Hiring the Right Skills for Decoupled Drupal Development in 5 Steps

Decoupled Drupal Development Hiring Challenge

Finding a savvy specialist amidst such high demand and terms of such a delicate approach can be truly challenging. That’s why you should keep your recruitment process consistent and know exactly what you are looking for based on the specifics of the technology and its decoupled implementation. But let’s start from the beginning. Namely, from the preliminary study and analysis of your hiring capacities.

Step 1 - Analyze your resources and needs

The range of your specialist search and recruitment ultimately depends on budget and/or management capacities. Then comes the scope and specifics of work you need your candidates to handle in terms of the project. These aspects dictate the model of collaboration, the candidate’s potential reliability, and the overall proficiency level of a specialist that would fit your specific goals perfectly.

In such a manner, the budget, the management capacities, and the scope of work define what general type of specialist you are to look for:

• An in-house developer - usually a high-level specialist that is fully recruited to your company/project staff, which requires covering all the underlying employment expenses, handling all the recruitment efforts, and providing dedicated management;
• A freelancer - independent specialists are usually the cheapest candidates out there that need a good balance between autonomy and strict management and may demonstrate outstanding talents yet can be too risky to employ.
• An outsourced specialist - outsourcing can serve as an alternative to both above options if you are looking to inject a portion of certain expertise into the project, cost-efficiently handle certain project tasks, or simply get the project done with the help of an autonomously managed team. 

On the other hand, the scope and specifics of work to be done also define the required level of the candidate’s qualification:

• Junior developers can make great candidates for maintenance tasks and other work of low complexity. A good specialist of this grade will deliver some driving narrowly-focused performance at affordable rates and with the passion of a growing expert. On the flip side, Juniors obviously shouldn’t be hired for more complex tasks.
• Middle-level Drupal developers certainly won’t fit Junior’s responsibilities, but they should have enough experience to do a fine job at separate technical tasks.
• The main challenge of recruiting Drupal specialists for the decoupled projects is that it is usually necessary to dedicate Senior developers to essential project tasks when building a new solution from scratch. We are looking at a pretty technically complex field of development as is while the decoupled approach also requires you to hire two separate specialists or teams for frontend and backend respectively.

The important thing about these prep stages is that project planning should work both ways - the project outline should be formed by the available resources as much as the tasks at hand form the required resources. To settle the big picture of your capacities, clarify the following questions:

• Are you building a completely new solution or optimizing an existing product?
• How extensive and complex is the project?
• Is it long-term and will you need to scale it?

This should help you outline the extent of reasonable project investment, intensity of management, scope of tasks, and model of workflow. Try classifying every other aspect - budget, work scope, etc. - by classic degrees - low, medium, and high. Based on that, decide on the most fitting collaboration format and level of specialist’s qualification.

Step 2 - Compose a job description

With all of the above information in hand, you can now create a job description to post on job boards and attract potential employees. It is completely up to you how exactly you attract candidates - design your job posts freely. But try to keep to the point and don’t forget to outline the main things and list exact requirements, all of which should include:

• Scope of responsibility - a range and complexity of tasks to be handled by the candidate (e.g., maintenance, optimization, full-cycle project development, partial hardcoding, etc.);
• Tech stack - a list of tools, languages, technologies, and other work appliances a proper candidate should be sufficiently skilled in (e.g., Drupal, Python, Flask, etc.). This is where you should subdivide the skills and abilities into the must-have ones and the nice to have ones;
• Compensation - a very sensitive yet necessary point in every job description out there. The position budget is based on thorough internal business and market analysis. To be competitive, pay must be both motivating and business-efficient. The pro tip here would be to try an outline the market average and offer slightly higher compensation to really grab the attention of good developers;
• Incentives and miscellaneous - your job as a workforce seeker is to provide convenient and rewarding conditions for an efficient specialist’s productivity. You can reflect this priority through various workplace privileges (exciting novel projects, professional growth, access to expensive tools, etc.) and an optional description of your team philosophy or corporate attributes. 

It’s also always great to outline the general psychological traits to instantly grab the attention of the most fitting candidates (e.g., “Are you a leader-to-the-bone looking for new equally challenging and rewarding experiences?” or “Have you been looking for a reliable opportunity to grow as a decoupled Drupal specialist?”). Having such an additional segmentation by the psychological portrait is yet another helpful “filter” for your job opening description.

