Convey passion and you're more likely to get hired. Why are so many people lacking it?
Interviews
A necessary evil I'm afraid. I hate giving them because I usually end up interrogating the candidate like someone who has just committed a horrible crime. The candidate is usually full of nerves, rarely prepared and completely lacking passion for what they are talking about. It seems that way at least.
The good eggs
There are awesome web developers out there. I've been fortunate to hire a few of them. Those people were hired because they conveyed an honest sense of passion for what they do. What they do is live and breathe HTML, CSS and JavaScript. To them, Grunt is a tool, not a noise. Performance and code quality are always on their minds. They have nightmares if they aren't writing tests before writing code. The application's code quality metric is a measure of how good their life is at that moment. All of this comes from a passion for doing things right. Giving a shit for the greater good of the application. Your career benefits naturally. Think of it as karma if you will.
So why don't you want to be hired?
When giving an interview, I find myself time and time again going to a crib sheet I scribbled down months ago (with questions like "what is a doctype?") and interrogating candidates based on that because people simply aren't talking my ears off as to why they are better than everyone else and they can join me on my journey to do great things. I shouldn't have to ask what experience you have with tools. I expect candidates to be telling me what the tools of the trade are. What bleeding edge technologies I should be aware of as they will be causing me and my team to produce all sorts of awesomeness over the next few months.
The web is an amazing place to work. If you're dabbled with a bit of web development because you've turned a simple CMS install with virtually no tweaks to the shipped design into a site for your brother's mate's nan's cousin and think you can make a career out of it by turning up half-arsed in attitude, passion and the language you use over the phone to me, I'd rather you not waste both our lives. I've got web development to be getting on with, because I actually care about what I do.