The recruitment process for a web development job can be a nightmare, possibly a long and arduous journey. On top of the experience check and culture fit test, you need to hire web developers with the technical skills your company need. How do you achieve that? What questions do you need to ask in order to find your next, suitable web developer?
In this guide, we’ll walk you through all the important web developer interview questions to ask and demonstrate what good answers look like. We’ll assume you understand software development terms and terminology because your candidates sure should!
Let’s get started, shall we?
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How the Web Development Employment Process Works (Usually)
The web developer recruitment process is always tailored to the company to which you’re applying, as well as to the particular web developer responsibilities you’ll take on. Depending on the needs of the company, you may be hired to contribute to custom web development projects.
Regardless of the projects you’re hiring for, here is the way a typical web development hiring process looks like:
- Initial interview, either through audio or video calls.
- If required by the company, an online aptitude test or competency test.
- Technical coding test, mostly comprised of programming interview questions that test your technical competence as a web developer.
- Final interview. You and the employer will talk to each other face-to-face. If an in-person interview isn’t viable (for WFH jobs, for example), a video call is likely at this stage.
Let’s look at some of the key interview questions you should ask job applicants, as well as what you should look for in your candidates’ answers.
Read More: 8 Common Interview Mistakes Remote Software Developers Make
Interview Questions Relating To Your Web Development Experience
Tell me about a web dev project you’re particularly proud of. What did you do that worked out well?
This question helps ease your web developer candidates into the interview gently. What you’re looking for in their response includes early indication of ambitions, perceived view of success, and way of working. A strong answer will not only encompass their individual contributions but also acknowledge the roles and efforts of other team members. Your candidates’ insights into collaboration and teamwork will be valuable aspects to consider.
Tell me about a web development project that disappointed you. What would you change?
Continuous self-evaluation is a must for a developer. You won’t want to employ someone who continuously make the same mistakes.
What’s hard for you about coding?
This is, for all intents and purposes, another way of asking web developers what their weaknesses are from a technical perspective.
How do you do testing? And what do you think about this? How would you improve QA?
Good code means fewer buggy web applications and fewer coding crises. A good web developer should value testing and respect the QA process because it will reduce the number of late nights when they try to find an issue that has been uncovered in the code.
How are you keeping up with the latest advancements in web development?
This web dev interview question helps you determine if the candidate continues to learn to program and tries to stay on top of their web developer skills. Feel free to ask your candidate about their favorite online web developer communities or programming-related Twitter accounts. If they don’t use Twitter, ask about publications and authors they read, as well as why they’re interesting.
Web development is always changing, so being curious about the latest trends and forming opinions about them is typically seen as a good sign. This question will help you determine how invested your candidates are in the latest web development news. Alternatively, you can also look into web development services, which typically provides experienced web developers for you to choose from.
What is your preferred development environment?
The main purpose of this question is to provide your candidate with an opportunity to showcase their adaptability to different environments as well as ability to voice and backup their opinions. This question will also give you an indication of whether your candidates have experience working with frameworks, version control systems, unit testing, and others.
Read More: 8 Behavioral Interview Questions Asked by Top Tech Companies
Check out our entire set of software development interview questions to help you hire the best developers you possibly can.
If you’re a developer, familiarize yourself with the non-technical interview questions commonly asked in the first round by HR recruiters and the questions to ask your interviewer!
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Interview Questions to Test Your Communication and Management Skills
What are some of your best soft skills?
As hiring managers, you want to look for problem solvers, brilliant communicators, and those who are willing to learn. Your candidate should give examples of how they demonstrate each skill so you may determine whether or not they fit this web developer role.
Depending on the nature of the job, you may prioritize certain soft skills over others. For example, time management skills, interpersonal skills, and intercultural communication skills may be more valuable if you’re looking for a freelance web developer as opposed to an on-site developer since freelancers typically work remotely. They’ll also need to be more autonomous.
If you’re hiring for a web development lead role or senior position, you will likely value things such as leadership skills, management skills, analytical skills, and problem-solving skills. And, aside from these important soft skills, your candidates should also have the skills you specifically mention in the web developer job description!
Tell me about a time when you solved a problem that didn’t involve coding?
This could be anything from the time they fixed the office coffee machine to that one instance where they helped a colleague fix their bike. It doesn’t really matter what they did — it’s simply meant to give your an indication of how they solve problems and interact in the wider team and company environment.
