Complete hiring guide for Tailwind developers

It might appear easy and straightforward to find a developer when you need one. But, there is more than just posting job ads and quickly hiring a candidate. Evaluating the developer’s skills is the only crucial part surrounding direct hiring. Just imagine, if you do not assess developers for relevant skills and expertise, the whole process from start to finish will be faulty.

To find the best Tailwind developer, you need to emphasize several factors that elaborate on the expertise of the candidates, their skills, education, and professional experience, as well as practical hands-on proof that that specific developer truly meets the requirements for the job position.

In this complete hiring guide for Tailwind developers, you can read more and prepare to conduct the Tailwind developer hiring process much better. We will explain more about everything that encompasses working with Tailwind. We include information about technical and non-technical skills, essentials, statistics about relevant numbers, salaries, obligations, assessment phases, and more.

The hiring process of a developer is not something that allows for shortcuts, and we encourage you to have a look at our complete hiring guide for detailed guidance on the hiring process of a Tailwind developer.

About Tailwind

Tailwind, also known as Tailwind CSS, represents a utility-first CSS framework for a fast custom interface building. The developer can customize easily and quickly, and because Tailwind is a low-level CSS framework, the developers can use every building block for their designs.

Tailwind framework relies on CSS (cascading style sheet language used for describing any parts written in a markup language). It also uses CSS classes for a practical and convenient styling process.

With Tailwind, a significant feature is that there are no obstacles like opinionated systems that usually would hinder the development speed and dynamics. And overall, this framework enables the successful creation of custom user interfaces.

Stats about Tailwind

When it comes to statistics about Tailwind, we will focus on the demand, popularity, salary estimates, and relevant sections.

Tailwind was released back in 2019, but since then, it reached the current (and latest) version 3.1 in 2022, with several previous improvements and fixes. The newest version has built-in CSS imports support, broader spacing, opacity color changes, adjustable contrast, style-native dialog backdrops, and more.

Since then, Tailwind rose to the top of most preferred CSS frameworks back in 2020, and astonishingly it keeps first place in popularity again in 2022 due to the straightforward CSS that’s easy to work with and is also suitable for beginners too.

Regarding the salary of a Tailwind dev, it ranges between $76,599 to $141,206 annually or $85,586 on average.

Popular brand names that rely on Tailwind usage

Many brands and companies rely on Tailwind in their work, but here are several out of many listed:

1. Starbucks
2. Buzzfeed (Solid)
3. TED (Shed)
4. Medium
5. Kickstarter
6. Twitch
7. Github (Primer design system)
8. Pizza Hut (UK)
9. Blizzard Entertainment (Diablo 4)
10. Github CoPilot - AI pair programmer

Interviewing a Tailwind developer

Helpful tips for a pre-screening interview

No matter how skilled you believe you are for hiring a Tailwind developer, you will still probably need external assistance from talent acquisition specialists and recruiters. Including these professionals in the dev-hunting process is an excellent idea to ensure that only good aspects are tested and reviewed before the final hiring decision.

Why do you need a talent acquisition specialist? Because they will place focus on initial factors that determine whether or not the developer continues further with the interviewing stages later on. They know the right questions to ask the Tailwind dev and how to evaluate the expertise.

First, they focus on expertise years or how many years of experience the developer has with Tailwind. During this process, they concentrate simultaneously on the soft skills of the developer as well as their English proficiency, interview etiquette, punctuality, and professionalism in terms of appearance, communication, and similar.

Technical skills of a Tailwind developer

The best candidate for the Tailwind developer position needs to have knowledge and experience with:

• Tailwind CSS
• PHP, Laravel
• API integrations (JSON, REST)
• ECMAScript (a JavaScript standard)
• jQuery, AJAX, Bootstrap
• Knowledge of C# and Python

We also asked Diamant Isufi, a software engineer in Proxify, to tell us more about the must-know and must-have technical skills:

“The Tailwind developer needs to know the basics of HTML and CSS and how IDS (intrusion detection software) works. They need to know how classes work and in what way can the CSS file be accessed. Additionally, knowledge in mobile and desktop responsiveness, and correct approaches for webpage multiuse on more devices, for the users. And, there should be knowledge of NPM (Node Package Manager), and Yarn (Yet Another Resource Negotiator) too.”

Diamant Isufi

Non-technical skills of a Tailwind developer

The recruiters, talent acquisition specialists, and hiring managers also pay attention to the non-technical skills of a Tailwind developer.

It is a non-negotiable one that the developer has to have a minimum average or good English proficiency because this indicates the developer will have a clear understanding and communication with the clients. Another non-technical skill to have is the attitude and openness during the interview—good soft skills for communication ensure that the developer can overcome potential challenges through a mutual understanding with the client.

