How to hire talented dedicated developers?

Once you have a new project to work on, you need a team of specialists to bring it to fruition. Where can you find these people? There are a few answers to this question:

• Reallocate your existing resources
• Hire new people
• Hire a remote dedicated team

Let’s look briefly at all of the mentioned above options to single out their advantages and drawbacks.

Don’t forget to keep in mind that the key components regarding which we are going to evaluate each approach of delivering a successful project are:

• Cost
• Professionalism
• Time

Reallocating existing resources

This kind of approach is highly improbable for an efficiently working company, but suppose you have some employees who are currently underworking. It means that their workload is lower than 100%. In this case, you can naturally utilize their unused time towards the new endeavor. How well will it work out?

Apparently, the most attractive element of this approach is its cost, and you are optimizing it! Now the person (or several people) will perform more on the same payroll. But that’s about all the benefit you get…

When it comes to the professional execution, the quality of work may vary depending on the nature of the new project. If it is related to the same subject area that your people typically deal with, you can expect decent results. However, if the project’s domain is different from their core tasks and requires a brand new skillset, you should think twice before appointing these employees to such a project. Unless you have some ‘Swiss-knife’ workers in your company, you risk ending up with a poor outcome.

With such shared resource scenario, the timespan of the new project will undoubtedly stretch significantly. Moreover, if projects priority is not changed, the new project will be developed residually, resulting in little dedication, and, consequently, little passion and creativity. Context-switching will additionally hinder the performance as it takes more time to pull all your thoughts together and switch to a new phase of work just after you have finished the previous part, which absorbed you for a good couple of hours.

All in all, we are falling behind with all three components we evaluate performance against. “What about cost?” you may argue. Well, if we take into account the risk of low-quality execution, uncertainty in meeting deadlines, context-switching time, and additional management efforts, the perceived cost of such project will be gross.

Hire new people

You may decide that new project needs new people. Your idea is that they should be dedicated to this task only, and this will lead to sky-rocket performance. This rationale does make sense, but some stumbling blocks may arise in the way. Let’s look at this approach through the prism of our three components.

The expenses here will definitely be substantial: full-time salaries to each new employee, new working places and computers, administrative overhead and a lot more. If you are not a web application development company, you may have troubles hiring IT geeks and gurus. The issue is that you may not have a hiring manager knowledgeable enough to scan swiftly through an endless game software developers list or mobile developers list, and adequately assess programmers’ skills and expertise. And what will you do with all these people when the project is over? Fire the newly hired personnel? Very few talented and experienced web developers or mobile applications developers are looking for 6-month job contracts. The majority of them want stable payment for the decent amount of work they do.

At first sight, the forthcoming performance shouldn’t be an issue as you are hiring a web developers team to fit your needs and requirements. But they haven’t worked as a team yet… They will have to go through several stages of team formation before they start to deliver: forming, storming, norming, and only then performing (psychologist Bruce Tuckman advises this structure). So, the full capacity feedback will not come immediately.

Inefficiencies in time will mostly come from the hiring and team-building processes forcing you to plan deadlines carefully.

To sum up, hiring new staff for temporary work is not the best idea because you waste your time building up a team, spend money to provide appropriate working conditions, and then wait until they find common ground and start to rock.

Hiring a dedicated remote team

Last, but not least, you can find a tailor-made professional web/mobile developers team from anywhere around the world to get the project done for you. Is this option worthy of paying attention to? Let’s dig into it.

Dedicated teams do not come for free, and that’s for sure, but with an opportunity to search worldwide, you will most likely have offers that could suit any budget. For instance, Eastern European developers are known to have high-level technical skills and creative mindset, and will cost 2 to 4 times less than the USA based ones.

What about productivity? First, you don’t need to worry about the hiring routine. Established outsourcing companies will do all the administrative hassle of putting together a top-notch team perfectly matching your requirements. So, no ultra-smart HR is needed to hire dedicated developers.

If you find the right outsourcing company, normally all their team members have worked with one another in various combinations for quite a while, plus they have an opportunity to create watercooler chats to exchange ideas and interact in a variety of formal and informal ways, especially if the tasks set by you need this kind of approach. What does it mean for you? The team you get is a TEAM that delivers from day one.

Moreover, teams like that go with a project manager – a person in charge of coordinating it, distributing tasks, and making reports to you. No administrative overhead on your side! And again, this manager knows how to approach each member of the team to get things done.

Regarding the time dimension, as the name ‘dedicated’ suggests, your project will be the one and only. No artificial dependencies on other projects, no context switching. Moreover, if the scope of the project changes there is no problem to extend the contract.

Sounds too good to be true? There is no silver bullet, so we want to drag your attention to several situations to be aware of:

• Communication difficulties. You will have to rely solely on technology in your interaction with a remote dedicated team; it’s not completely flawless at times. However, there are many other tools available on the market, and you can easily agree on some of them to be your Plan B providing a decent level of communication.
• If the hiring team are not native speakers, make sure to speak to the prospect project manager to see how easy it is for them to convey technical ideas in a clear manner.
• Pay specific attention to the understanding of deadlines by different cultures – this could be for you a life-saving move.
• How do you find out about the reputation of the company and team you are going to work with? Ask the contact details of some of their previous clients. Do your research on the web, and talk to several representatives (managers, programmers) of these companies. Thus you will be able to distinguish fact from fiction.

Resume

If you need a student to write a script for you, you may go to some web developers site and find one in a matter of minutes. However, if you are in need of a high-level team of the web or mobile app developers for hire, stick to respected, advanced outsourcing companies that can ease hiring and administrative burden as well as supply a stellar team of developers.

Anton Kulichenko