert to monitor and maintain the performance of your team.
But remember that the core of your Node.js developers’ team should consist of talented developers who are eager to grow. Don’t build a team of rock stars. Instead, build a team of these developers around one (or more) seniors to give both sides to show their best skills – in management and development tasks.
Step 2: Create the recruitment funnel
In most cases, this funnel looks as follows:
- Candidates research
- Interview with the candidate
- Recruitment task
- Feedback (call or in a written form)
- Decision
Let’s describe the steps in detail.
Candidates research
This point is quite simple. Your job here is to verify the candidates and pick ones who could meet your expectations.
Interview with the candidate
While a CV or GitHub profile can tell you a lot about the candidate, it won’t reveal their soft skills like communication, English level, if they fit your company’s and team’s culture, etc. The interview will, however. Just prepare questions to check their values, motivation, goals, and attitude.
Also, to make the whole process faster, you can prepare a list of questions to verify your candidates’ technical knowledge. Thanks to that, you’ll be able to proceed the rest of the recruitment process only with these, who meet both, cultural and technical expectations.
Recruitment task
No matter how rich your candidates’ portfolio or GitHub profile is, it’s always good to test them in a battle. Even if they were great during the tech part of the interview. With recruitment tech tasks, you’ll not only verify the skillset of your candidates, but also their approach to solving complex problems and, as a result, their motivation.
If they solve your task well, coming up with a smart solution to the issue, it means that they are truly dedicated to what they do. Based on that, you can assume that they will perform the same engagement while working for you.
Feedback
This is a very important aspect of the recruitment process. By giving your candidates feedback about their test task and interview, you show them that you reviewed them carefully and respect the time they spend trying to work for you. And even if the feedback is negative, but it has a polite and professional form, it can help these people improve their skills and go further with their professional development.
Hired / not hired
This point can be a part of the previous one. When giving feedback, inform your candidates if they made it to the next step of the recruitment process or not. And, while doing that, try to explain to them your decision.
If the feedback is possible, but you’re not 100% sure about the candidate, you can propose another extra step like, for example, call with one of your in-house Node.js developers to see if they’ll have some line of communication with each other.
Step 3: Create a job description
To hire Node.js developers, you have to prepare an attractive job description. But what does it mean?
Nowadays, when more than 8600 companies use Node.js in their tech stacks, and we can name at least 16 popular apps that were written with Node.js, a simple job description is not enough. You need to stand out from the crowd.
First of all, ensure that your job description has a clear job title. Avoid “extraordinary” titles because it can only make people confused. Also, include some info about your company, its core values and culture to give people the opportunity to know you better.
After the short introduction, focus on a detailed job description, responsibilities, required skills and tech stack, etc. And don’t forget to list the benefits of working with you. But avoid being boring and impersonal. Try to show a unique value of working with your team, something that only your company has to offer. It can be the opportunity to work on fascinating projects with global clients, Open Source development, etc.
The key to success here is to find out what Node.js developers find attractive in job offers and provide it in your one. And, of course, it has to be translated into reality.
What’s also important and very appreciated by candidates is full transparency when it comes to the salary. So don’t keep any secrets here. Just show how much you are able to pay.
Step 4: Prepare relevant interview questions
As mentioned before, an interview is another great opportunity to verify your candidates’ tech knowledge. By asking well-prepared and challenging questions you’ll know which candidates you want to move on and which to thank.
As a CTO, you probably know what you want to ask about but, to make your job easier, we’ve listed some of the most common questions used in recruiting Node.js developers.
Here are some examples:
- Where can you use Node.js?
- Why use this technology?
- How does it work?
- Why is Node.js single-threaded?
- If Node.js is single-threaded, then how does it handle concurrency?
- Explain callback in Node.js.
- What are the advantages of using promises instead of callbacks?
- What are the modules in Node.js?
- What is the purpose of the module .Exports?
- Why is Node.js preferred over other backend technologies like Java or PHP?
- What’s the difference between Angular and Node.js?
