Top 10 Skills to Look For When You Hire a Laravel Developer

Top 10 Skills to Look For When You Hire a Laravel Developer

There’s a difference between a PHP developer who has used Laravel and a Laravel developer who can build something you’ll still want to maintain a year from now.

The title won’t tell you which one you’re getting. The skills below will.

These aren’t theoretical skills. Each one prevents real production problems in Laravel applications.

1. PHP 8.x : Modern PHP Skills

A Laravel developer should understand modern PHP features like union types, typed properties, dependency injection, interfaces, and traits.

Why it matters: Developers stuck in older PHP patterns often write code that works but becomes difficult to maintain in modern Laravel projects.

How to test it: Ask them to explain a recent service class they built and why they structured it that way.

2. Eloquent ORM Beyond CRUD

Most developers can write User::find($id). Strong Laravel developers understand relationships and query performance.

Skills to verify:

• hasMany, belongsTo, belongsToMany

• Eager loading with with()

• Query scopes

• Knowing when raw queries are better than Eloquent

Why it matters: Poor query handling creates N+1 issues that slow applications under real traffic.

How to test it: Ask how they’d efficiently display 100 orders with customer names.

3. REST API Design

Laravel makes APIs easy to build, but not every developer builds them correctly.

Skills to verify:

• API resources

• Proper HTTP status codes

• API versioning

• Sanctum vs Passport authentication

• Rate limiting

Why it matters: Bad API decisions become expensive once mobile apps or integrations depend on them.

How to test it: Ask how they’d structure a blog API with authentication and comments.

4. Queue and Job Management

Production Laravel apps handling emails, notifications, or third-party APIs should use queues.

Skills to verify:

• ShouldQueue

• Redis vs database queues

• Laravel Horizon

• Retry logic and failed jobs

• Job batching

Why it matters: Queues separate demo apps from production-ready systems.

How to test it: Ask what happens when a queued job fails and how they’d handle retries.

5. Testing

PHPUnit or Pest doesn’t matter. Writing tests does.

Skills to verify:

• Feature tests

• Mail::fake() and Queue::fake()

• Factories and database refresh traits

• Authentication testing

Why it matters: Untested applications become dangerous to modify over time.

How to test it: Ask how they’d test a controller that creates a user and sends an email.

If you plan to hire a Laravel developer, their testing habits usually reveal more about their engineering maturity than their portfolio.

6. Security Fundamentals

Laravel has strong security defaults, but developers still need to understand them.

Skills to verify:

• $fillable and $guarded

• SQL injection prevention

• CSRF protection

• File upload validation

• Sanctum vs Passport use cases

Why it matters: Most Laravel security issues come from developer mistakes, not framework flaws.

How to test it: Ask what security mistakes they commonly see in Laravel codebases.

7. Git and Team Workflow

Good Git habits matter more than most hiring teams realize.

Skills to verify:

• Feature branches and pull requests

• Meaningful commit messages

• Merge conflict resolution

• Proper .gitignore usage

Why it matters: Developers who only worked solo often struggle in collaborative environments.

How to test it: Ask how their last team handled branching and code reviews.

8. Laravel Ecosystem Awareness

Strong Laravel developers know the ecosystem, not just the framework.

Tools worth asking about:

• Livewire or Inertia.js

• Filament

• Laravel Telescope

• Laravel Horizon

• Spatie packages

Why it matters: Experienced developers avoid rebuilding tools that already exist.

How to test it: Ask how they’d add role-based permissions to a Laravel application.

9. Database Design and Migrations

Laravel migrations are powerful, but database mistakes become expensive quickly.

Skills to verify:

• Foreign keys and soft deletes

• Index strategy

• Clear migration naming

• Safe migrations for large tables

Why it matters: Poor schema decisions create long-term technical debt.

How to test it: Ask how they’d safely add a column to a production table with millions of rows.

10. Communication and Async Work Skills

Communication is a technical skill in remote engineering teams.

Skills to verify:

• Clear pull request descriptions

• Asking structured technical questions

• Documentation habits

• Proactive updates

Why it matters: Poor communication slows entire teams down.

How to test it: Evaluate how they communicate during the hiring process itself.

The Checklist

• PHP 8.x modern features

• Eloquent relationships and optimization

• REST API design

• Queues and background jobs

• Testing practices

• Security fundamentals

• Git workflow experience

• Laravel ecosystem awareness

• Database design and migrations

• Communication skills

A developer who checks all ten is genuinely senior. Seven or eight usually indicates a strong mid-level hire with growth potential.