Vervoe logo

How To Hire a Full-Stack Engineer

Complete with job descriptions, skill profiles, and interview templates. Use this Full-Stack Engineer hiring guide to help you make the right decisions, fast.

Full-Stack Engineer Recruitment Guide

What does a Full-Stack Engineer do?

The role of a Full-Stack Engineer is to look after both the front and back end of applications. These applications may consist of anything from mobile applications or websites. Being a Full-Stack engineer means you’re writing server side code like an API or backend code which interacts with a user interface. Full-Stack engineers generally don’t specialize in one language, but rather are proficient in many, as they will need to make many different parts of a system interact with one another.

Day to day tasks of a Full-Stack Engineer

Skills assessment

Full-Stack Engineer definition

Full-Stack Engineer’s role which is likened to a jack of all trades, they will work with databases, servers, code and clients in order to produce a product which tries to meet or exceed the needs of a customer.

Full-stack engineer 1
HIRING PROCESS

Full-Stack Engineer Hiring Process

Step 1: Understand the role
Step 2: Source Applicants
Step 3: Skills Assessment
Step 4: Interview
Step 5: Hire

Build the Ideal Candidate Profile​

To find the best person for the role, you need to understand what the role involves. You can complete this with the hiring manager to define the role, its contribution, and the skills needed.

Write A Job Description Based On Skills

Once you understand the requirements for the role, you’ll need to understand the skills for success. You can then write an effective job description to promote your role.

Selecting The Ideal Candidate

See which applicants have the right skills for the role. Send all your applicants a Vervoe skills assessment from the expert library, or customize one for your organization.

Interview Top Performers

Your skills assessment results will identify top performers. Focus your time on interviewing those that have met or exceeded your requirements. Assessment results will also help guide which skill areas to focus on in the interview.

Making An Offer

Once you assess your candidates against these skills, you’re ready to offer the top performer(s). You should base your offer on the value that the candidate would bring to your team and your business as a whole. It is also important to ensure your compensation and benefits packages are competitive in the industry and help you attract and retain the top talent.
Build the ideal candidate profile

Skills needed for a Full-Stack Engineer

A Full-Stack Engineer must be able to pick up different pieces of technologies without much prior knowledge and understand them in short turn around in order to develop different systems which meet the needs and wants of clients and stakeholders. Full-Stack Engineers will need to have fundamentals of software engineering mastered in order to thrive in this role.

Pro Tip

Understanding a candidate’s ability in the wide array of technologies that your organisation uses will allow you to find projects where they’ve applied their skills in the past and you will be able to draw connections between your organisation and make the judgement if their skillset is the right fit for your organisation.

WRITE A JOB DESCRIPTION BASED ON SKILLS

How to write a Full-Stack Engineer job description

Once you’ve determined the skills required for the role, you can write the job description to advertise for your position. Here’s what to include in your Full-Stack Engineer job description:

Job Title: What position are you hiring for?

Summary: What makes your company unique? What would it be like to work for you?

Responsibilities: An overview of the role’s day-to-day activities, and how the position contributes to the organization

Requirements: Skills a candidate must have to perform the job successfully

Benefits: Details of compensation, benefits, and any perks on offer

Pro Tip

In building your candidate profile, remember you’ve already identified what skills are needed to succeed in the role. Here’s where to list your “must-have” skills and maybe a couple of “nice-to-have” skills. For example, a Full-Stack Engineer should have experience working with databases, so ask them about their last project where their code interacted with a database.

Full-stack engineer 2
SELECTING THE IDEAL CANDIDATE

Sample skill tests for a Full-Stack Engineer

Create a free account today to access the full assessment and more from our library

Full-stack engineer 3

Question 1

Spring Core

Question Type: Multiple Choice

In which of the ways given below can dependencies be injected in a Spring IoC application?
A) Constructor based
B) Destructor based
C) Setter based

Full-stack engineer 3

Question 2

Java

Question Type: Multiple Choice

Let’s say you want to write software in which you want to compose several objects i.e one object wants to use features offered by another object. Which of the following design patterns is best suited for such a purpose?

Full-stack engineer 3

Question 3

JSP

Question Type: Multiple Choice

Which of the following methods is used to return the object of ServletContext from the GenericServlet class?

INTERVIEW TOP PERFORMERS

How to interview a Full-Stack Engineer

Once your Vervoe skills assessment has surfaced the most qualified people for your open role, you can focus on interviewing these candidates. The interview should focus on any skills that require development that were highlighted from the skills assessment.

Now you know that candidates can do the job, the interview becomes more of a relationship building exercise where you can get to know the candidate on a more personal level, understand their motivations, and how they would fit in with the team.

Making An Offer

How much does it cost to hire a Full-Stack Engineer?

In the United States the salary of a Full-Stack Engineer is reported to be $97,500 by Talent.com, whereas Glassdoor USA reports it as $90,817. The lowest ten percent of Node.Js Developers are paid $62,000, whereas the top ninety percent earn up to $94,000 with the median of these salaries coming in at $131,000 according to Payscale.com

Full-Stack Engineer Salary United States

In the United States a Full-Stack Engineer can expect to have a salary around $94,000 USD. There will be a few factors which affect this number, which include seniority, location of the organisation and the industry the organisation operates within.

Full-Stack Engineer Salary United Kingdom

As a Full Stack Engineer the salary within the United Kingdom comes out to a value of £46,000 a year. The factors which make this salary come down to a couple of main factors, location of the organisation and skill of the developer.

Full-Stack Engineer Salary Australia

In Australia the median salary for a Full-Stack Engineer is $100,000 AUD. This salary will be heavily dependent on the skill of the employee and the type of work they will be working on.