Step 5: Look for cultural fit
No matter if you are hiring on-site or remote Node.js developers, the cultural fit of your candidates is essential for effective cooperation. Besides salary, which is quite obvious, company culture is what makes people happy with their job. If your employees identify themselves with the company’s values, they will be more engaged and motivated to grow inside the company.
Ask your candidates questions touching the following aspects of work and professional development:
- Their dream work environment.
- What makes them unhappy at work
- What characteristics make a good team leader?
- What motivates them to grow and expand their knowledge.
Where to find top Node.js developers?
Now, let’s discover where you can find and hire Node.js developers for your team.
In-house hiring via job boards
This is probably the first thing that comes to your mind when you have to hire Node.js developers. One of the biggest advantages of job boards is the fact that they allow you to reach a huge number of developers with minimal effort. All you have to do is to publish a job offer.
On the downside, reaching hundreds or even thousands of potential candidates, prepare yourself for receiving a lot of job applications that won’t fit your needs. Reviewing these applications will cost your recruitment staff a lot of time and effort which makes the whole process longer and, in consequence, more expensive.
Freelancing platforms
Another interesting way of hiring Node.js app developers is to look for them on freelancing platforms. The most popular places where you can hire remote Node.js developers are:
- Upwork
- PeoplePerHour
- Toptal
- Fiverr
The main advantage of this approach is the fact that you can see the rating and experience of each freelancer which makes the potential candidate’s verification process much easier. However, as with every approach, hiring Node.js developers on freelancing platforms has its drawback – they usually don’t have time for more challenging or complex projects.
Recruitment agencies
The main advantage of hiring Node.js developers with the help of a recruitment agency is the fact that the agency takes full responsibility for the process. Also, they can share some advice on how to prepare a job description, will help you with verifying candidates’ tech knowledge, etc. But, as you probably know, this solution will cost much more than handling the process on your own.
IT staff augmentation via software development agencies
Nowadays, a lot of software development agencies offer staff augmentation services.
The big plus of this solution is the fact that these people work exclusively for you and take full responsibility for the project. What’s more, if you hire a team with a senior developer on board, they can share their knowledge with your team, upskill your in-house developers and work as mentors. It will help you to improve the development process and the overall quality of your products.
Why is Poland one of the places to find Node.js developers?
JavaScript developers from Poland are taking the software development market by storm. The whole IT industry in Poland is rapidly growing. As of 2022, the market reached $9.14 bn and was ranked 7th in Europe. Also, according to Statista, the most popular programming language here is JavaScript with over 24% of developers specializing in it. Next in line are Java (around 21%), Python (15%), and Typescript (11%).
On top of that, hiring remote Node.js developers from Poland can bring more benefits for your company. What are they?
Great price-value ratio
Node.js developers from Poland have a deep tech knowledge and deliver top-notch quality at much lower cost compared to other EU countries, especially western ones.
Low cultural barrier
Polish developers’ cultural context is very close to the US and Western-European mindset and approach to work ethic. They are eager to learn, actively participate in discussions and feedback sessions, have no problem with sharing their own ideas to solve the problems and are not afraid of complex and demanding projects.
Convenient location and time zones
Poland’s location makes cooperation easy for most clients from Europe and USA. Thanks to that, the project management and scheduling meetings are very efficient and easier to deal with.
How can RST Software help you with Node.js development?
As you can see, the process of hiring Node.js developers is a challenging and time-consuming task. That’s why, it’s always good to, at least, consider hiring a third-party company to help you cope with Node.js development.
At RST, we have an experienced and highly specialized team of more than 150 developers on board including, of course, Node.js experts. What’s more, as we focus on high levels of seniority within our teams, the average experience of our developers varies around 9 years of working on software including mobile, frontend, backend, web development, and many more.
Also, as a group of enthusiasts of software development, we don’t only use technologies to work, we develop them too! Our team is responsible for launching and developing open-source projects that are becoming more and more popular among developers from all around the world.
Our developers stand behind such projects as:
- AdminJS – the world’s leading OS admin panel for Node.js apps
- Eventrix – JS library for state management
- Better-Docs – documentation toolbox for projects based on JSDocs3
If you’d like to discuss your team augmentation needs, just drop us a line at hi@rst.software and we’ll swiftly take care of it.
