Finding and hiring an offshore dedicated team of software developers is a challenge most large companies face at some point. Although it is a responsible and crucial task, there is no need to turn it into a problem.
Luckily, there are numerous methods that can help in hiring remote developers. These methods include browsing through Google search, freelance workplaces, and B2B portals to find partners through outsourcing, offshoring, and outstaffing, which might become a perfect solution for businesses looking to hire remote developers in top software outsourcing countries.
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A dedicated team is a type of cooperation between the service provider and the client in which the later hires a team or several teams of specialized professionals for the long-term performance of certain tasks. That way businesses can make sure all the people they hire are at the right place and that everyone is doing the exact job they need to do.
Businesses around the world strive to find the best offshore managed team to delegate some of their essential tasks to. But how do you find the right team and where to start looking for as a managed services provider?
Google is a good place to look for a remote dev team, but you need to know what to search for to avoid wasting time. We decided to give you some keyword ideas to help you narrow down the search: try to use short and concise phrases like “hire managed development team”, “software development services”, or ”hire a development team in Ukraine” Try to trim down all the redundant words and focus on the goal of your search.
Working with freelancers might be a convenient and cost-efficient solution for everybody who needs software development but lacks in-house talents. There exists a variety of freelance workforce communication models that help in establishing efficient cooperation between the client and the outsource talents. In case a business looks up to hiring freelancers, there are websites created by outsourcers for outsourcers so that they can find jobs online, communicate, and share their ideas, along with finding remote workforce.
Upwork is a community for freelancers of all sorts, which makes it a good place for you to find the desired talents. Here’s what you get when using Upwork:
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YouTeam is a perfect tool for candidate or team search among developers. Here are the pros and cons of using the tool for talent sourcing:
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Toptal is a platform that helps the clients and the teams of engineers to connect and cooperate prior to and throughout the project.
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The platforms are kind of similar but these might be fairly considered the most popular and effective when it comes to client-service provider cooperation.
Use B2B portals to find information regarding companies that provide aid in hiring remote developers. B2B platforms similar to Clutch might be the right answer for gathering the data regarding particular contractors and the services they provide. For example, our Relevant Software Clutch account can give you an idea of how a corporate account looks like on the platform. Additionally, as a project manager, you might want to go to websites like Goodfirms to find the information on the potential remote workforce. Using and sharing information is the best way to find reliable partners.
Ukraine can be fairly considered Europe’s new best outsourcing destination. Ukraine is a developing economy, which makes hiring local professionals cost-efficient for most western businesses. Additionally, this country is a home to nearly 200,000 specialists in the IT field, which makes it a perfect place to outsource software development tasks to. Powerful software development hubs around the country house thousands of highly professional specialists in various fields, so that there is no problem finding experts of software development in Ukraine.
Another European country, Latvia, is home to several leading development companies. Despite relatively small developers population, Latvia quickly grows into one of the top destinations for outsourcing. Numerous international firms already headquarter in Latvia providing services to clients around the world.
A Central European country, Poland, is a developed and progressive country that has been long associated with the rapid growth of IT-related businesses. Thanks to western investment, Poland has grown into one of Europe’s leading IT hubs, which is why it is rather beneficial to outsource here.
Linkedin is one of the basic but nonetheless important headhunting tools that someone looking for some new talents has to know about. Although it is the tool for recruiters in the first place, you can also use it to find a development team regardless of your position.
Here are some of the paths you can choose when looking for the workforce:
As you can see, there are different ways you can use LinkedIn to meet your team development teams. In any case, it is a great platform for you at least to narrow the search area down and compile a list of the most plausible candidates for the job.
It might also be a good idea to do the simplest: ask others to help. Most probably, you’re already a part of a big tech community, either online or offline, so be sure to use networking to find the right candidates. The following are some ways of how you can request others to share their experience to your benefit:
Remember that both positive and negative feedback of particular tools, platforms, or talent sourcing methods is valuable.
After narrowing down the search area, it is time to get to the hiring process, which might be an even more puzzling stage. After filtering the list of teams that fit the requirements and needs of the business, the next step is to find out which team is the best. Interviewing is the way to go, and we are going to cover the most important aspects of the process next to ensure that it goes well and leads to the desired outcome.
To get a fruitful experience of investigating potential employees and communicating with them, you should consider sticking to the following plan, which consists of several crucial steps.
You must set clear goals for the candidates. It means that the teams need to know what tasks they are about to embark upon and be ready for the challenge. Make sure they clearly understand their goals and expectations and are ready to meet them.
At this point, you are to evaluate all the pros and cons of each group and its members. An evaluation of experience, soft skills, personal traits, proficiency, and other traits of the candidates helps in seeing the full image and finding out which team is the best. That is how you can identify the best candidates.
Then, consider whether the teams are up to the requirements. That is where they pass tests and show how good they are at their job, which helps to filter out the best ones.
A short test lasting somewhere from 2 to 4 hours might be perfect for screening the tech abilities of the potential employees. This will help in defining the best candidates as they will have to demonstrate their tech skills and knowledge.
For the non-tech positions, the process of preliminary selection might be more challenging as you have to evaluate the soft skills of the candidates for the remote or in-house team. Soft skills, unlike the ability to code, cannot be measured precisely. That is why it might take several meetings or calls to decide on the candidate.
This is the final step that follows testing in the entire process, and that is where you meet the most suitable candidates and actually interviewing them. Usually, at this point, both you and the candidate know they already are on the safe side. Still, you have to make final evaluations before making the decision to start cooperation.
There are several questions you might want to ask before hiring a candidate. Asking these final questions might look like a redundancy, but better safe than sorry:
Asking these and similar questions might reveal some hidden strengths and weaknesses of the candidates. Although you will most likely already know whether you are going to hire a candidate by that time, it is better to double-check.
