Front-End Technical Assessment: Planning A Successful Hire

HR and recruiters can attract the right candidates by using clearly defined and realistic front-end technical assessments.

Good brand websites are indispensable to most businesses today, and so are the people who design them. To find a good front-end developer, HR and recruiters need to know what skills matter for a company’s projects. Front-end technical assessments bring clarity to technical hiring and help match the perfect candidate to employers’ needs. Here’s how you can plan a successful hire using the right front-end technical assessments.

Know Which Skills You Need

First, you need to know what skills are needed for your business project. Does your company want a CSS coding expert? Or do they want someone with a portfolio in setting up eCommerce platforms? Perhaps your team is looking for a front-end developer to work with back-end engineers on a database project? Whatever the need, recruiters and HR can save a lot of time by listing down specific skills and aligning the front-end technical assessment to those expectations. 

Typical front-end skills include:

  • HTML, HTML5: Used to layout and position elements on a webpage
  • CSS: Used to style fonts, images, and colors on websites
  • CSS preprocessors: Used to scale and add functionality to CSS coding
  • JavaScript: Used to run apps on a webpage
  • jQuery and Bootstrap: JavaScript libraries used to implement common codes
  • APIs, REST: Used to simplify network communications
  • Webpack, Gulp, etc.: Build tools used to transform development code into production-ready code for cross-device use
  • SEO: Techniques and best practices to improve website performance for search engines
  • Testing and debugging: Use of testing frameworks such as Jasmine to optimize applications

Having a good idea of what skills are needed for a business project is necessary to make a good hire.

Align The Front-End Technical Assessment With The Job Role 

Next, HR and recruiters should align the technical interview with the prospective position. This step is best accomplished by using a front-end technical assessment relevant to the nature of the company’s business. 

Front-end developers might be tasked to:

  • Design a multi-page mobile website. Incorporate responsive elements and features. Optimize user experience through quick video loading and viewing.

  • Develop a user-friendly website for customers. Incorporate brand design elements and functionality. 
  • Create cross-browser tools. To improve visitor interaction with the company website.

By aligning the technical interview experience with the role, candidates also get a taste of on-the-job duties beforehand. This quality immediately clarifies any wrong expectations on the part of either interviewer or candidate and minimizes the possibility of making a wrong hire. 

Give Candidates What They Need

Provide candidates with the appropriate languages and frameworks to complete their assigned tasks. Interviewers need to provide one or more of the following depending on the test’s technical requirements:

  • Languages: HTML, CSS, JavaScript (also Python, PHP, Ruby, etc.)

  • Libraries: React, jQuery, Reduct, React JS, etc.

  • Frameworks: Bootstrap, Foundation, Angular, Ember JS, Vue, etc. 

Again, it’s best to align the front-end technical assessment experience with the actual work environment of the candidate’s potential role. If the in-house team uses HTML, assigning an HTML coding challenge to applicants is best, etc. 

It’s understandable that not every company can provide conducive testing environments for its applicants. That’s why technical hiring platforms come equipped with the right technical environment and tools for coding challenges, including front-end technical assessments. Recruiters can take advantage of these platforms to test candidates quickly and objectively. The best technical hiring platforms also offer large libraries of front-end prompts that interviewers can use on the go. 

Keep It Short And Simple 

Lastly, technical interviews, including front-end technical assessments, are best kept short and simple. HR and recruiters can get to the right candidates faster by assessing applicants efficiently. Candidates also appreciate a speedy technical interview process to get a placement or move on to other opportunities. 

Companies can use technical hiring platforms to simplify their hiring process in the following ways:

  • Abbreviate the hiring timeline by condensing in-person steps and focusing on skill assessment ex. one screening call, one take-home interview, and one final round interview.

  • Give take-home interviews to multiple candidates using the online hiring platform.

  • Assign short skill assessments (20 minutes to one hour) using standardized front-end technical tests.

  • Automate scoring using a technical hiring platform.

  • Create a candidate shortlist quickly by ranking candidates based on performance and objective scores.

By keeping the technical hiring process short and simple, companies maximize their chances of securing the best front-end developer while providing candidates with a positive experience. 

In summary, HR and recruiters can plan a successful front-end developer hire by clearly identifying the required skills, aligning the front-end technical assessment experience with the role, providing candidates with the right tools and environment for the test, and keeping the hiring process short and simple. 

Choose Your Front-End Technical Assessment From Filtered’s Library

Filtered offers ready-to-go front-end code assessments to help you align technical interviews with the position you’re hiring for. Our platform supports Angular, Bootstrap, Ember, React, and many more. Filtered enables developers and engineers to build a front-end application using a variety of languages and tools.

Filtered front-end questions webpage

Filtered is a leader in skills-based, data-driven recruiting technology. Our end-to-end technical hiring platform enables you to spend time reviewing only the most qualified candidates, putting skills and aptitude at the forefront of your decisions. We’ll help you automate hiring while applying objective, data-driven techniques to consistently and confidently select the right candidates. To get started, contact our team today or register for a FREE demo