How to Hire a Front End Developer in 2024: Rates, Skills, and More

Before talking about how to hire a front end programmer, let’s talk about the essence of this position.

A front-end developer is a specialist responsible for creating everything a customer interacts with or obtains data from a digital solution. Both creativity and tech knowledge are required for this essential task. The attention of front-end developers is on the user experience. Therefore, the technology they choose depends on how effectively it will achieve that level of usefulness, speed, and efficiency.

After we’ve found out the main areas of responsibility of front-end developers, let’s think about the aspects you should pay attention to when you hire frontend engineer.

You probably already know that developers are divided into junior, middle, and senior according to their skill level. But how to hire front end engineer to get a top-quality final product and not overpay?

When developers are just starting out, they are often familiar with only one programming language or framework. Respectively, the range of technologies and skill level they possess allow solving a limited number of tasks. In a perfect world, junior front-end developers are capable of building a stable app that will carry out most of the functions it’s intended to.

However, in reality, it turns out that juniors often need the help of their senior colleagues. Thus, they work slower to fill their knowledge gap and might be unable to make an app corresponding all of the set requirements. So think twice before you hire front end web developer of this level.

Years of experience: 0-1

As developers gain seniority, they get a precious skill of building apps tailoring them to appropriate business logic. They’ll examine the business aims and budget limitation firstly and choose the most suitable technologies to build the product. A senior developer can also propose you several alternative ways to solve a problem and explain the benefits of choosing each one in a simple language. After years of hands-on experience, they can confidently foresee the consequences of implementing each scheme.

Years of experience: 3-5+

Of course, you can’t count coders’ talent in years when you hire frontend developers. Some junior developers can possess all the skills you need for a project despite a lack of experience. Still, the best way to hire front-end programmer with good skills is to find someone with a tech background to help you with interviewing candidates and defining necessary skill set.

If your project is rather small (e.g., a landing page or a simple business website), the junior developer can do all you need. However, as the project complexity grows and a wider range of technologies is needed, consider choosing more experienced developers.

It’s important to examine front-end developer responsibilities before you start looking for candidates. In case you have no technical background and don’t really know what front-end engineer responsibilities are, I’ve listed the main of them below.

• Create a layout of an app using HTML and CSS to deliver a pixel-perfect design
• Build the client-side of the product: user interactions, animations, responses to a server
• Write clean code that could be easily reused in the future
• Optimize applications to achieve the best performance and scalability
• Collaborate with other members of a team

Simply put, a good front-end developer is a neat designer and an accurate programmer in one.

Typically, the competencies that front-end developers should possess are divided into hard skills and soft ones. Let’s find out how these two kinds of skills (that you should understand when hire best frontend developers) are differentiated from each other.

Hard skills are the tech savviness and abilities necessary for success in the software development industry. To produce high-quality software solutions, specialists must acquire certain competencies, frequently based on technical knowledge and experience.

Let’s view the most demanded front end developer skills that these specialists should possess while you are hiring a front end developer.

Front-end developers utilize such markup languages as HTML and CSS. But it would be a mistake to say those are all the tools they use. Proficiency with JavaScript is one of the essential skills for a front end developer for hire. This language is used to create dynamic user interactions and cannot be ignored by engineers who are actually in charge of building those interactions.

There’re also a lot of other technologies and skills front-end developers should possess. Here is a basic front-end developer skills list:

• Responsive design
• Preprocessors for CSS like SCSS and SASS
• Module frameworks that streamline creating a large application and its architecture like Angular, React, Vue, or others
• PWA
• CSS frameworks such as Bootstrap
• Browser developer tools
• Testing/debugging in an IDE
• Module bundlers that help to simplify developer’s workflow like Webpack. Gulp, Grunt, and Browserify were used previously but after the emergence of Webpack, all of them started to steadily lose their popularity
• Version control systems such as Git

If you are not sure what technology to use, find out detailed statistics about the most popular libraries based on the JavaScript language around the world as well as for each country in particular. Moreover, you can apply to a competent outsourcing software development vendor. They’ll give you the profound consultation you need, as well as offer you to hire front end developers enough skilled to perform your project.

It’s worth mentioning that the skills of front-end developers depend on their seniority. Thus, senior front end developers for hire can also be skilled in back-end languages and frameworks such as Node.js, Python, or PHP, as well as possess such technology stacks as the LAMP or MEAN.

Contrary to popular belief, programming abilities are not the only ones the front-end developers should have. In today's tech sector, soft skills are becoming more and more crucial. Developers may succeed at soft skills since they work in teams, interact with management, and deal with clients.

