How do you make the best of hiring junior developers?

We see the trend that more companies hire junior developers straight from universities. There are many reasons for that: lack of resources available in the market, lower price and willingness to help the industry to grow.

It is important to understand that hiring a new person with little or no experience does not always reduce the cost; it is usually more expensive than hiring an experienced developer.

That is why we suggest looking for fewer experienced developers only for companies of a certain size. You need to have enough senior resources to continue developing, onboarding, and following up with your new peers. You also need good processes for onboarding both internally in a company and in product development.

Hiring Process

Usually, when we talk about technical hiring, we are talking about technical interviews, sometimes offline/online technical tasks, a few interviews with different people, etc. But when it comes to Juniors or Students, most of this does not work at all.

Students usually study in outdated university languages and frameworks; they do not know much about development processes, how to work in a team and never run any program outside their laptop.

So, talking very much about technical skills is not going to show you the candidate's potential. For sure, you need to set a minimal entry level for each position. For example, frontend developers should know React Framework or similar to some extent and show some projects they built in the university they graduated from or their private projects. You should evaluate their interest in technology and willingness to learn.

So, far more time must be spent evaluating their emotional intelligence. Do they match your company culture? Are they proactive and open to feedback? They should understand that they are only at the beginning of the journey and want to learn more.

One good way to attract and evaluate students is to call them into your company for the master thesis or other practice time they have to do in their last years at university. This is a great opportunity to build a brand for your company. You may also try to cooperate more with universities and provide lectures. If your company builds a product, it can be used in the educational process - share licenses with the university for free or at a discounted price. This way, more students will know about your company and be willing to attend practice there.

But it is important to remember: if you bring students for practice, it is not only the students’ responsibility but also yours for their success. This means you need to allocate resources to help them find a good theme for their project that is both not complicated and not easy, so it allows them to have a good score. It should be a manageable task to do within a short period of time. You must help review the document and add valuable feedback when they write a report.

As a result of this work, you will see who among students has potential and who does not. If you did your job well, most of them would ask to work in your company!

If your business is big enough, you can set up your own courses or academy to prepare the people with the skills your company needs. This is a very popular model in Western Europe and Asia among companies providing offshoring of IT services. It usually provides mediocre results, but it is a working model because of the volume. Experienced people can cover newcomers until they learn how to work. At the same time, companies cover the cost of education very fast by starting to sell new resources that can do one particular thing.

Who should hire a Junior Developer?

Hiring a new resource is always a risk. Norwegian labour law strictly regulates this process, and every hire should be a very careful decision. It is a long wait time if the candidate is already working somewhere. It will take 3 months to wait. If we add at least 3 months to find a candidate, we are talking about half a year. If you make a mistake, it will be a long wait time for the project to find the resources that you actually need.

You have to give new employees time to become productive. Usually, it takes up to 6 months for newcomers to become familiar with the company and the software it is developing to provide tangible results. This is the same time that they have in a contract for a trial period.

When we are talking about hiring a Junior Developer, we need to take into consideration a few important aspects:

1. Usually, the ratio between Junior and Senior developers in a company should be about 1:2-3. This allows senior developers to effectively oversee projects and mentor juniors, ensuring quality and consistency in development practices. However, this can vary; some teams prefer a 1:1 ratio for highly specialised projects, while others might have a different distribution depending on their specific circumstances
2. Seniors should have enough time to guide junior developers without significantly hindering their productivity. This not only helps in the professional growth of juniors but also in maintaining code quality and project progress

If you are a startup with limited senior resources and budget, hiring Juniors or students will not solve your problems. If you want to hire, you need to understand that your development capacity will slow down for a while, your code quality will be lower, and your senior resources will be overwhelmed with the amount of work they will have to do.

If you do not do proper onboarding and mentoring, you risk building a low-quality product without developers sharing information. Usually, in that situation, Junior developers receive a task that is not very important for now. They do not receive any help and try to figure it out independently. This will bring costly consequences in the long run, when they will eventually leave with all the knowledge and huge disappointment but with valuable experience that they will use in the next place.

Conclusion

While hiring junior developers sounds like an easy way to save your development budget, it is much more complicated. Hiring junior developers will affect your senior resources' productivity, code quality, etc. But Juniors can bring fresh perspectives to the problems and help build better products in the end.