Front-End Developers Hiring in 2022: Rates, Skills Guide, and More

Vitaly Kuprenko

Vitaly is a writer for Cleveroad. He enjoys writing about technology and digital marketing.

When opening your website for the first time, the user interface (UI) is the first thing that a customer notices. That’s why it should be well-designed and built because many factors depend on it. For example, it brings aesthetic enjoyment and accentuates your brand's individuality and reliability. So, UI plays a crucial role in your website acceptance by the target audience.

So, it’s a no-brainer that you should employ great front-end developers to create a competitive UI. However, there are many hiring issues every decision-maker has to solve. This article aims to help you efficiently deal with hiring front-end developers.

Table of Contents

• Front-End Developers Seniority
• Junior Front-End Developer
• Middle to Senior Front-End Developer
• Which One to Hire?
• Front-End Developer Responsibilities
• Front-End Developer Skills
• How to Employ a Front-End Developer (Hiring Options)
• Freelancers
• In-House Developers
• Offshore Programmers
• Front-end Programmer Interview Questions
• Things to Know Before Hiring Front-End Engineers
• Front-End Developer Salary
• Front-End Developer Jobs
• Conclusion

Front-End Developers Seniority

Programmers are typically grouped into the junior, middle, and senior levels, basis their skills and experience. Let’s understand what each of these experience levels means, so you can identify the qualities of your ideal front-end developer hire for the job at hand.

Junior Front-End Developer

These developers are usually at the start of their career (having 1-year working experience or less). Junior developers can only complete a limited amount of tasks due to their knowledge level. The last one is usually narrowed to a particular framework or software language.

That’s why junior specialists often ask their senior colleagues for help, and it’s ok. The juniors cope with the standard tasks well, but they might require more knowledge for building a complex custom product. Thus, estimate your project and consider if it’s worth adding developers with profound expertise to your team.

Middle to Senior Front-End Developer

Programmers of this type work on the projects for about 3-5+ years. 

The more experience the developers obtain during their workflow, the better they cope with the tasks and understand the business logic of their projects. So, their pool of functions is quite vast: from providing an analysis of business goals and budget costs to solving problems connected to the product building.

So, having a concrete experience, the middles (and especially the seniors) can even predict the results of a particular idea implementation.

Which One to Hire?

The forecited characteristics of the developer levels are approximate because the talent can’t be measured in years. For instance, after all the lack of experience, the juniors can demonstrate skills necessary for your product building. 

So, if you need to hire a developer and evaluate their hard skills properly, you can take a technical interview assistant. Through the lens of the tech background, this person will help you estimate the candidate's essential skills set.

Thus, if you have a small project, like a simple business website or a landing page, you can hire a junior developer without any doubt. But if your idea needs a complex implementation, look for more experienced specialists.

Front-End Developer Responsibilities

It is pretty essential to define the duties of the future developer before a hiring process. In case of technical background absence or if you’re unaware of the front-end specialist's primary responsibilities, look at the list placed below. The front-end programmer has to:

• Develop the product’s client-side and create animations, requests to a server, or user interactions.
• Prepare an application layout with the help of CSS and HTML to implement a perfect interface.
• Maintain applications to get excellent scalability and performance.
• Care about the future, providing clean codes that could be used again without problems.
• Make strong cooperation with the front-end development team.

Therefore, a good developer is simultaneously a careful designer and an accurate programmer.

Front-End Developer Skills

The skills of the front-end engineers are tightly correlated with their seniority level. This way, the seniors should also be skilled in frameworks and server-side languages such as PHP, Node.js, or Python to be familiar with tech stacks like MEAN or LAMP. But let’s return to the basic skills discussion.

So, CSS and HTML fluent use is as vital for the front-end developer as proficiency in JavaScript. With the help of JS, the creation of dynamic user interactions starts being possible. That’s why the front-end developers responsible for preparing those interactions cannot ignore this software language. 

However, the mentioned skills are last but not the least. The list of essential basic experiences for the client-side programmers is provided below.  They should deal with:

• CSS preprocessors (Sass or SCSS) and CSS frameworks (like Bootstrap or Foundation)
• Adaptive design
• AJAX, jQuery and Backbone.js
• Tools for browser development
• Module frameworks that simplify large apps and their architecture development (like React, Angular, or Vue) and module bundlers that streamline the engineering process (as Webpack)
• Version systems (like Github)
• Testing or debugging in an IDE, etc.

If you think about what technology is more critical for your project, you can consult with the thorough world and country statistics as to the most popular libraries, depending on JavaScript.

How to Employ a Front-End Developer (Hiring Options)

You can employ the development experts and service providers differently: through freelance portals, job boards, or offshore companies listings. Again, though, each way has its pros and cons. That’s why you should study the hiring options to define what specialist is suitable for your workflow.

Freelancers

Now, let’s look through the benefits and the drawbacks of hiring such specialists.

Freelance employment is one of the most accessible ways to obtain a new specialist for your project. Moreover, it’s pretty cheap because of freelance competitiveness. You can minimize your money and time expenses needed for workers’ sick days or vacations. Thus, the freelance hiring version is suitable for the changeable workload on small-scale projects.

However, there is a principal defect in freelancers' employment. Such specialists are dependable on timetables because they can live in different time zones. Therefore, you should also check their workflow (avoiding surprises connected to the sudden leave) and solve other issues, such as communication, development process efficiency, etc.

You can employ freelance specialists on such web spaces as Fiverr or Toptal.

