Over the past few years, IT industry has experienced a booming demand for PHP professionals. PHP has proved to the most preferred programming language by professionals and marketers alike with its robust development potential.
An increasing number of customers are looking to hire PHP developers for their web application development projects. And is it hard to find a PHP developer for hire? Absolutely not! One search on Google, and you end up with a long list of companies offering PHP developers on hire.
This brings up the problem of abundance. You have several options to choose from. Now, given that hiring an offshore PHP developer is often a strategic decision, you need to be smart here. Weigh your options for pros and cons.
A wrong move can land you in a soup where you end up spending more than you ought to. Or worse yet, you can end up hiring a PHP developer who can do no good for your application. So how do you proceed? For small and medium-sized projects, the following tips will be helpful.
Know Your Project Requirements
Before you start evaluating a PHP developer, you need to know what exactly your project demands. This is where you start analyzing your requirement. Do you need a core PHP developer?
Do you need to hire a PHP developer proficient in open source frameworks like WordPress or Joomla? Get your project requirement straight first, and then start searching. This will help you save time and resources.
Also, try to develop a clear project description once you have agreed to hire PHP web developer. Describe the exact goals of the project and think about some other characteristics that will be important to you.
The more specifics of the project you can mention, the better – because the PHP developers can determine and understand easily what code base they need to use.
Experience Level
Try to find out if a PHP developer is mature enough to handle your development requirements. Here, it’s not only the experience in terms of number of years that matters. A PHP developer should also have a proper understanding of your business domain.
Who would you instead choose a developer with decade long experience but not in your industry vertical or a developer with 5 years of experience in your own vertical?
Your best bet would be to hire PHP programmer who has worked on multiple business domains, including yours. This experience would have shaped up developers’ understanding and their business logic.
Case studies and consumer testimonials indicate that developers have partnered with reputable businesses and measured how successful they are. A robust offshore company’s reputation would save you from problems associated with project efficiency and processing time.
Technical Proficiency
This is purely technical stuff. This is where you evaluate a PHP developer’s coding skills. You assess his programming and analytical abilities. Remember to check the comfort level of a PHP developer with HTML, AJAX, JavaScript, MySQL, XML and so on. Hiring a multifaceted developer would definetly help you in the long run.
In addition to this, try to see how good a developer is at addressing hacking and security issues. A PHP developer should also focus on coding in such a manner that it improves the application runtime. This will be another key factor for your application development.
Certifications
It’s always good to know that a PHP developer you intend to hire has technical skills certified by other reputed names. It reinforces your analysis and judgment.
Try to see if the company you are hiring PHP developer from has won some accreditations or acknowledgments from other organizations. These acknowledgments can be for technical abilities, quality processes, affiliations, etc.
Communication Fluency
This is especially important if you are considering hiring an offshore PHP developer. Try talking to a PHP developer and gauge his communication skills. A PHP developer has to be comfortable with your preferred language.
The developer should be in a position to comprehend your working instructions and communicate back effectively any of their concerns.
But this is only one side of the communication aspect. The other element is cultural exchange. When working with an offshore developer, there is a cultural chasm that you might encounter. Ensure that this cultural divide is not so huge as to impact your project or rapport with the developer.
Check Developer’s Portfolio
This is where you should be real smart. There are companies out there who will give you an enterprise-level portfolio. But they would not be comfortable sharing developer-specific portfolio. This can be fishy. Always demand for a developer specific portfolio.
Question the developer over what technologies he has employed in the application. Ask him what coding standards he has followed. If possible, try to read a case study of the project. This will give you a detailed insight into what the application is all about. This is your final frontier in PHP developer evaluation.
Benefits of Hiring Dedicated PHP Developers
Cost-effective
Many SMB business makes the mistake of hiring an in-house team of developers and later realize that some resources are of no use, which adds up to your overall cost for training and other stuff.
While on the other hand, hiring dedicated PHP programmers are is much more cost-effective. Since you hire them for a particular project, you actually save money. Also, they are equipped with specialized training and skills that complement your work.
Deadline Disciplinede
With your in-house team, you may come across days when there’s a delay in a software project. That eventually cost you money. But the case with the dedicated PHP developers is otherwise.
They work well to ensure timely submission of the project. Because of their skilled expertise and sound-command over PHP language, these teams of dedicated developers can resolve any complex issue during the defined timeline. So, what you get is exceptional outcomes – without missing a deadline for the project.
Flexibility
Hiring a dedicated PHP developer gives you a more significant advantage than the in-house one as they work for you from a remote location. This eliminates the hassle of setting up infrastructure or space for the development team.
Speed to Market
High-quality web applications and apps are developed by dedicated professional PHP developers, leading to increased business resilience and an enhanced and improved ability to function under competitive market pressure.
Depending on your needs, the team leader assigned to a job will scale up your funds. This will allow you to gain versatility and adaptability to function more efficiently to achieve your final objective.
Steps to Hire Best PHP Developer
1) Start the hiring process with a clear job description
Basically, there are two PHP developers category:
- CMS-Drive web development: In this role, if you want to optimize or modernize your existing CMS (content management system) like WordPress/Drupal, then mention that exclusively in your job description.
- Platform-driven development: If you want to hire a PHP developer for developing a web platform or improve an online shopping portal – then it would then be useful to mention your framework of choice in screening skilled, dedicated developers
2) Where To Find Dedicated PHP Developers
To hunt down your best-dedicated PHP development team, you have to look for them where they spend most of the time. Stackoverflow, Mogul, Meetup, Github, etc., are tech-based platforms where developers ask and answer queries.
Other websites like Clutch, Upwork, Fiverr, GoodFirms, Toptal are best suited for finding experienced and skilled dedicated PHP developers. But don’t forget the step mentioned above of clearly stating job responsibilities – while searching on these platforms.
3) Conduct interview
After shortlisting the companies/ candidates as per your project needs, you now need to have a conversation or an interview to better understand their portfolio.
Since the PHP developer community has different expertise levels, investing in an online screening test framework to screen on a scale would be a good option.
For coding language combinations like PHP and SQL, or PHP and WordPress – platforms like Devskiller or Testdome have pre-built customizable PHP test questions. A majority of your inbound applicants could be screened for these exams, after which you can perform virtual or in-person technical interviews.
Technical Interview Questions
This round of interview will give you better clarity on if the PHP developers are the best fit for your project. To do that, here are a few PHP developer-related interview questions:
- How to enable error reporting in PHP?
- How will you define a constant in PHP?
- What are the differences between echo and print in PHP?
- How will you use HTTP headers in PHP?
- What is the difference between a session and cookies?
- How to compare objects in PHP??
- Write a sample of code showing the nested ternary conditional operator in PHP.
- Define constructor and destructor in PHP
- Can you tell the 3 scope levels available in PHP, and how would you define them?
- Define composer? What benefits have you found in the composer?
Most important hard skills for PHP developers
In the software world, the right set of hard skills is required for any developers to handle complex tasks. Here are the essential hard skills to look for while hiring a PHP developer:
1) Sheer knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
2) Good and effective business communication skills
3) Able to manage multiple projects at a time
4) Why and how’s of Web-Development, web services, GIT
5) Familiar with development tools, framework, and libraries
6) A team leader
Endings
There is no foolproof method of hiring PHP developers. But a little caution and evaluation can help you avoid bad taste in your outsourcing endeavor.
An ideal PHP developer can transform your vision into a reality effortlessly. Just spot the right talent and hire a dedicated PHP developer!
