Hiring Great Drupal Developers - Buyer Beware!

Hiring Drupal developers is difficult. Hiring great Drupal developers in the current market often feels close to impossible. They are highly sought after and most of the people on the market, in all honesty, aren’t very good.

I’ve put together a list of the best Drupal interview questions that I’ve used over the years to screen Drupal candidates. Hopefully you’ll find them useful.

CMS developers are an unusual breed. They come from a wide variety of backgrounds, often stumbling into programming. While a non-CS background can bring valuable perspective, if you need a strong generalist on your project you should take extra care to make sure that you’re getting the skill set you require.

As you are probably well aware, hiring is very time consuming. To be effective you should aim to spend 80% of your time talking to great candidates. To do this, you need an efficient initial screen to quickly weed out unsuitable candidates. Ideally you’ll do your screening online or on the phone.

Your screen should test for most of the skills that you’ll need to see exhibited on the job, including: web basics, OO PHP knowledge, solid coding technique, system design, CSS/HTML, SQL and Drupal expertise.

After the screen, don’t forget to look at your candidate’s commits to Drupal core or module functionality. In my experience, great Drupal developers have a track record of regular contributions to the project.