Hiring JavaScript Developers: Recruiting and Retaining Top Teams

JavaScript has now been the default language of building for the web for the last two decades. Flexible, capable, and ideally suited to prototyping—it’s easy to see how the language has grown to be a central component of web engineering. The opportunities for organizations to access these advantages lie in hiring JavaScript developers that can successfully lean on the language to deliver high-quality web apps for your services.

Universally known for being capable of building dynamic web applications, mobile apps, and even desktop software—Javascript can do more for companies today than ever before. Often, the language acts as a key bridge between an organization and its customers.

When it comes to hiring and retaining high-quality JavaScript teams, the popularity of the language can also create challenges for organizations. Demand for developers with strong JavaScript skills has grown with the productivity and increased use of the language. As a result, companies are now facing a highly competitive market for high-quality JavaScript developers that haven’t already been snapped up.

With countless interesting projects, products, and companies hiring JavaScript engineers as soon as they become available, finding the top teams should be a high-priority recruiting goal for many organizations. Achieving this, however, is often easier said than done.

Recruiting within JavaScript requires a knowledge of the language, its application, and its developers that most often comes from time and experience within the industry. It means finding the right team fit and matching up both technical and soft skills to find the developer that will complete your organization. Our guide on finding the right fit when it comes to JavaScript development can help open the door to bringing in new engineers.

Here, we’ve used our time and experience in and around web technologies to put together a detailed guide on how to recruit and retain the best JavaScript development teams in your organization. With deep-dive guides on the most important topics, techniques, and tools—we’ve gathered together everything you need to know when it comes to hiring JavaScript developers to build your apps and services.

Of course, if you need to hire JavaScript teams today, there’s no better place to start than Pangea’s tools and services! Connecting your company to the top-tier JavaScript development currently on the market, just tell us what you need and we can recommend up to 5 top teams to bring into your firm within just 72 hours.

Choosing JavaScript Development

Underpinning apps and services for more than 95% of the web, JavaScript has been among the most popular languages globally for many years now. New developers and teams often ask precisely what it is that makes JavaScript so inherently useful for both engineers and organizations?

For businesses, the ability to create dynamic web pages, bespoke user experiences, and essential tools that enable greater reach and functionality are major advantages the language holds. When it comes to reaching a large number of customers, few tools can achieve as much so easily.

For developers, the abundant array of tools and frameworks available for the language make it highly productive for application engineering. Permissive by nature and well-suited to rapid development, JavaScript is often relied on for high-fidelity prototypes and experimentation.

For both groups, there are an abundant array of resources and tools for improvement in the language. Just a quick guide and some of our top tips on improving as a JavaScript developer can level up a valuable skill set and provide strong results in very little time.

Each of the advantages of the language, however, can come with drawbacks that need to be considered. Being permissive by design means strict care and attention should be applied when engineering applications to ensure bad habits or small errors don’t make it to production. With the right teams, the right tools, and the right techniques—using JavaScript can unlock some remarkable possibilities.

Here, we’ve put together an expert article that helps you get to the right solutions for your business. Weighing up the pros and cons of JavaScript development can help you to make key decisions about where to take the language and your developer’s skill sets.

Javascript Roles

Another critical part of hiring JavaScript teams is knowing precisely what kind of development talent you need to bring into the firm and precisely how those teams are going to be made up.

In this respect, JavaScript is somewhat unique as being a language focused towards web development. As a result of this focus, developers are most often experienced in one of three areas:

• Front-end UI development
• Back-end logic
• Full-stack applications

While there are many other avenues of development within JavaScript, most developers will have the majority of their experience in one of these three specialities. When it comes to hiring, there are considerations specific to each that your managers should take on board.

Front-end JavaScript Developer Role

Focused primarily on UI and UX considerations, the front-end developer writes code to improve the user-facing side of the site.

Front-end developers are often experienced in some areas of design and user experience. These developers most commonly work on continuously improving the look and feel of the application from day one of development through to product launch and beyond.

The role of the JavaScript front-end developer typically includes:

• Developing user-facing parts of the site and improving the user experience
• Designing and developing new features to improve the site’s workflows
• Keeping watch of potential front-end bugs that impact security or usability
• Write and test front-end code that can be reused in the future

Back-end JavaScript Developer Role

Focused mainly on performance, storage, and functionality back-end engineers typically build a site’s architecture and the underlying structure needed to serve the project.

These engineers are often responsible for performance and functionality, maintaining the logic and connections that make the site work together as a whole. The goals of the back-end engineer typically aim towards speed, efficiency, and reliability.

The role of the back-end developer typically includes:

• Implementing data storage solutions with security, performance, and reliability in mind
• Developing the server logic that will retrieve data and action items for users
• Create reusable code and tests to optimize architecture for the organization
• Analyse performance, reliability, and data to identify where the site could be improved

A full-stack developer, in contrast, often pitches in as needed while development progresses at different stages of the project. A generalist across many areas of both front-end and back-end development, these developers are ideally placed to keep an eye on the bigger picture of an engineering project.

The ideal JavaScript development team would be made up of front-end, back-end, and full-stack developers with various skill sets. The precise makeup of engineers and skills you need will be ultimately by the kind of project you intend to implement.

Going through this process early and deciding on the kind of JavaScript development teams you need to meet your goals can save you a lot of time and energy in finding the right candidates.

Helpfully, we’ve put together a complete guide that includes everything you need to know when it comes to hiring. Helping you to get started finding, interviewing, hiring, and managing JavaScript teams into your organization the comprehensive guide to hiring JavaScript engineering teams contains everything you need to bring the advantages of JavaScript into your company.

