How To Find and Hire an Offshore Software Development Team

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. 

Where to find an offshore software development team?

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

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.

Freelance workplaces

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.

1. Upwork

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:

Pros:

• Tremendous talent pool. Developers with diverse experience, background, and tech stack are there for you to choose from. So the chances are that you will find whom you need.
• Employment security. The platform manages the administrative aspect of your cooperation with the employees, so you can focus on the project progress.

Cons: 

• Mostly useful for hiring individual devs rather than teams. Since the users have their individual accounts, you will have to look for and hire every team member separately.
• Quality control-related issues. The developers you hire are still remote workers that are challenging to control in terms of their productivity and performance.

2. YouTeam

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:

Pros:

• Perfect for hiring teams. Team members can create their joint accounts for team hiring. For example, here is our Relevant Software YouTeam account.
• Strong quality control. The service ensures that the candidates have proof of competence.
• Reliable partners for long-term cooperation. Because of the developers’ proven expertise level, they appear as worthy potential long-term partners.

Cons:

• Mostly offshoring oriented. If your goal is different, using YouTeam may not be a suitable option for you.

3. Toptal

Toptal is a platform that helps the clients and the teams of engineers to connect and cooperate prior to and throughout the project. 

Pros:

• Connects the businesses with potential contractors. Simple search and detailed account overview make Toptal easy to use for talent sourcing.
• Establishes a strong bond between the partners. The platform connects both parties and helps establish effective communication between them.

Cons:

• Additional fees. If you decide to hire developers or dev teams via Toptal, you’ll have to pay additionally. This can affect your project budget significantly as opposed to when you reach out to the dev company directly.

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. 

B2B portals

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.

Best countries to hire a development team

Ukraine

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. 

Latvia

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. 

Poland

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 network

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:

• Searching for companies. You can access such information on companies as their geographical location, the number of employees, level of employee experience, and even the accounts of the companies’ employees, along with the general descriptions of what the businesses do.
• Using groups. You can enter groups uniting LinkedIn users depending on their interests or goals, which may be other people looking for talents that you can reach out to and share your experience with each other or the candidates and teams looking for employment.
• Reaching out through messages. Connect with people occupying positions that are interesting for you, who may be CEOs or developers, and start a conversation with them to discuss how you can bring value to each other.

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.

Ask the community

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:

• Social media posts. If you have a lot of friends who are in the same field or industry on Facebook or any other social network, create a post describing your situation and ask for people who have faced the same case to share the methods of talent sourcing they used. 
• Use Quora and forums. Platforms like these were created to help people in similar situations as you have faced, so be sure to use them. Just search for particular keywords to find out how other people deal with similar cases.
• Request references. When you have a potential candidate in mind, regardless of whether it is a single developer or a team, look for the previous projects they worked on and ask for feedback on their performance. It is always better to have some positive reviews before starting to work with someone.
• Visit tech events. Nothing builds a community more than a dedicated event. Talk to people during coffee breaks and share your contacts to reconnect with them later. Such connections will help you gather more info and even get help in the future when any issues occur, including the one with remote workforce employment.

Remember that both positive and negative feedback of particular tools, platforms, or talent sourcing methods is valuable.

How to hire an offshore software development team

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.

Perform an Interview

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.

Set goals

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.

Conduct an overview

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.

Technical screening

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.

Final interview

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:

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• Are you anxious about working remotely?
• Are you capable of tracking your own performance in an objective manner?
• Are you an objective-driven worker?
• Can you work with rigid deadlines?
• Do you consider yourself a flexible and agile employee?

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.

Ensure security

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.

How long does it take to hire a developer and other tech specialists?

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.

The average time to fill different tech positions

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.

The average time to hire a developer by technology

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. 

Software developer hiring process and timeline at Relevant

#1 Job posting

This is when we clarify the vacancy details and spread the opening across various job boards and platforms. 

Duration: 1 business day

#2 External search and interviewing

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 

#3 Making an offer

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

#4 Employee onboarding

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

What affects the speed of hiring software developers

Despite the general timelines and benchmarks, there are ways to get software developers onboard faster.

Similar domain

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. 

Strong talent pipeline

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. 

Influential employer brand 

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.

Tips to follow after hiring a dedicated development team

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.

Manage Remote Offshore Teams Just Like In-House Teams

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.

Establish Effective Communication

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.

Build Trust

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. 

Wrapping up

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?