The developer must be punctual for the call/interview because this signals whether or not the developer is responsible and accessible when needed.

Essentials and assessment of a Tailwind developer

There are several essentials and must-have requirements to look for in a Tailwind dev, as mentioned above in sections as well, such as:

• Bachelor's or Master’s degree in computer science, IT, or engineering
• Experience in customizing apps with TailwindCSS UI
• Experience with Tailwind CSS, Laravel, PHP
• Experience with API integrations (JSON, REST)
• ECMAScript knowledge
• Experience with C# and Python
• Experience with AJAX, Bootstrap, jQuery

To this, Diamant adds:

“A Tailwind developer needs to know when and for which projects they can use Tailwind. It can be easy to conduct the setup and apply styles quickly. Still, for reusability and scalability, they would need to know proper structures that reduce redundant codes and apply global styles. I would personally ask the candidate about their previous experiences with Bootstrap and Material Design, how they handle responsiveness, how they set up themes and style in previous projects, and what experience they have with SaaS.”

What distinguishes a great Tailwind developer from a good one?

It is not hard to make a difference between a great and good Tailwind developer. The great one will have proven and hands-on years of experience with this framework, and they will be part of the Tailwind community for some time too.

Additionally, they will immediately share their professional opinions about Tailwind components—critical thinking and constructive opinions about the framework (improvements, issues, etc.) confirm that someone has enough good experience with it.

Also, do not underestimate the importance of sharing opinions in the form of ideas and improvements, so if the Tailwind developer shares some concrete thoughts for the present or future work, that is another clear sign they are probably the right candidate for the position.

And, of course, outstanding performance in the technical and practical tests during the interviewing phases is another vital aspect for filtering the applications to the best one.

Possible challenges during the hiring of a Tailwind developer

As with most or all hiring, the usual challenge that could arise is hiring a developer that lacks the proper skills or expertise for the job position. The recruiter can resolve this in time if the interviewing and vetting are done correctly and meticulously.

And to avoid this type of challenge, there should be no hasty or rushing dynamics during the interviewing and filtering of applications. The hiring managers or recruiters need to filter out the best applications and not just group aside all ‘good enough’ candidates.

Why and when do you need to hire a Tailwind developer?

You need to hire a Tailwind developer if you need to achieve or improve the following in your work/business:

• Building different looks and components regularly—Tailwind is suitable for utilizing all palettes and colors to create a new look component every time.
• Management of unused CSS—with Tailwind, there will be no more unused CSS, and when the developers are building for production, in the end, there is a tiny CSS bundle of less than 10KB in size.
• Responsive designs—the developer can quickly build highly responsive designs directly in HTML, without the hassle of dealing with various media queries in the CSS.
• No duplications—Tailwind manages repetition by extracting specific components to achieve a single result.
• Elegant and practical dark mode design—the developer can use Tailwind to apply a dark mode in the configuration and then use the same dark mode over any color pattern, border colors, gradient, or text color.
• Usage of out-of-the-box ready defaults—Tailwind offers many defaults that are ready to use, such as spacing scale, box shadows, defaults for the mouse cursor, color palettes, and more. These defaults allow for an easily customized and personalized design that is easily implemented in the customized CSS framework.
• Better IDE (integrated development environment) integration—the developer does not need to remember every single class name because, with Tailwind IntelliSense extension, there are autocomplete suggestions that don’t need configuration.

Benefits of Tailwind

Since Tailwind is among the most popular CSS frameworks, there are many benefits of working with it and incorporating it into the daily work of devs. This framework has outstanding features that apply to different projects, especially React projects.

When a developer uses Tailwind, they focus on displaying an item rather than that item's functionality, and testing is much easier due to this purpose of layout and display emphasis.

Let’s see what are the biggest and summed up benefits of Tailwind:

• Security and responsiveness—there are rarely any bugs and breaks with Tailwind, and the developer can design a layout directly with the HTML files for a mobile-friendly and responsive experience.
• Fast CSS styling—Tailwind is the most rapid HTML-styling framework that allows direct layout designing through many built-in classes. When the developer styles certain web apps, there is no need for default features and themes; instead, the developer chooses various looks and options. Everything from color palettes, spacing, themes, styling, and colors to more similar things.
• Common utility patterns—With Tailwind, there is no need to name classes because it offers available common utility patterns for overall organizing and cascading classes.
• Suitable for building complex layouts—One exciting thing about Tailwind is that it uses a mobile-first approach, and the developer can build responsive designs quickly.
• Community integration—Whenever the developer feels stuck or needs to get the opinion of another expert alike, the community offers many such possibilities.