In-House Developers

The main difference between the in-house developers and freelancers is: the first ones are less likely to give up the project and strive for positive results.

You can also motivate your corporate programmers to quickly achieve the set missions by a fully equipped workplace or a salary increase. Moreover, such co-workers are submerged in their tasks deeply, they are controllable during the workflow, and you can teach them according to your business aims. This way, your cooperation may last for a long time with rewarding effects. And the more in-house programmers work for you, the more they are in touch with your business processes. 

Despite the benefits given above, there are also drawbacks. But they can be easily solved if you’re eager to create a reliable working process. 

In-house developers can be employed on such resources as CareerBuilder, Dice, or LinkedIn. You can also look for candidates on Clutch or GoodFirms.

Offshore Programmers

Outsource web development is a prevalent option among decision-makers. The reason for such popularity is simple: you don’t care about taxes, vacations/sick days, and office rent because the hired specialists will handle their duties remotely from their working space and chosen country.

An outsourcing team runs like clockwork, different from a small group of freelancers with no strong team communication. However, the price for offshore specialists’ services is relatively high in comparison to freelancers. In addition, outsourced developers can be located worldwide, so communication with them can be conducted due to the relevant time zone.

IT Firms, Clutch, or TopDevelopers are among the resources where you can search for qualified offshore specialists.

Finally, you should find out that it is better to cooperate with in-house developers or outsourcing teams than go over the different freelancers. The first two hiring options can help you prevent money and time losses.

Front-end Programmer Interview Questions

During technical interviews, you can use the questions given below. The checklist contains two parts:

• Hard skills control — it reveals technical knowledge concerning frameworks or software languages. To verify the candidate’s hard skills, you can ask the questions like that:

• Define Angular. Classify its key features.
• Comment the models and components on Angular.
• How will you deal with HTTP errors contained in Angular apps?
• What is CLI?
• Comment package.json file.
• Explain the tsconfig.json file.

• Soft skills control — such questions can identify how a candidate manages stress, team cooperation abilities, etc. Here is the shortlist for checking soft skills:

• Describe a life moment when unexpected changes occurred. How did you cope with it?
• How did you handle the controversial moments in the past? How would you take it today?
• Imagine the situation of working with a team in which members conflicted with each other. What would you do, and how would you reconcile with the conflict?
• Tell about an important project goal you’ve achieved. How did it happen?
• How can you motivate yourself during routine tasks completion?
• Share the time management techniques you use during a workflow.
• Describe the ways to stay productive in an overloaded work process.

It is not the whole questionnaire. You can edit it and add the topics you need. We presented you with examples of frequently used questions for a successful and productive interview.

Things to Know Before Hiring Front-End Engineers

New developer recruitment is a very responsible task because your product's future depends on it. So, you should note some more points even before the hiring process is established. It can be the following ones:

• Conclude an agreement with programmers. Working without it leads to unpredictable consequences. Thus, the agreement can protect you and regulate such essential moments as money expenses and periods. Moreover, you can also hide the upcoming application details before the release in marketplaces. In such a case, you can undersign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA).
• Divide your project into sprints. After Agile implementation in the software workflow, project managers and developers started dividing the working process into small sprints. This approach helps to obtain results at the specified time and to track progress.
• Represent clear goals to achieve. It is essential to avoid the contractor and the client misunderstandings, leading to money and time losses. So, a project specification can assist you. However, it’s challenging to set it up. That’s why many outsourcing companies can offer their help concerning this matter.

Front-End Developer Salary

The front-end development sphere is very competitive because of its popularity. Thus, a client-side engineer will always have many exciting tasks, career growth possibilities, and a good salary. However, the last one depends on a bunch of factors, such as specialists’ seniority, company specification, a place of living, etc. 

Now, it’s time to analyze front-end developer salaries according to regions and specialists’ seniority.

So, the front-end engineers from the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, and Germany are the most expensive service providers. At the same time, specialists from Ukraine, India, and Brazil have lower rates. 

Front-End Developer Jobs

We have studied many job resources and made our TOP-7 job sites (in addition to the ones mentioned above) where you can hire front-end engineers. So, our list contains:

• GitHub Jobs. A large community for both the developers and recruiters. The possibility of hiring a developer is not free but low-cost.
• Toptal. This resource represents a well-designed and vast but comprehensive pool of front-end developers’ CVs. The best candidates can find their way into Toptal.
• Authentic Jobs. It is found initially for creative people. Thus you can start your search for front-end developers here. The site offers not only freelancers’ employment but also corporate specialists and remote ones.
• We Work Remotely is an Internet space, which allows the recruiters to find front-end specialists. The site is easy to use because of its adaptive design. The candidates are sorted out by their seniority and location.  
• X-Team. Well-skilled front-end engineers can also be hired here. Moreover, you may even employ a development team if you need such one. 
• Front-end development services are one of the hottest categories on Freelancer. Here you can view a database of IT specialists, choose the appropriate ones, conduct an interview and even manage your payments.  
• Guru is a global freelance net where you can get acquainted with front-end guru profiles and manage payments to your employed developer through a unique payment system.

So, having learned a short characteristic of every job resource, you can choose one of them or several that can help you with the process of recruitment the best of all. 

Conclusion

In this article, we looked briefly through the essential factors you have to know for a successful hiring process of front-end engineers. 

But if you need to obtain more information, a team of qualified IT specialists can assist you. The experts will help you to set up a budget and time estimation of your idea. You can also discuss your decision's pros and cons and get the full and qualified reply to all the questions you worry about.