Ready to Hire Database Developers for Your Company? Here’s Everything You Need to Know!

Database management is an integral part of an organization because it requires managing large amounts of data. That’s why there is a great demand to hire database developers for various roles, including data analysts, business analysts, SQL administrators, IT managers, etc.

Database developers have a tough role to play. It requires a broad understanding of applications, business needs, user needs, and good professional database skills. Even large organizations usually have a small group of database developers. However, only one or two people play this role in most organizations. That is, there is no room for mediocrity or lethargy.

Recruiting the right technical team for an organization can be a daunting task for hiring managers and recruiters with no technical background. Non-technical recruiters receive a lot of resumes and are confused about how to hire database developers, conduct pre-hiring evaluations, and what kind of skills to look for in developers.

This article will discuss how to hire the best database developers and streamline the hiring process.

Why should you hire a database developer?

There are many organizations where developers play the role of database administrators. While some developers may have advanced management skills, we must consider certain factors to decide whether a professional database developer is needed or not. Let's have a closer look at each of these elements.

• Performance issues are the most obvious sign that a special DBA is needed. These issues directly affect the user experience and significantly impact both commercial and brand image. If your application's response time is inadequate due to database interactions, you may need to tune your database to improve performance.

• Security and data availability are two essential factors to consider. These are areas that require special knowledge and continuous monitoring. The security field is evolving rapidly with the challenges and sophistication of hacking tools and attacks. Don't compromise on safety!

• If you use a cloud environment to host your database or a managed database hosting service, the cloud service handles all availability issues. However, it's good to check for regular recovery and availability checks after downtime. In a world that is always connected, longer downtime is not feasible.

Hiring a database developer on your team from the beginning can bring tremendous value to your applications and data. However, the following scenario requires a dedicated database developer.

• If your business relies on data availability until the last microsecond, you need to hire a dedicated database developer. The best examples are banks, financial companies, stock market apps, and emergency medical services. These services cannot handle downtime, delays, or transaction losses. In such cases, you need multiple database developers to ensure data security, reliability, and availability.

• If your application is facing latency issues. Many variables can play a role, such as poorly written applications and hardware and infrastructure limits, but most often due to poor database optimization.

• If the number of transactions is increasing rapidly. The index becomes useless with the continuous addition of new data and changes to existing data. If you have a lot of transactions, you need to delete, modify, or rebuild the corresponding index frequently. As data and transactions grow, database log files begin to grow. These log files are essential to ensure transactional consistency, deadlock resolution, and rollback. As the log file size increases, the response time for each transaction begins to decrease.

Do not postpone your decision to hire a database developer for your company if you are experiencing any of the above problems.

Roles and responsibilities of database developers

Database developers and administrators play a vital role in any organization. Some of the key roles and responsibilities of database developers are as follows.

• Database developers are responsible for designing stable, reliable, and efficient databases that provide the framework for easy storage, access, manipulation, and analysis of data based on business requirements.
• Efficient maintenance of databases for ensuring maximum performance, productivity, and data availability at all times.
• Monitoring usage of the database including the volume of transactions, concurrency levels, and response times.
• Implementing strong security protocols for ensuring the safety, integrity, and consistency of data at all times.
• Taking regular database backups, creating data archives, and planning an efficient storage strategy for scaling the company’s operations.

Tips to hire great database developers

Start with a good job description.

Start the hiring process with a compelling job description. It should clearly state the needs of the company and the roles and responsibilities of the ideal candidate.

Having a clear and concise job description is the best recruiting approach, as it fills the candidate pool with well-educated and experienced candidates. As a recruiter, you and your manager must read and sign your job description before it can go online.

Technical screening

Technical screening is one of the most important parts of the hiring process when hiring a database development team. Database developer technical screening tests provide deep knowledge of developers' skills, experience, and how passionate they are.

The screening test provides an overview of the following professional developer skills:

• Database table and structure design
• Creating optimized SQL queries for integration with existing applications
• Creating database triggers for automation
• Maintaining data quality and managing database security
• Creating views, functions, and save systems.

Use simulators

Simulators play an important role in hiring database developers and help recruiters save time, money, and effort in hiring the right team. It's a coding evaluation test for candidates to provide a real-world situation that tests the developers’ ability to create optimized queries to access data in a SQL database before an interview.

Here are some of the benefits of hiring a database developer using the simulator:

• Much better than a job interview.
• Helps remove prejudice
• Help candidates measure their interests.
• Help recruiters and recruitment managers validate a candidate's technical skills.

Online SQL skills evaluation

Use an online SQL skill review, even if you have a non-tech background. Performing an online SQL skill evaluation is the best way to determine if the developer is suitable for the company's requirements. This skill assessment test can filter out the best candidates and save up to 50% of the time.