Step 3 - Hunt and recruit

The overall difficulty of finding fitting candidates to hire depends on the availability and demand. Decoupled Drupal specialists aren’t scarce, but the required skills aren’t extremely widespread either while the demand for them is quite intense. This sort of imbalance poses the main challenge. But if you do set out for it, you can start searching in two complementing ways - passively and actively.

Passive hunting

The passive hunt implies a traditional job opening posted on the themed resource. This can include posting a job ad on:

• An online job ads board that is most popular in your region;
• Your own official website;
• Online communities and forums.

An ads board would be the standard first option. Posting a job description on the website is a pretty efficient method to show that you are truly a reputable employer. As for forums and communities - there are tons of resources dedicated to Drupal online, the community is passionate and striving. Once the job ad is published, it’s all about waiting until a proper candidate (or, to be exact, a number of candidates) reacts and responds to your offer. This is why it’s called passive hunting.

Active hunting

Alternatively AND additionally, you can take up a more active hunting model and target platforms, such as:

• Social media where pretty much all passionate Drupal specialists are usually gathered in dedicated groups and communities;
• Professional social platforms like LinkedIn where people come for networking and discovery of new work opportunities;
• Reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations can be gathered all across the market and your own professional network to find someone truly reliable;
• Events like meetups, conventions, qualification boosters, and all sorts of related activities where lots of specialized people meet under one roof can also serve as lucrative sources of new talent.

Active hunting is all about getting out there and seeking out the much-needed employee. In certain cases, it is good to involve a dedicated SMM professional in the process of active hunting. 

Step 4 - Sift through candidates

Once you get a bunch of job applications and CVs, it’s time to narrow down the list and pick the best of the best. How to do that exactly? A face-to-face interview is the first most reliable thing that comes to mind. But you can’t really interview ALL of the candidates you have, can you? That would be counter-effective, to say the least. What you need to do first is shortlist and prioritize. 

Try to outline three major categories of candidates - e.g., impressive, promising, and potentially interesting. This “preliminary segmentation”, if you will, should be carried out based on the inputs provided - candidates’ scope of experience, portfolios, recommendations, your own general impression, etc. Filtered out impressive and promising candidates should go through soft and hard skills checks. 

Soft skills assessment

First off, you need to get acquainted with a candidate - introduce them to your line of work and goals, discuss skills, experience, and other underlying specifics. The initial interview is usually carried out by a manager, an HR specialist, a manager, or a CEO. The pro tip here would be to also investigate the social media pages of a person to get some headstart info on them.

Hard skills assessment

Timely assessing hard skills is vital to the overall efficiency of the recruitment process. If they cannot handle test tasks properly and responsibly, what sort of further workplace reliability are we talking about? And generating a small test task is the most universal hard skills evaluation approach. However, keep in mind that new small test tasks are more for Junior candidates while Senior specialists shouldn’t necessarily go through them or get bigger test assignments that are full-on parts of an ongoing project. 

Having a profiled Drupal specialist of your own, you can also set off a technical interview where both the theoretical and technical skills of the candidate will be tested by a knowledgeable professional. Then, there’s also GitHub where you can check candidates’ pieces of code, previous project assets, and community ratings. 

Step 5 - Compose a job offer

It all needs to be official - once you find the most fitting candidate that you are ready to work with, you need to seal the deal with a job offer. It is a document that should excite and motivate your future employee, not only outline all the formal specifics. Express your own thrill of getting to work with a new talent in it. Define the rates and deadlines. This is the final step of the way - the rest is getting a positive response and kicking off the workflow with a new employee.

Wrap Up

The field of IT recruitment is narrow, demanding, and ever-changing. Especially when it comes to progressive approaches that simply haven’t yet got the time to mature in the market. This is why finding and hiring fitting professionals for decoupled Drupal development can be so challenging. And this is why you should entrust it to experienced recruiters in order to achieve long-term beneficial results.

Contact the specialists at Alpha Web Group to discuss your future project and gather a team of reliable, seasoned coding aces that build top-of-the-line frontends and backends that combine into market-defining solutions.