Tuesday 24 September 2013

Recruiting front-enders

My personal preference is for full-stack development. I always try and keep abreast of emerging technologies in whatever area of programming they might arise. However, full-stack developers tend to come with a premium in terms of their cost, so at the company I am currently working, they are looking for a front-end developer who has the ability to take some crazy designs and turn them into reality. Unfortunately, we are struggling to find this person. There are 2 problems we are encountering. One is the location - we are in the middle of the countryside, but near enough to London to have many potential candidates sucked that way. The other is the type of people we are seeing. They tend to be people with big corporate backgrounds who have used a framework religiously for the last 5-6 years and now want to go contracting. Unfortunately, that kind of background and mindset doesn't show an aptitude for implementing the kind of cutting edge designs we are working on. I was asked to come up with a description of the person we wanted and I came up with the following:
I think that for the specific projects we are looking for we would ideally like someone with the following experience:
  • Working with video in HTML5
  • CSS animations/transitions
  • Using canvas in HTML5
  • Creating pixel-perfect layouts
I doubt that we will find a candidate who has experience in all these areas, particularly as some of them are quite new and emerging, but if they have strong demonstrable experience (either professional or personal) in some of these or in other cutting-edge front-end technologies (e.g. angular/ember, websockets or other HTML5 stuff) then that would show the kind of willingness to experiment that I think we are going to need for projects such as this.
What do you think? Can I improve upon that as a description? Will it attract the right type of people? Most importantly, do you know anyone who might be willing to come and work in the Oxfordshire countryside who has those types of skills? Please get in touch if you do!

No comments:

Post a Comment