Not completely a separate step but rather an aspect to keep in mind throughout the entire recruitment process, keeping things safe is critical to you as an employer or a business owner. Businesses that never tried nearshoring or any type of outsourcing might be anxious to turn to this type of cooperation. There is no need to worry because platforms like Upwork, YouTeam, and Toptal guarantee the total security of cooperation between the client and the service provider. More so, these platforms make it possible for agile management and efficient cooperation between you and your in-house team.
One of the biggest benefits an outsourcing vendor can offer in terms of finding candidates is the talent pool. If an outsourcing company has available developers on board, you can start working with them instantly. And if you’re lucky, they may even have a small team you can hire right away.
Now, if the outsourcing vendor doesn’t have free specialists, they will need to find candidates for your project outside. This is a standard procedure that does require some time: depending on the seniority level and the tech skills you’re looking for, the hiring process can vary from 3 to 8 weeks. But it’s often faster than finding candidates on your own and ends in a perfect fit. After all, experienced vendors like Relevant know what they’re doing.
So far, a software development engineer is one of the most in-demand tech roles: on Glassdoor alone, there are over 60K job openings searching for software development engineers.
In the US, it takes around 41 days on average to hire such a professional. A more precise time-to-hire rate varies depending on the candidates’ seniority level, their particular tech position, tech stack, or expertise rarity.
It takes roughly 35% longer to fill a senior position than a middle one, and, apparently, it’s not as time-consuming to hire a junior developer or a trainee: about 50% faster than hiring for a middle position.
If you take another country, say, Ukraine, the time-to-hire rates for tech specialists slightly differ.
It typically takes 45 days to hire a development team lead, a UX and design team lead, or a business analyst. This is about 1.5 times longer than closing senior and middle positions within the mentioned roles, which requires about 30 and 25 days. To find the right match for junior and trainee positions, it usually takes not more than 15 days, which is 1.5 times faster than hiring a middle professional.
From another perspective, hiring middle and senior IT professionals may take longer. Such factors as the surge of technology relevance (Go and Python), increasing demand for specialists in a particular domain (Python in data science and C++ in IoT), or market saturation (RoR) pose additional challenges and add to the hiring time.
Hence, it may take you up to 8 weeks to close a senior Go, Python, C++, or RoR developer opening. However, it’s relatively quick to hire middle to senior PHP, mobile, front-end, or .NET developers, requiring 3-4 weeks to find the right match.
This is when we clarify the vacancy details and spread the opening across various job boards and platforms.
Duration: 1 business day
At this stage, we prescreen the CVs we’re sent and conduct interviews with selected candidates. Our interviewing process includes 4 interviews: with an HR, with an in-house English teacher to evaluate the level of the language, with technical experts, and finally, with the client.
Duration: 12 business days
Once there’s a match between the client and the candidate, we clarify all the details like the start day, the computer configuration, and programming software the new hire will need, the trial period, and other operational information.
Duration: 3 business days
Eventually, once the candidate accepts the offer and their notice period begins, we start guiding the new hire through the onboarding process.
Duration: up to 20 business days, but usually much faster
Despite the general timelines and benchmarks, there are ways to get software developers onboard faster.
Focus on developers who have worked in similar domains or projects. This will narrow down the search and get you straight to the developers with the relevant experience. Plus, when a candidate like this joins your project, they will be more likely to connect with the team and the project quickly.
You can’t get away from weeks of external search. Still, if a recruiter who works on your opening has an extensive network of candidates inside the software engineering community, this will help a lot.
The employer brand is another essential factor that can propel your opening and fill it faster. If the outsourcing company looking for a developer for you has earned recognition and a strong employer brand on the local market, more candidates will be sending them their CVs.
Relevant, for example, is a company with a well-established name in Lviv, Ukraine. We’re also members of the Lviv IT Cluster, the most prominent business Ukrainian community of IT companies, authorities, and educational institutions.
Hiring an offshore team is not where the effort is to end; you also need how to manage remote employees. Here are some things to consider when starting to work remotely or development team extension.
Once a remote team joins the in-house team and becomes a part of the company’s talent pool, it is necessary to establish a sense of equality. Both in-house and remote workers need to understand they need to perform at the same level of productivity and quality. That is why you must impose the same standards upon all the employees.
Making sure everyone is doing their best is a must, therefore it is best to allocate some resources to assuring the quality and productivity of the teams.
One of the factors that might hinder communication with the offshore team is a language barrier. When hiring remote contractors, making sure they speak English or any other language that is comfortable for you and your already formed team is imperative.
Secondly, you must realize the importance of cultural differences. When hiring remote developers, it is worth understanding that these people come from different cultural backgrounds, and even though they are the ones looking for employment, employers must also be respectful to their cultures.
When working with remote teams, trust is one of the primary concerns both parties might have. In most cases, the hirers would never meet their employees, which might compromise their ability to trust each other. That is why it is necessary to build trust through effective management and communication.
Well, it is true that finding and hiring a dedicated software development team might be a real challenge, especially when you extend your search to the global talent pool. That is why it is necessary to follow some specific recommendations on how and where to find decent workers. Among such, you should keep in mind the steps that a successful hiring strategy includes, which are the ones we listed and explained in the article.
Particularly, start with browsing through all the available platforms and use your network to request recommendations and feedback on what works and what is not worth spending time on trying. Then, make sure to plan out the candidate filtering out and interview processes to choose the best fit for your project.
In any case, following at least some of the recommendations we have provided will definitely narrow down the search for sure if not help you find the talent you need. Maybe Relevant’s dedicated software development team is what you need?
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