Hiring Remote Development Team

In the fast-changing digital sector, hiring has never been an easy task. However, when it comes to remote hiring, things become even trickier as the search for the right remote developer to work with may turn into a real roller coaster ride. Where to find the true match for your project and how to tell if the diamond is real or fake? Read your complete guide below.

Although remote work tended to expnad even before the global pandemic, COVID 19 provoked a colossal shift to remote working. According to the Clutch new survey, 66% of U.S. employees are working from home.

Most IT businesses have already appreciated many benefits of having a team of remote developers. However, there are still multiple companies who are skeptical about outstaffing practicality.

In this article, we will share with you our opinion why you should give green light to outstaffing and, most importantly, how to hire your remote team to reap the benefits and not to make embarrassing mistakes that will put the entire endeavor under risk.

Primary Benefits of Virtual Teams

So, what new opportunities for hiring virtual teams open up to IT companies? Look through the list of the principal advantages of outstaffing below to make sure that you are on the right track when deciding to hire remote developers.

1) Access to the Global Talent Pool

When hiring remote developers, you get the opportunity to work with the best people, regardless of their location. This expansive talent pool is just stunning. In other words, you no longer need to fish only in your small pond, since now you can go fishing in a giant ocean.

2) Optimization of Operation Costs

Hiring dedicated teams significantly reduce operation costs. For instance, the IBM managed to save $50 million in real estate costs, while Sun Microsystems cut similar costs by $68 million a year when their employees started to work remotely.

3) Increased Productivity

As a rule, remote work has a positive impact on the worker’s work-life balance. It means that developers working remotely can arrange their work schedule the way they want, which makes them feel more satisfied with their employment. Yet the most important thing is that a peaceful and relaxing home environment has a positive impact on your remote developers’ productivity.

The list of benefits of having a team of remote developers can be made much longer, but, for sure, you got the idea, didn’t you? And now, as we’re clear about WHY you should hire a remote team, let’s move to the HOW part. There is the other side of the coin you should be well aware of beforehand since when you decide to hire virtual players, you will have to face a few quite tough challenges.

Below you will find the most important recommendations on how to hire a remote developer easily.

How to Hire a Team of Remote Developers. Our Guide

Write a Job Description Carefully

When crafting your job post, try to find the balance between providing enough details while keeping the description concise. An effective job description should have the following structure.

Look for Remote Rech Talent in the Right Place

There is a multitude of hiring platforms that help find a remote specialist you need (for instance, Hundred5, WeWorkRemotely, RemoteOK, FlexJobs, etc.). Such job search websites like Indeed.com, Hired.com are also pretty useful in this regard and offer good remote job opportunities.

Hacker News, GitHub, Twitter or LinkedIn… In a word, any place where people congregate can help you find the missing element in your project team puzzle.

Search for Reasonable Rates

If you’re going to try to find the most affordable rates possible, think twice. Don’t let the greed make you grab the cheapest labor in the market in order not to bitterly regret your decision afterward.

Also, keep in mind that the rates mostly depend on geography rather than your candidate skills. For example, in the US, a rare developer will agree to code for less than 50 USD/hour, whereas in the Philippines you can find good guys for only 5 USD/hour. However, the sensible middle is always the best decision. If you hire a remote developer from Central and Eastern Europe, you can expect high-quality code at affordable prices.

So, if your company is ready to engage with the global talent pool and doesn’t consider language or time difference as a barrier you can solve your IT challenges without excessive costs.

To make the salary issue even clearer for you, we’ve placed here a small comparative chart. Below you can see the average software developers’ salaries worldwide in 2020.

Source: daxx.com

Analyze Ratings and Reviews

In case you’ve chosen a remote developer and have found at least one bad review at the last moment, this may be the sign for you to reconsider your choice. You’d better spend more time searching for a more suitable candidate since cooperation without trust cannot be effective a priori.

One more thing to be wary of is no ratings at all. On the one hand, do not rush to employ the talent, as there’s no proof he/she will be a real asset to your team. However, don’t let it make you too judgmental, either. In fact, the candidate might be just a new one on the platform. Besides, such candidates are very likely to try their best to win the first good reviews.

Opt for Live Video Calls

To find out if the candidate’s mentality fits your team, instead of a phone call schedule a video call. Do not underestimate the power of face-to-face interaction!

Make Sure the Candidate has Read Your Ad

Although it may not seem particularly important to some employers, this small detail tells a lot about your potential remote developer.

If the applicants have read your ad only partially, as well as if they don’t ask any further questions regarding the work, this means they don’t care about your project. You’d better reject indifferent candidates in the early stages to go on searching for a real match.

Provide the Developer Candidate with a Trial Paid Project

Dig deeper with the small-scale paid project. By doing so, you can make an objective assessment of the candidate’s technical skills and get as close as possible to determining if the remote developer is good for your project or not.

How to Manage Work with a Remote Developer. Key Points

Once the screening process is over and you have said “Yes” to one or more remote candidates, it’s time for some practical advice to make the collaboration more effective.

Unfortunately, many employers mistakenly believe that hiring an experienced remote developer automatically guarantees the project success.

However, the stark reality is that if you neglect a proper onboarding and simply expect your new remote developers to dive into project details on their own, a fiasco is almost inevitable. To reach outstanding results when implementing a project, the employer and the developer team should communicate a lot, regardless of whether you hire remote or in-house engineers.

By following a few simple tips below, you can avoid many misunderstandings and significantly improve each remote player performance.

Tip #1. Support your new remote developer during the onboarding period.

Give a hand to your remote developers in the first days, which are the most crucial and difficult for them. Assist them in setting up servers, give access to necessary logins or repositories, etc. Keep in mind, the sooner your new virtual players get all necessary project details, the faster the work will move ahead.

One more thing: if you were lucky enough to hire the right engineer, be ready to answer a lot of questions for the initial few days.

Tip #2. Give them detailed tasks.

When you hire remote developers, explain in simple terms what you expect from the project, what its core objectives are. To eliminate all possible disputes, pay attention even to the details which may seem minor at first glance. Provide as much visual material as possible — use mockups, video screencasts, screenshots, and graphic files. At the same time, examples of similar projects will be of great use for both parties.

Tip #3. Don’t be a watchdog.

Total control irritates. You need to understand, some days your remote developers are more efficient and some days they are less so. A good solution for both parties would be to agree to check the progress weekly at a certain time.

Nevertheless, do remember to track the hours. This is more important for planning than for control, as it helps assess your team speed and schedule project advancement.

To track the work hours you can choose real-time trackers such as Upwork’s internal one, or start-stop type trackers, for example, Toggl.com. Or at least use Jira timesheets to see how many hours a given task takes to complete.

Before We Go

So, now you know how to hire remote developers and can see for yourself that the process is pretty tricky. However, by using the above pieces of advice to select the right candidates and choose the right job management model, you can enjoy multiple advantages of having remote players while minimizing all possible risks.

Search for your talents with a cold head, hot heart, stick to our recommendations and you’re doomed to have top candidates in your company. Good luck hiring!

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