How to Find and Hire a Great Shopware Developer?

Many requests for website support, slow loading speed, lack of required features, and high maintenance costs are the main reasons why online store owners decide to migrate to another platform and search for a Shopware developer. If you have faced similar difficulties and decided to relocate to another platform, we can offer you a worthy alternative.

In most cases, online store owners want to migrate to another platform because their current solution no longer meets the business needs. Therefore, the best solution to this problem is to hire Shopware developers who can help your business. You can read about the advantages of Shopware over most popular platforms and how this migration affects business profitability in this article. Dinarys has large experience in developing e-commerce sites for Magento and Shopware.

Specifics and Difficulties of Finding the Right Candidate

The shortage of qualified IT specialists in the labor market continues to increase. Companies have a great temptation to hire anyone who meets the technical training requirements.

Given the complexity of the recruiting process in an IT company, we have systematized the requirements and standardized the selection process.

It consists of five stages:

• Forming requirements for candidates and drawing up an application;
• Searching for applicants who meet the requirements, creating a shortlist;
• Testing and interviewing;
• Decision;
• The job opening is finally closed after the new employee passes the probationary period.

The HR department needs to start with one of the most important things in recruiting: identifying who you need. In this case, this is a Shopware 6 developer.

You can see how Shopware 6 and Shopware 5 differ in this article.

The basic principle we follow when selecting candidates is this: first of all, this person needs to know their job and have work experience in this field. If there are gaps in the knowledge and the skills do not meet our requirements, the applicant must have a sufficiently high ability to learn.

When starting to fill a job opening, the project manager forms an application for a new employee. There is no specific template for this application. The main thing it needs to define is the technical requirements (programming languages, technologies) and the future employee’s position. For their part, HR managers should have a list of requirements that the company imposes on all candidates without exception. They are based on corporate standards, job profiles, and project-specific requirements.

For example, a candidate for a junior software developer position must possess at least the following set of knowledge and skills:

• knowing at least one programming language;
• understanding data structures, basic design techniques, coding system;
• being able to comment on the code;
• being able to conduct automatic testing of code elements;
• the skills to write technical documentation in English;
• teamwork skills.

The HR manager then creates a vacancy for the position of a Shopware developer, writes the text to post on social media or on specialized websites, and begins to search for candidates.

For the specifics of technical specialists’ selection, let’s analyze the third stage of this process - testing and interviewing.

By the company’s and project manager’s requirements, the candidate is asked to complete some tasks to test their skills before they proceed to the technical interview. This allows testing the candidate’s ability to solve tasks related to technologies that will be used in their work. To assess candidates’ technical knowledge and skills, our company has developed tests for various programming languages ​​and technologies, taking into account the specifics of specific projects. With the help of these tests, technical interviewers can determine how well a candidate knows their job.

The test results are a pass to the technical interview. During this type of interview with the candidate, we discuss the approaches they use in solving specific problems. This standardizes the interviewing process and also helps managers compare the programming skills of various candidates.

What Are Other Things That Count When Looking for Shopware Developers?

During the technical interview, the following aspects are also assessed:

• intellectual factor (the complexity of the tasks they can perform, the consistency of their thinking, the ability to form and convey their thoughts);
• motivational factor (preferences and expectations);
• personal factor (the candidate’s behavior during the interview).

Of course, technical interviews are led by IT specialists who are truly experts in their field. The job of the HR manager is to advise on the interviewing process, train the project managers in interviewing techniques.

When creating a vacancy, you need to consider how much you are willing to pay the future Shopware developer. Shown here are the average payment rates for developers from different countries. The rate is shown per one hour of developer’s work.

How to Interview Developers

The search for a candidate has several stages. We've analyzed various guidelines on interviewing IT professionals. We use the best of these guidelines at our company, and would like to share some of them with you.

When preparing for the interview, we recommend that technical interviewers read the candidate's resume and sketch out an interview plan (make a list of questions related to the analysis of the testing task done by the candidate and additional questions).

Bearing in mind that software development is a creative process that requires the ability to solve complex non-standard tasks, we recommend that managers also approach interviews as a non-standard task.

The following are the recommended questions when interviewing a candidate for the position of a Shopware developer, as well as possible interpretations of the information obtained and the answers you need to pay attention to.

Question about their latest project

You can ask about any project that the candidate has recently participated in. If they have just graduated, ask a question about the topic of their thesis. When interviewing experienced candidates, it is advisable to ask about a previous job.

This part of the interview is very revealing since it helps the manager get a general idea of ​​the candidate's experience, the complexity of their projects, what roles they have played, and what they would like to do. You need to pay attention to whether a person talks about their work with enthusiasm, how ready they are to go into details, whether they completed their past projects. During the interview, the topic of relationships with other former team members may also come up. These topics should be given great attention, especially if the candidate will be joining an already formed group.

Tricky question

This task’s meaning is to assess how the candidate will act in a non-standard situation, how ready they are to solve complex problems. A resourceful and quick-witted candidate will look for an answer. If the person starts to get anxious, you can ask them leading questions. The goal is not to get a correct answer, but to see the approach that the candidate uses to find a solution, their readiness and ability to find solutions.

Questions about Shopware

The Shopware software is based on emerging e-commerce technologies. It provides highly innovative marketing tools and includes integrated SEO features that are the foundation of any successful online business. A potential Shopware 6 developer should know almost everything there is to know about it. What are the advantages of this platform, what are its pros and cons, how important is this platform in the e-commerce world?

Skill presentation

We cannot hire a person without first knowing how they code. You can ask the candidate to send you a sample of code in advance. During the interview, you need to discuss the written code, ask the candidate if they like what he wrote and why. You can ask them to find errors in their own code. All developers make mistakes. Still, you need to be able to find your mistakes and admit to them, because the final result of the work of many (other members of the team, testers, customers) depends on it.

Question about design and functionality

You can ask the candidate to design something. In the case of the Shopware platform, this will be a fragment of an online store. With the help of this task, you can get an idea of ​​whether they can analyze a problem, ask questions, use the information received, how creatively they approach solving tasks, and whether they can make decisions. A good specialist will try to get more information about the assignment from the interviewer. For example: who is the store for? Do we need to create it or improve an existing one?

Outcome

After all tests and interviews are done, you need to make the decision. Do you hire a candidate and, if so, which position (junior or senior Shopware developer) it will be and what will be the conditions of employment. In our company, this decision is made jointly by the technical interviewer and the HR manager. We have developed a template for assessing a candidate to make the right choice.

Using this template, we determine the desired portrait of the candidate first. Then, in interviewing and evaluating candidates, we compare the ideal with the applicant’s real portrait. This preliminary assessment helps us make the right choice among several candidates and adjust the future training needs for the new employee.

You can hire a Shopware developer from our team. Share your project idea or requirements to start your project.