We’ve researched and collected the TOP-5 soft skills you should check when hire a full-time front-end developer.

Collaborative skills fundamentally come down to having effective teamwork skills. It's a soft skill enabling developers to collaborate toward a similar objective, accept and provide advice, and respect other team members—in short, to be the ideal jigsaw piece. So, while recruiting specialists, pay attention to the developer's prior experiences: they might reveal a lot about their capacity for collaboration. For instance, at hackathons, developers must collaborate to create a usable product in a condensed amount of time.

Camille Fournier mentions the importance of collaborative skills (you should pay attention to when hire front-end engineer) in the following way:

Flexibility. The software industry is an ever-changing, tumultuous, and dynamic one. To build a successful development team, you should seek individuals demonstrating that quality. A developer should be adaptable and ready to roll with the punches in various situations. Thus, you should seek indications of flexibility when hiring front end developer.

The ability of an expert to organize their time successfully might indicate whether or not you can rely on them to complete their job. You might ask a developer about how they prioritize their projects and manage their time during a job interview. A developer's inability to manage their time effectively impacts the entire team. This way, if one team member can't meet the deadlines, everyone else must wait or take over the slack; and you should certainly check this soft skill when hire front-end developers for your project.

The ability to be patient. It takes patience to work as a team. Because not everyone works at the same rate, patience is an important soft skill to have and to be verified when hiring front end developers. A developer's experience may be used to judge how patient they are. For instance, it's possible that they had to practice patience if they consistently worked in large teams and on ambitious projects.

Self-direction. The best working arrangement between a manager and a front-end developer avoids micromanagement. There should be a high degree of confidence that a developer knows what they must do and will do it without instruction or pushing.

There are several ways to look for web development service vendors and professionals: outsourcing companies listings, freelance portals, and job boards. However, each of them has its own benefits and drawbacks. So, to maximize the former and minimize the latter, you should learn for sure how to hire front end designers and which developer suits you best: freelancer, in-house employee, or outsourced developer.

Compared to other options, hiring a freelancer is the most affordable one. However, in reality, the more freelancers you hire, the more communication and other related problems appear. Not to mention the likelihood of slower development process and more bugs in the end product.

Pros

An attractive benefit to hire frontend developer on freelance is a relatively low price. It happens because the competition on freelance platforms is tough. Another benefit is that you can hire freelancer only when you need them. You don’t have to worry about sick leaves, vacations, etc. This option is great for a small-scaled project or if you don’t have a constant workload.

Cons

Freelancers’ major flaw is their dependability. First of all, freelancers often live in different time zones, so it might be difficult to control their timetables. Furthermore, you have little protection from freelancers leaving your project without saying a word which is the worst nightmare for a product owner. So, you can make your own conclusions as to hire front-end coder on freelance.

Where to hire:

• Fiverr
• Upwork
• Freelancer
• Toptal
• Codementor

As a decision-maker, you probably know the difference in working effectiveness between loyal and unloyal employees. In-house developers are directly interested in positive project results and are less likely to leave (unlike freelancers).

Pros

By offering monthly salaries increasing with the time along with a constant and well-equipped workplace can motivate developers to care about your long-term goals and mission. There’s a higher chance they will work for longer and become well-cooperated team players. As a result, urgent tech tasks can be resolved quickly.

Cons

Paying salaries to developers on a regular basis, which increase over time, is costly. Finding a good developer is difficult, especially if you’re located in a small city. Not to mention such expenses needed when hire front-end developer as taxes, software, hardware, office space, etc. It takes a decent amount of time to find, interview, and onboard in-house developers. What’s more, this process tends to repeat all the time since programmers tend to leave companies they’re working in more often compared to other specialists.

Sites to hire front-end developers for in-house team:

• Indeed
• Glassdoor
• LinkedIn
• CareerBuilder
• Dice

IT outsourcing services rapidly became a popular hiring option for decision-makers. How does it work? You hire front-end developers in an offshore software development company from any country you like. And they work on your project remotely from their company’s office. This way you don’t pay for office rent, sick days/vacations, taxes, etc.

Pros

You don’t have to spend extra money on the above-mentioned expenses when you hire front end professionals. Besides, outsourcing allows you to change the size of your development team as the project scales. It’s important to note that the outsourcing team works as a team, not as a bunch of separate freelancers who have never communicated with each other before.