Regarding the benefits and best things of working with Tailwind, Diamant said:

“This is an excellent solution for developers familiar with CSS who want to speed up the creation and design processes. It is simple to use, easy to set up, and easy for applying styles to components. The responsiveness is handled easily through breakpoints, and there is a Tailwind configuration file for customizing the project needs and matching the theme.”

We see the numerous benefits of using Tailwind, which is even more prominent with employers and companies regarding long-term benefits for business success.

Companies would benefit from hiring Tailwind developers because there will always be a precise and unique UI for the websites, not just approximately completed. Also, there is no limitation for choosing other style approaches, and customization improves when CSS and SCSS are combined. Styling structures will always be delivered very fast and efficiently changed if needed. And, there is no depending on other libraries too.

Tailwind interview questions and answers

Below we suggest just some out of many relevant interview questions to consider for the Tailwind developer interview:

1. Briefly describe Tailwind functions and directives.

Expected answer: The functions in Tailwind are the sets of custom functionalities for easy accessing of specific values in Tailwind. In this context, the directives are the at-rules used specifically for Tailwind, and they represent CSS statement types that direct how CSS behaves. All directives start with @

The functions and directives add features to your Tailwind projects that make those projects enriched with special functionalities. Some to list are:

• @apply—If you want to combine existing class parts within a custom CSS, you use @apply.
• @tailwind—with this directive, your CSS will receive ‘components’, ‘base’, ‘variants’, and ‘utilities’.
• @responsive—to wrap the class definitions and create responsive class versions
• @variants—for utility versions creating
• config()—used for easy accessing of the config values in Tailwind
• @screen—for easy creation of a media queries without values duplicaton

2. What can you elaborate about custom styles in Tailwind?

Expected answer: We can always quickly add customized styles in the Tailwind framework because it is highly customizable. There are little to no slowdowns and obstacles to this because Tailwind is extensible too. For example, we can customize a theme with unique spacing or typography and color palettes too. Then, we can add custom CSS rules to the project with @layers. Also, there are base styles additions, adding of component classes, easy ambiguity resolving, and easy whitespace handling, among many others.

3. What are ‘media queries’ in CSS?

Expected answer: The media queries are used for appearance modification of the app or web page/website through specific features, user preferences, and characteristics that would complete a functional appearance, and these queries are primarily used and connected to CSS, but you can use them with JS or HTML too.

These queries are a great tool to use, and they are combined with the media types in terms of enriching and adding to the concept of media types (which, by the way, are various rule sets for various devices). Media queries make it possible to adjust the resolution, height, and width of a device, viewport height and width, and landscape or portrait orientation. Ultimately, we get a nicely tailored and customized style sheet for the devices (laptop, mobile, desktop, etc.).

4. Can you explain the difference between CSS and CSS3?

Expected answer: The keyword modules are the crucial word here because CSS lacks modules, and CSS3 has them. To define it in a simple way, CSS is a simpler version, more basic; it offers stylizing with colors, backgrounds, and border options but has no responsive design support. It also boosts the overall accessibility of content.

At the same time, CSS3 is more advanced and updated, and we get that responsive design support here. With CSS3, we can format and structure pages and even get individual modules if we split CSS standards.

5. What is CSS Box Model?

Expected answer: If we want to refer to things related to layout, design, or ‘framing’ of the things we see, we refer to the box model. All parts in CSS are ‘boxed’, so for layout handling, creation, alignments, and adjustments, we need to know how to work with this model.

This box model resembles a box-frame, and it frames and captures HTML elements inside of it, so the components of this box are padding (the neat area surrounding the content), margins (a framing that’s out of the border), the content itself (the text and/or image), and borders (the frame around content and padding too).

6. What are ‘nested groups’?

Expected answer: First, let’s define nested groups—this is simply one group, child-group, contained within another parent-group.

In CSS, nesting represents a process where we gather and nest items that reduce code written by the dev, with the help of the plugin ‘tailwind/nesting’. In turn, this helps us to load any pages faster and also minimize the size of style-sheets. The process of nesting is a selector contained in another selector or related styles grouped in one place, and thus we write the CSS in a more organized.

7. What can you say about CSS web page integration?

Expected answer: The CSS web page integration can be done in three ways.

• Inline—If there are HTML elements attributes to the CSS code, i.e., we apply CSS to them. Here we go to the HTML element attribute and write CSS code in it.

• Embedded/Internal—This one is great for one-of-a-kind style applying within one document or through < style > within < head > , so we place CSS in the web page head element.

