Hiring the best talent for your company can be a challenge at the best of times. Hiring individuals with competence in a specific set of skills such as React JS and requisite project experience highlighting the execution of the knowledge of the tool is a different situation altogether.
But what is React JS, and why has its demand suddenly seen such a hike?
React JS is an open-source, low-code JavaScript library introduced by Meta (Formely Facebook) and is used to create UI’s or User Interfaces for single-page web applications and mobile applications.
React JS is one of the top five most in-demand skills globally. In fact, the Y-o-Y demand for developers equipped with React JS as a skill rose by 184% from mid-2019 to mid-2020*, and that stat has increased by 30%* since remote work became a norm.
So before you begin hiring individuals equipped with React JS as a skill, you need to evaluate the following factors:
- The kind of project experience and domain knowledge you need
- The quantum of your existing resources of React JS developers
- The level of seniority you want to hire for depends on the extent and duration of the project
- Size of your company and forecasted growth therein
Let’s take a look at why these factors are important and what the implications of hiring the right resource can be:
Project Experience and Domain Knowledge
It goes without saying that if you need individuals to come in and work on projects that require the execution of React JS in the solution, that individual needs to have at least a working knowledge of the tool and some creative ways to execute it in the final solution.
What you need to assess is the amount of experience you want them to have, in terms of:
- Number of years worked
- Industries for which they’ve delivered solutions
- What kind of solutions they’ve delivered
Along with experience, you need to evaluate the depth of domain expertise you’d like them to have. Since React JS is a relatively new developer tool, you’d have to assess if you want someone who has been delivering solutions using React JS ever since it was introduced or whether they’ve been using the tool for a relatively lesser period of time.
Evaluating the required depth of experience is vital because it lets you know how much room you can give them while working on the solution and how much they can implement for your clients who may be working in fairly broad or incredibly niche industries.
Quantum of Existing Resources
Evaluating the number of resources you need to hire is critical to avoid under-hiring or over-hiring. You don’t want to be in a position where you don’t have enough resources once the project begins, or you have resources that are idle due to over-hiring.
To make sure that you hire just the right number of React JS developers, you need to first take stock of:
- How many existing React JS developers do you currently have
- How many more resources will you need for current and future projects
- What are some domain-specific skills that you need that your existing developers don’t have or haven’t implemented enough.
After thoroughly evaluating these factors, you’ll be able to decide precisely how many new resources you need in the short run and the long run and what you’d like them to bring in with them in terms of skills and technical know-how.
Level of Seniority
Perhaps the most crucial analysis you need to do before hiring is to decide the level of seniority for which you’re hiring. This is critical since it encompasses:
- The extent of experience and domain knowledge
- The number of existing resources at different seniority levels
- The lengths of projects that you usually undertake.
Knowing what level of seniority you need to hire for is important because it helps you zero in on the following:
- Do you need someone to come in and contribute to the base level of the project?
- Do you want someone to come in and take on some important responsibilities and manage a small team of developers?
- Do you want someone to come in and lay the groundwork for the project you’re about to start.
Basis these internal evaluations, you need to decide who to hire from the following categories of seniority:
1. Junior Developers
Junior developers are individuals who have just started working in the development ecosystem and have little to no experience working on projects that involve the implementation of React JS. These individuals are best suited for working in teams to set up the project's groundwork.
Developers at this level will need a certain level of mentorship and guidance from more experienced developers but can be a great asset to developing the final deliverable.
If you need to hire people to lay the project's foundation, then junior developers should be your focus, and you need to chart out a hiring plan accordingly.
2. Mid-Level Developers
Mid-level developers are typically those individuals who have sufficient experience working on projects involving React JS. They understand the tool, its applications, the extent to which it can be used and the best practices that come along with the tool itself.
Additionally, mid-level developers also carry team handling experience with them, so they’re also adept at looking after the work of junior developers, along with their own KRA’s.
So if you’re looking for individuals who can bring in both domain knowledge and team handling experience, you need to seek out mid-level React JS Developers.
3. Senior Developers
A senior developer is someone who lays out the blueprint of the entire project. They define the scope, duration, personnel requirement, and level of creative licence and provide the whole team with a stage-wise bifurcation of the project as a whole. They’re in charge of every aspect of the project, no matter how minute.
These are individuals who have extensive knowledge of the tools that will be implemented in the solution and carry with them a significant amount of experience leading teams of developers.
So if you’ve identified that you need someone to come in and create a new blueprint of executing the project and set up the teams that will be involved simultaneously or at different stages of the project, you’ll need to hire a senior-level React JS developer.
Company Size
A rather essential but often overlooked consideration that needs to be made while making hiring plans is to hire according to the current size of your company while keeping the forecasted future personnel growth in your peripheral vision.
This is also important because the kinds of projects you take up are also somewhat dependent on your company size, and only after you have the project can you narrow down on how many new resources you need to bring in, not just for the next one project, but for the next five.
But where do you find these developers? Even though React JS as a skill is hugely in-demand, where would you be able to find individuals who fit the bill, as far as experience and domain knowledge are concerned?
For this, you need to decide if you want to hire full-time employees or would you prefer to work with freelance professionals?
Full-time employees, of course, become an integral part of your company over time, working on multiple projects and also contributing to the growth and culture development of the overall organisation.
Having full time React JS developers at a time when it's such a popular development tool can have massive benefits as you can take on a lot of projects based on this new tool and develop some really creative solutions. You don’t have to re-hire every time a new project comes in, and since React JS as a tool is only growing in popularity, it may behove you to keep some talented developers around.
The other way to go is to collaborate with freelancers. You can always get in touch with individuals who have the requisite domain knowledge and project experience and work with them on implementing React JS into your solution.
The advantage here is that you get to choose from a plethora of individuals, all of whom have mostly the same length and breadth of experience and knowledge, and you can work with the one you feel fits your needs the best. It’s a very flexible way of collaborating, and freelance collaborations have been growing in popularity with many big and small firms.
Here are a few places you can go to and find the best freelance React JS Developers:
- Toptal
- X-Team
- CodementorX
- Stack Overflow
- MobiUnity
Hiring individuals for any task is a challenge that keeps on continually evolving. Hiring individuals with a particular skill set requires you to have a working knowledge of the tools such as React JS within that skill set as well. A good hiring plan can benefit you for a long time and put you in touch with people who can elevate the overall deliverables at every stage of the development process.
Sources: India Today, developersforhire