Cons

The price of the outsourcing “how to hire front end developer” question is slightly higher compared to freelancers, but it is paid off regarding the advantageous quality-price ratio. Moreover, outsourced developers are often located in other countries, so the time zone issue may occur. The right approach to the said drawbacks can help you build effective outsourcing workflow with the developers located far away. For example, Cleveroad as an outsourcing software development vendor, usually schedules essential meetings with clients at a comfortable time to be connected.

Where to hire:

• Clutch
• GoodFirms
• IT Firms
• TopDevelopers

Summing up this section concerning the kinds of front-end developers for hire, we’d like to say that, in most cases, it’s better to hire in-house developers or find a reliable software development company rather than switching between different freelancers. As practice shows, the latter choice often leads to time and money losses.

We’ve prepared separate PDFs with tons of questions for a technical interview with front-end developer candidates. You’re welcome to download them and use them when hire front-end programmers.

I’d like to note that front-end web developer interview questions included to those files are mainly focused on Angular framework.

Hard skills are specific abilities every professional has to have. Questions in the PDF below are ranging from general (e.g. what is Angular) to more complicated (e.g. explanation for package.json file).

Soft skills combine communication, social, people, and other skills required to work as a part of a team. You can use questions from our questionnaire while hiring a front-end developer to your in-house team and check their soft skills level.

Underneath, we’ve listed some basic yet vital points you need to know before you hire front end design engineers.

Set clear requirements. One of the most important issues is to set clear requirements for a product. Otherwise, a misunderstanding between customer and contractor might appear (read as time and money losses). However, making project specification is definitely not an easy task so outsourcing companies often offer their help in carrying it out.

Break down your project into sprints. With the emergence of Agile approach in software development, it became popular to divide projects into small sprints and to receive deliverables by clearly specified deadlines. The major benefit of this approach is your capability to constantly track the progress of your project and avoid possible setbacks. However, this is a task for developers and project managers. You should just be aware of this approach to better manage the project.

Employing a front end developer hire them with signing a contract. Working without a contract makes unpredicted risks closer to you. It’s better to protect yourself and add every rule to your contract that helps to regulate your working relationships better. The most important of them are time terms and money expenses. Also, you might not want to disclose your app details until it gets published in app stores. In this case, the solution for you is to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). By the way, Cleveroad willingly works with NDA and offers such an option to clients.

It’s time to take a look at front-end developer rates by countries and hiring options (e.g. freelancer, remote developer, etc.)

According to different online sources, the work of junior front-end developer amounts to $41-60/hour. Middle front-end developers basically charge $61-80, but you can save your costs and pay only $41-60 if you hire them from Central Europe or Africa. As for senior front-end developers, their hourly rate varies depending on the region.

Based on this cost to hire front end developers on freelance, it’s possible to calculate how much a day or a month of freelancer’s work can cost you. To do this, let’s take the average global rate of 70$/hour. Thus eight-hour workday will cost you $560, and a month of work with a 5/2 schedule will amount to $12,320.

You should also realize that freelance developers’ work is appropriate when you need to do small tasks quickly. However, if you apply to them for a complex solution development they can’t guarantee you quality and effectiveness.

If you hire developers on a full-time basis to work in your office, you’re probably more interested to find out the annual salary. According to Glassdoor report connected to annual front-end devs salaries, the average annual payment for a developer in the US is $84,454 a year. The source also mentions that the developer can gain to $128,318, then, obtain $152,499 as a senior front-end developer, or get $144,392 annually as a lead front-end developer.

However, front-end developer salary in the United States heavily depends on a state. You can explore salaries for each state and even city on Indeed which is essential when you hire frontend development developer.

As for global outsourcing rates, they seem to follow the same pattern. The most expensive regions are North America and Australia and the cheapest regions are Asia and Central Europe.

We hold leading positions in different international ratings. You can check our rewards and notice that Cleveroad is a top software development company in Los Angeles, UK, and Manchester, according to Clutch.co.

Here’re some other benefits to hire top frontend developers and outsource software development projects to Cleveroad:

1. Our front-end developers use the latest technologies. Besides, our software engineering team follows a time-tested development patterns to eliminate mistakes, save time, and start working on the project as soon as possible.
2. We pay great attention to the professional growth of specialists. Our developers regularly visit specialized meetups and conferences to stay up-to-date and improve skills.
3. All developers at Cleveroad dedicate 10% of their working time on testing the functionality they currently work on. This brings plenty of benefits in the future such as preventing potential time losses because of bugs.
4. Cleveroad uses Agile approach to manage projects. This allows us to deliver projects faster, get feedback from clients on each product iteration, and meet their requirements.

We can effectively assist you in building your digital product. All you need is to make the first step towards and apply to us to discuss any details concerning your product.