Hiring for any position can feel overwhelming, and hiring a professional Laravel developer who fits right into your culture and grasps the way you conduct your business is no easier.
Sharing some of our processes and insights with you in this blog post in hopes to assist you in the upscaling of your Laravel development team. Well, that’s why in this post, we will walk you through the entire recruitment process from platforms used for sourcing to evaluation methods and important HR and tech interview questions.
What Is a Laravel Developer?
A Laravel developer is a professional who uses the Laravel framework with efficient syntax and powerful features to develop an effective, efficient, and secure web application that complies with contemporary internet guidelines.
What Does a Laravel Developer Do?
Here are some responsibilities of a Laravel developer:
- Development of apps: Developers develop and sustain web apps, mostly. This includes analysing client needs, devising application architecture and building features using the Laravel’s capabilities.
- Database Management: They manage database activities such as creation, querying, and updating. Knowledge of SQL and experience with Eloquent ORM are important to handle data efficiently and with integrity.
- Front-end Integration: The back-end functionalities are generally interfaced with by front-end developers most of the time. This is going to involve you learning HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and possible a front-end framework like Vue in some cases. js or React for end user -friendly websites that are responsive.
- Performance Tuning: They are also responsible to perform Tow Us tuning of the applications. This also covers optimization of caching strategy and utilization of code profiling tools to develop more responsive and performant applications.
- Security and Maintenance: It is essential to secure web applications. The specialists apply security measures to prevent threats such as SQL injection and XSS attacks. Routine maintenance and updates the applications, to resolve bugs and enhance functionality, is also included in their work.
- Cooperation & Documentation: Good communication with team members, stakeholders and clients. They also serve as documentation of the development history, codebase and system architecture so beginners can follow the keys and begin their collaboration.
Where You Can Get Laravel Developer
Tracking down a Laravel developer for hire is no mean feat. One big reason is a dearth of tech talent. But by learning the right things, you can hire a Laravel developer.
Online Job Boards
What is an Online Job Board?
Most of these job boards come with a searchable database of job postings that can be checked by job listing by title, location, industry and other related categories.
Some online job boards you may want to check for freelancing opportunities include Upwork, Freelancer, Fiverr, Indeed, Toptal etc.
Laravel-Specific Job Sites
Below are job portals where Laravel programmers have access to job opportunities.
Laravel job boards LaraJobs and Laravel Jobs connect companies with experienced Laravel developers.
Developer Communities
Social networking is an activity in which individuals can connect and share ideas, information, and content to people and organization. There, they help connect like-minded people and groups.
You may find Laravel experts on some social media like facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram etc. Developer communities, however, are online gathering places for software engineers to exchange ideas, and to help one another.
Such communities could be forums, chat rooms, blogs, or other points of contact where developers can meet and work together on projects.
Some of the best developer communities to hire Laravel developers include: GitHub Stack Overflow HackerRank Reddit Etc.
Referrals and Recommendations
Feedback or reference from previous customers or fellow professionals provides some insights on how the developer works, his/her work attitude, work ethic, and communication approach.
You can request for referrals from your professional network or check for reviews and client testimonials over the internet.
You can also search for developers that have contributed to projects like yours.
Review their portfolio to look at their previous work.
After finding a few developers who seemed viable, interview them to gauge their technical abilities and project needs.
This will enable you to trim the list and hire the perfect developer for your venture.
How to Hire Laravel Developers
- Technical Screening
You can start by questioning the Laravel developer regarding his technical skills. Such questions can be on PHP concepts and things related to Laravel basics. You can also ask them about best practices for web development.
If you would like to gauge your candidate’s technical knowledge further, ask him/her the question on Laravel service containers and facades. Also, you can get them to explain middleware, and route model binding. You can also inquire about how they deal with queues and dispatching.
And so, this step is a way to sieve out the applicants who doesn’t really know the base and who have never put their hands on.
- Ask for a Portfolio
After that, you can inquire about previous Laravel projects that an applicant has been involved in. And then you can say, “Can I see the portfolio and then ask them about them. You may inquire about the size and complexity of the app. Another option is to ask them if they managed the project or they were just a team member.
You also want to inquire if they were doing any specific functionality with Laravel and what they found difficult. What’s more, is you may also request GitHub repos links (When available). Their code can be reviewed and you can see how they are organised and how they program.
- Practical Coding Test
It is also possible for you to offer an actual coding test to your candidate to get a better idea about his skills. It can be for building a Crud app with Basic Authentication. You may also ask to implement a RESTful API endpoint with validation and error handling from them. Also, you can simply ask them to create a relationship through Eloquent models.
- Ask Scenario Based Questions
You could give actual cases and questions and ask them how they would work with Laravel. For instance you could ask them how they would create multi tenancy in a Laravel application. In addition, you might ask them how they can make the app perform better for a very busy app.
Thus, you can evaluate not just a Laravel Developer technical skills, you can also check his/her architectural thinking and knowledge of Laravel ecosystem tools by asking these questions.
- Assess Soft Skills
Even the most brilliant developer won’t do well if they don’t work well with others. So, you can evaluate how well they describe the technical decision during the interview. You can also test how open they are to feedback and how adept they are working with Agile and remotely too.
- Ask Them About Git (Or Another VCS)
You can inquire about their exposure to the Git flow. Also, you can tell as much by how they use feature branches or how they deploy as you can by what they will tell you. Or, you can ask them how experienced they are at using tools like GitHub Actions or GitLab CI.
- Ask About Testing and Quality Assurance
You’re a Laravel developer and are comfortable with TDD and unit/feature testing. And, to gauge their understanding, you can also get into how they make their code testable. You can also inquire about their process for testing business logic and UI components. You can also question them how they have worked with tools like PHPUnit, Laravel Dusk?
- Community Engagement
And you could ask them how they keep current with Laravel and PHP information. Also you can learn if they do PHP, or Laravel conferences. Also, you could ask them about their participation in Open Source projects.
Final Thoughts
Finding a Laravel developer at a startup is not supposed to be easy. After all, hiring Laravel developers means you are putting your money on faster, more scalable development. Taking into account experience, location, culture, and guaranteeing that legal documents are signed, including contracts and NDAs, can allow you to hire a professional who is highly skilled and can make your project a reality.
You can also position your business for innovation and success by emphasizing on the best personnel and culture fit. It’s absolutely insane how you have to play this out in your head.