• Imported (External)—If we need multiple website page editing and changing, this is the right way. We go to an external type of file, and we use < link > element to place the CSS here. For this, we need to go to the workspace, make a separate CSS file, and start the linking in all subsequent web pages.

8. What are CSS ‘pseudo-classes’ and ‘pseudo-elements’?

Expected answer: If we need to specify or define a particular element or state, we need to use a selector for specifying those states and elements, and this type of selector is called a pseudo-class. It is, in fact, a keyword within a selector, and with the pseudo-class, we can do various stylings of elements, links (visited and unvisited both), and more similar. It’s just enough to hover and move the mouse over the element we want to stylize. For example, with hover, we can change the color of a button so that when a user hovers over that button, the color alters. There are a lot of pseudo-class variants, such as focus, group-hover, active, focus-within, group-focus, motion-safe, focus-visible, and many others.

When we compare and define the phrasings pseudo-class and pseudo-element, the pseudo-class is a CSS virtual class, and the pseudo-element is an HTML virtual element. The pseudo-class pinpoints the various element states, and the pseudo-element takes the role of a new element within an element—they stylize a line or the first letter, for example.

9. What is a CSS ‘preprocessor’?

Expected answer: We use preprocessors in CSS when we need to simplify work with repetitive tasks, i.e., to enable their automation, but also to reduce various errors and unnecessary code lengths and to make snippets of code that we can reuse.

Some CSS preprocessors are Less, Sass, Stylus, and PostCSS, and using these with Tailwind is just optional, not a must. The benefits of using preprocessors would be easier CSS organizing and combining of the files.

10. What can you say about ‘calc()’ in Tailwind?

Expected answer: calc() represents a valuable and simple-to-use function that we use when we need to get calculating of a specific value, i.e., receiving property values in CSS. When we use this function, all math expressions are enabled, such as ( * ), ( - ), ( / ), and ( + ), and we also receive values linked to padding, width, margin, and height.

This function is always placed in between two square brackets.

11. Define the CSS BEM.

Expected answer: BEM (Block-Element-Modifier) is a front-end methodology or convention for the naming of the CSS classes and neatly organizing them into clean formats.

When we use CSS BEM, we can maintain and organize our CSS better, for example, through resolving scoping issues upon namespace defining. This methodology is especially useful for large projects because it enables easy organizing of styles within those projects.

Now, let’s briefly define the three parts of BEM:

• Block keeps elements together inside, and it behaves very much like a scope
• Element acts like a more specified component part
• Modifier is used for the addition of some styles in some elements

Using BEM is beneficial because we get a better structure of the CSS code, we can reuse independent blocks, and there won’t be any more cascading issues and obstacles.

12. How would you describe Tailwind ‘floats’?

Expected answer: Tailwind CSS Float is a class that can recognize multiple values. Both Tailwind CSS Float, and CSS float property, can be used for the same purpose. With the help of Float, we can easily observe the content when we need to wrap an element with it.

We have three types of Float:

• float-none—When in a default position/place, the element can float here.
• float-left—For element floating on the left of a container
• float-right—For element floating on the right of a container

13. What is ‘CSS cascading’? And ‘cascading portion’?

Expected answer: When the rules of styling position are flowing, descending, or ‘cascading’ from various/different sources, we call this algorithm CSS cascading. The concept contributes to a neat hierarchy of styles.

When we delve more into details, the cascading portion means we maintain a document more practically because we make divisions of separated style formations, such as line width, font size, the color of the background, and font too.

14. Definition and a brief comparison of ‘nth-of-type()’ and ‘nth-child()’.

Expected answer: Both 'nth-of-type()’ and ‘nth-child()’ are selectors, pseudo-classes in CSS.

The nth-of-type() can easily match a number with an element on the basis of that number which signifies the numeric position of the element, i.e., on the basis of the order within the source. Here, the position is determined only within the group of same element type siblings.

With nth-child(), we also match a number with an element, but here the number signifies the siblings quantity that preceded the element in the whole document.

15. Compare and define the ‘relative’ and ‘absolute’ in the context of CSS.

Expected answer: These terms represent positions in Tailwind CSS, i.e., element position in comparison with the overall document flow.

Relative is a normal positioning in context to the element’s normal and plain position. If we work with an element that’s relatively placed and we set bottom, top, left, and right properties, there will be visible changes much different from the normal plain position.

In turn, with the absolute position, we adjust the element position only in regards to its placement to the ‘parent’, and if there is no ‘parent’ and we need to use something as ‘parent’, we appoint this role to the body of the document.