Hire WordPress Developer Intern — the employer’s brief

Insist on reading an existing codebase before changing it, and on enough theme and child-theme structure to work unsupervised on small tasks. Custom post types and fields is the third thing worth testing in the interview. Tool familiarity — WordPress, ACF, PHP — is a bonus rather than a filter: most of it is a week of learning for someone with the underlying skill.

One finished thing. Ship one reviewed, merged change that goes to production during the term is the right size: real work someone on the team would otherwise do, small enough to finish, visible enough to assess. If they move quickly, cut page load time on the top five pages and record the scores is the natural second piece. A term with three half-finished projects assesses nothing and teaches less.

₹10,500 to ₹25,000 a month covers most of the market for this role. Metro product companies pay at the top of the band; tier-2 cities and services firms 25–40% lower. An unpaid listing filters for who can afford to work free rather than who is good, and roughly halves the applications you receive.

Ask about something that went wrong. "How do you speed up a slow WordPress site?" gets you caching, images and plugin audit rather than a new host, and two follow-up questions on their own example will tell you the depth. Candidates who have only studied the topic run out of specifics almost immediately.

One finished, reviewed piece of work that someone on the team would otherwise have done — not a side project nobody adopts. The deliverables above are sized for eight to twelve weeks of supervised work by a student with the fundamentals but no production experience. If they can demo it and the team keeps using it after they leave, the hire paid for itself.

Yes, and the difference is what you must provide rather than what they must have. A developer brief promises build work, so it needs repository access, a real ticket and a named reviewer from day one. If those are not ready, hire against the general brief instead — a developer intern with nothing to build leaves inside a month, and usually tells their campus why.

Always. Students plan around semester dates, and a listing without a start date and duration is filtered out by exactly the organised candidates you want. For WordPress roles, stating "three months, starting June" typically produces more applications than an open-ended listing at a higher stipend.

Specificity does most of the work. A listing that names the project, the tools and the deliverable filters itself, because candidates can tell whether they fit. Adding one screening question to the application — from the set above — removes most of the rest without adding a review round.