Read More: How to Write a Great Thank-You Email After an Interview
How would other developers and project managers you’ve worked with describe you?
This is a great way to gauge their self-awareness, confidence, coding skills, and their possible place within your current team or in previous positions.
You can’t work out how to solve a coding problem. What do you do to find the answer?
Do they ask a colleague, post a question on Stack Overflow, or search other platforms? There’s no right or wrong answer here. In fact, a combination of both may be the best route. What you may find interesting is seeing whether your candidate prefer to keep their head down or ask around if faced with a problem.
What do you think of pair programming? Have you ever done it?
This agile development technique isn’t always suitable for day-to-day web development, but it’s interesting to assess whether they are happy to sit down with a colleague and sort through their code.
Have you ever worked directly with clients or been in a customer-facing role in the past? If not, would you like to?
This particular web developer interview question is essential, especially if the candidate is expected to take on a significant client-facing role. It aims to gauge how well the candidate can articulate their approach to handling feedback from crucial stakeholders and other individuals.
When hiring a web developer to contribute to the development of an app or product, it’s crucial to recognize that they will inevitably encounter challenging feedback from various sources, including end-users, investors, and colleagues within the company. To ensure you select an outstanding web developer, pay close attention to how adeptly they handle feedback.
Read More: 15+ Most Popular Programming Languages & Technologies to Know and Learn
Interview Questions to Test Your Technical Skills as a Web Dev
Can you describe your workflow when you create a web page or web app?
When you ask your candidates about how they create a web page, it results in a good way to assess how web developer job candidates approach basic chunks of work. Do they use ready-built code snippets to quickly layout a basic HTML page, add a little jQuery, and code from there? Or do they use a more in-depth approach such as Bower or Yeoman?
What tools do you use to find a performance bug?
The answer to this web development interview question will depend on their dev environment, as different programming languages use different profilers and some frameworks have built-in debug tools to find performance issues. This doesn’t matter too much, but their approach does.
What do you know about CORS?
CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) is an HTML5 staple that should be familiar to most front-end web developers. It allows developers to request many different resources (jQuery, fonts, and so on) from a domain outside of the domain from which the resource came.
Can you explain the purpose of each HTTP request type when using a RESTful web service?
Make sure you are familiar with the difference between a GET and a POST request, for starters. Remember to mention PATCH, DELETE, PUT, and CONNECT requests, and seal the deal by talking about TRACE and OPTIONS. This is a solid question to assess your basic understanding of HTML and data integrations.
If you have 5 different stylesheets, how would you best integrate them into a website?
This interview question for web developer jobs help to test your candidate’s CSS understanding. Would they combine the multiple stylesheets into a single CSS file? Or would they just combine application-specific stylesheets? And, what is their approach when using a library, such as Bootstrap?
Read More: 10+ Tips for Preparing for a Remote Software Developer Zoom Interview
How do you organize your JavaScript code?
This web dev interview question will give you insight into how your candidate organizes their code. Do they separate JavaScript and HTML? Is their JS broken into logical units and kept in separate files? Do they use a script to concatenate these files into a single bundle? Do they use JS namespaces to avoid cluttering up the global namespace?
How do you take into account SEO, maintainability, UX, performance, and security when you’re building a web application?
This is one of the most important web developer interview questions to assess how web developers look at the bigger picture. The ability to balance and understand these very different factors is a core competency for any web developer.
Their response will also indicate which factors they prioritize when coding. For example, if your company is a fintech startup, you may favor security over SEO. On the other hand, if you run an online media publications, you will likely value performance and SEO. A good answer is one that’s relevant to your company’s specific products and services.
Read More: Phone Screen Interview vs Actual Phone Interview: Learn the Differences
Wrapping Up Our Web Development Interview Questions
Please note: By no means are the above web developer interview questions the only ones you’ll be asked as a candidate.
You’ll likely want to dig deeper into your candidate’s technical expertise for the tech stacks they may encounter if they’re to be hired for the job.
If you’re not a developer, focus on asking preliminary questions on culture and values and ask an experienced and knowledgeable developer to do the technical screening portion of the interview process.
You can also explore HireAI to skip the line and:
⚡️ Get instant candidate matches without searching
⚡️ Identify top applicants from our network of 250,000+ devs with no manual screening
⚡️ Hire 4x faster with vetted candidates (qualified and interview-ready)