Building JavaScript Development Teams

The first thing to consider when constructing a quality JavaScript team is the tools and technologies that are going to support them.

JavaScript is in a unique position, with an abundance of technologies supporting the language as one of the most widely-used and productive engineering tools currently available. This means choosing between many available and highly productive frameworks and technologies when it comes to putting together your teams.

Finding the right frameworks to use and the right technologies to combine them with to optimize productivity can be challenging. With a depth of experience in this field, we’ve put together the ultimate guide to JavaScript frameworks to take a close look at what makes up a great framework and what factors you should consider when using one.

With all the technologies in place to create successful teams, the next consideration you have to make is how to bring in JavaScript developers that will deploy the language in a way that creates a lasting impact.

Whether you’re familiar with hiring freelancers to undertake new projects and tasks, or regularly hire an outsourced team to take projects from design to completion—it’s worth considering which option is best for each new use case to bring in teams and talent your company can depend on.

The unique capabilities, design, and use of JavaScript make it a language worth taking a second look at when it comes how you build your teams.

Both freelance developers and outsourced teams have relative strengths and drawbacks that make them well-suited to some types of projects and organizations over others. Our resources include a comprehensive guide on should you hire JavaScript freelancers or a remote JavaScript team? to outline the most important factors you need to consider and help you come to a decision to help build your services.

If you need additional expert guidance on finding the JavaScript team right for your company, you can take some extra help from our recommendations to find the industry experienced team with the tech tools and skills necessary to meet your requirements.

Hiring JavaScript Developers

When it comes to the hiring process itself, there are few easy options and no shortcuts to ensuring success. Building a team you can trust takes time, patience, and skill.

Luckily, we’ve developed all three in the course of hiring many development teams, engineers, and technical staff to high degrees of success over years. We’ve put together a guide on how to do the same when it comes to building JavaScript teams.

Our article on how to interview a JavaScript developer and what to look for outlines the JavaScript hiring process from beginning to end to help you build a team that will maximize your chance of success. From interview questions that will illuminate your candidate’s technical skill sets to what to look for in a high-quality applicant, check out our guide before you start your interview process.

Of course, simply finding JavaScript developers in today’s crowded and competitive marketplace can be tough. With an abundance of fascinating projects from electric vehicles to private space flights looking for JavaScript engineers—there’s a lot of competition seeking out the same kind of talent.

To win this race you have to stand out from the crowd. You have to advertise your firm as an exciting place to be and an exciting place to work within today’s tech industry. Put simply, you have to show prospective developers why your organization is the best place to invest their time and energy to build world-changing applications.

Success means getting the hiring process right from initial planning through to you creating and posting the perfect job description. Our article on hiring Javascript developers can take you through the complete hiring process to create a job specification from our template to launch your company to success.

Managing JavaScript Success

With hiring out of the way, and your ambitious goals met, management is the next area to consider when thinking about your JavaScript teams. Today, this invariably means guiding your teams through remote management strategies and techniques.

Leaning on a global pool of developer talent for its productivity, quality, and flexibility advantages is a powerful tool for most companies. The drawbacks, when it comes to the management of distributed teams, primarily stem from the intent and direction required to ensure everyone is pulling in the same direction at once.

While these challenges and techniques of remote management were completely alien to most a few years ago, they’re incredibly common and widely used today. Now, remote management is expected in many organizations and its benefits are widely taken for granted.

Helping you to navigate remote management in your teams, we’ve put together a quick guide on the do’s & don’ts of managing a remote JavaScript team to help kick off productive projects within your company.

Recruiting and Retaining High-quality Javascript Developers

JavaScript, and its unparalleled ability to reach users at scale, is unique amongst most technologies and tools. Acting as a bridge that connects organizations to their customers, and billions of users on the web, getting the technology and its deployment right is critically important.

Hiring, managing, and maintaining strong teams is 80% of the battle when it comes to JavaScript development. Like many technical challenges, get the team right and success will inevitably follow.

FAQ

Q1. How Do You Hire a JavaScript Developer?

To hire a JavaScript developer successfully, you should aim to tap into a large global market and advertise your organization as an exciting and productive place for developers to invest their time and skills. You can achieve these goals by creating an accurate, detailed, and interesting job description that will attract high-quality applicants.

Carefully consider the kind of developer, or team of developers you want and target your specification for front-end, back-end, or full-stack JavaScript engineers accordingly.

Post your job description to as many relevant places as you can. Stack Overflow and GitHub are usually key choices when it comes to finding high-quality developer talent. Finally, interview and test your applicants to ensure a good fit on both technical and soft skills to create a well-functioning and highly productive team is brought into your company.

Alternatively, you can use Pangea.ai to find a pre-vetted JavaScript development team chosen from the top-tier development talent based on your requirements.

Q2. Are JavaScript Developers in Demand?

JavaScript developers are one of the most in-demand skillsets in the technology industry today. Used in more than 90% of websites, and relied on to deploy desktop and mobile applications for organizations, JavaScript has seen a growth in demand year after year thanks to its many available frameworks, tools, and uses in the marketplace.

Salaries, for JavaScript developers are comparable to languages such as C#, C++, and Java—averaging around $54,000 in the last year. While there are roles that are better rewarded throughout the industry, there are few that share the same number of jobs available or the same broad use cases as JavaScript does.

Almost 70% of professional developers used JavaScript in at least part of their role within the last year, marking the ninth year in a row that the language has ranked as the most popular amongst engineers. With more than 60% of developers marking their appreciation for the language, it’s one that’s similarly highly regarded too.