Some of the benefits of using SQL functionality are:

• Ability assignment- Compare with industrial benchmarks
• Configuration determination based on information- Determine the correct adaptation of your organization
• Productivity
• Detailed analysis

Online evaluation allows the applicant to take the test anytime and anywhere. The pre-hiring tests make the hiring process very powerful and managed.

Coding interview

Once the candidate passes the SQL skills evaluation test, it's time for a direct programming interview. Interviews allow you to test your developers’ skills, including communication skills, problem-solving skills, experience, time management skills, creative skills, and other soft skills. Since you have already verified the developer's expertise in the previous steps, you can ask questions about database knowledge, frameworks, programming languages, etc.

Essential skills of a database developer

A great database developer is responsible for designing, developing, testing, deploying, and maintaining an organization’s database. Here are some of the essential skills you should look for before hiring a database developer.

Good knowledge of data modeling

The data model is an essential part of database management because it describes the actual entities such as "customers," "services," and "products" and the relationships between these entities. Therefore, database developers should be familiar with data modeling, running benchmark stacks to ensure performance, and validating user requirements.

In addition, developers need to avoid the pitfalls of data redundancy, zero saturation, tight coupling, etc.

Understanding of query and programming languages:

Website database developers should be efficient in database programming languages like SQL as it is the most common querying language used with datasets. SQL provides a wide range of capabilities for users to access and manipulate data based on their specific needs. SQL is the standard language used with relational databases and it is used to perform three fundamental operations on data including DDL, DML, and DCL operations. This is why, when hiring database administrators or developers, you must look for candidates who have high levels of expertise in SQL language.

Besides SQL, the database developers should also be good with other programming languages such as Python, Java, and C# amongst others. When working with databases, developers are required to deal with different languages, frameworks, and technologies since the database is closely associated with a wide range of applications coded in a wide array of languages. So when hiring database developers, you should assess candidates based on their familiarity with these languages and how adept they are at learning new technologies based on the demand for scaling up the company framework.

Efficiency in using various Database Management Systems:

DBMS, also referred to as the database management system is the software that manages the storage, manipulation, retrieval, and updating of data. DBMS provides multi-user access to data and is designed for fulfilling data requirements of small as well as large-scale enterprises. DBMS helps in maintaining the integrity of data and removing data redundancy. DBMS follows the ACID model, known as Atomic, Consistent, Isolation, and Durability. Some of the popular DBMS that is widely used by enterprises are Oracle, MySQL, SQLite, Microsoft Access, PostgreSQL, and dBASE among others. When hiring a database developer, you must see if they are familiar with these different DBMS software systems, and ideally, you must look for candidates who are proficient in more than one DBMS type.

Secure your database

Data protection and security are essential to business continuity, so database developers need experience designing and running secure design options. Developers also need to ensure that data integrity is maintained over time and protected from unauthorized changes and theft.

Where to find a database developer?

Due to the nature of the job, hiring a full-time database developer is common, but you can also hire a freelancer for a specific project for a limited period. However, you will want to hire a full-time database developer in most cases.

You can explore many channels to find and hire a good database developer.

• LinkedIn is a popular and primary channel where all kinds of professionals are present.
• Job boards can also be helpful. They have profiles of database developers according to the requirements.
• StackOverflow is the largest developer community, and you can find many database developers there. It is a handy source as you can see interactions with potential developers and assess many qualities, including their technical skills.
• There are various meetup groups where database developers get together and interact frequently. Such groups are another excellent place to find and hire database developers.
• If you are looking explicitly for a freelancer or remote full-time developers, Turing is the right place to hire database developers.

Hiring the top-rated database administrators and developers

If you want to hire a database administrator for your business needs then you should have a robust hiring funnel in place for sourcing and hiring the best talent in the industry. The hiring funnel has various stages from writing effective job descriptions to screening candidates' applications, from conducting interviews to vetting their suitability for the role, from offer letters to onboarding - everything needs to be done professionally in a structured manner for best results. Managing every aspect of hiring can be daunting and this is where job matching platforms like Turing can help you find top developers from around the globe seamlessly, at affordable prices.

Turing can help you source top-rated database developers from a global talent pool and match them within 3 to 5 days. The company’s own AI-powered Intelligent Talent Cloud provides the framework for sourcing, vetting, matching, and managing the remote

Conclusion

Finding someone with all the skills and experience you need is undoubtedly a challenge. If you don’t have a recruitment manager with a technical background, the hiring process can become lengthy and tedious. You can also develop a database developer evaluation test and the other evaluations mentioned above to facilitate the process.

The conclusion is simple- be intentional. Make the right decisions about hiring developers, carefully plan and carry out each hiring process, and emphasize the strengths of each individual.

A careful follow-up to the above steps will ensure that you hire the right people for your organization.