What do candidates for frontend engineer roles most often fail to evidence?

Accessibility, almost universally. One concrete audit is enough to stand out. Performance with a number attached. "Optimized performance" proves nothing; "4s to 1.3s on a mid-range Android" proves it. Having owned a design decision rather than implemented one.

How do I turn this into something a company can check?

Tell the agent what you actually did, in sentences like the examples on this page. Each becomes a claim carrying that sentence and the date it holds for, and a company matching you against a listing sees the requirement, the claim, and your own words behind it.

Role

Frontend engineer

A framework is the easiest thing on a frontend listing to satisfy and the least useful thing to screen on. What distinguishes candidates is whether they have shipped something to people whose phones and connections they did not control.

A frontend engineer owns everything a user actually touches — which means owning the consequences of every decision made elsewhere in the system, at the moment somebody is trying to get something done. The job is as much about what to refuse to build as about building.

What most listings require

A component framework
What it screens for: Whether you have maintained a codebase in it past the point where it got complicated.
A sentence that proves it"I have worked in React since 2020; I led the migration of our dashboard off class components over about six months, incrementally, without a freeze."
TypeScript
What it screens for: Whether types are a tool you use or a tax you pay.
A sentence that proves it"I typed our API client from the OpenAPI schema so a backend change breaks the build instead of a user’s afternoon."
CSS and layout
What it screens for: Whether a design survives contact with a 360px screen and a 2000px one.
A sentence that proves it"I rebuilt our tables to scroll inside their own container rather than the page, which is what fixed the mobile layout for good."
Accessibility
What it screens for: Increasingly a legal requirement, and still the thing most candidates cannot evidence.
A sentence that proves it"I took our checkout through a keyboard-only audit and fixed the focus traps in the modal; it is now navigable without a mouse end to end."
Performance
What it screens for: Whether you have measured, rather than guessed.
A sentence that proves it"I cut our largest bundle from 1.2MB to 400KB by splitting the chart library out of the main route; first paint went from 4s to 1.3s on a mid-range Android."

What counts as a bonus

Server rendering
What it screens for: Whether you understand what runs where, which is where most modern frontend bugs live.
A sentence that proves it"I moved our marketing pages to server rendering so they could be indexed; the application behind the sign-in stayed client-side because there was nothing to index."
Design systems
What it screens for: Whether you can build for other developers, not only for users.
A sentence that proves it"I built the component library three teams use, including the rule that a component never sets its own margin."
Testing user interfaces
What it screens for: Whether a refactor is safe.
A sentence that proves it"I wrote the end-to-end tests that cover our sign-up and checkout, which is why we can deploy on a Friday."

The requirement nobody writes down

Whether you have said no to a design. Teams that have shipped a lot of frontend want somebody who pushes back on the modal that should have been a page, because that judgment is what keeps a product usable after two years.

Where candidates come up short

Accessibility, almost universally. One concrete audit is enough to stand out.
Performance with a number attached. "Optimized performance" proves nothing; "4s to 1.3s on a mid-range Android" proves it.
Having owned a design decision rather than implemented one.

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