How to Hire Qualified Software Developers for Your Start-Ups

It is true that acquiring sufficient funding is not an easy job like most software startups think; similarly, choosing the right software developers for your project is just as challenging and a crucial job.

This is because it is hard to gain user trust; just simple things like bad UX/UI, bugs, and low performance might ruin it. Missing deadlines can lead to missing opportunities in the current market.

Poorly-designed software architecture blueprint and supporting documentation for start-up products will complicate the process of transferring knowledge and become such a burden to the HR Team in recruiting new members sooner or later. If growth and evolution are not the main purposes for the architecture, the startup organization needs to recreate it from the beginning during the time the product of the company starts to scale.

A step-by-step guide for choosing the right software developers for your company, including start-ups, will be provided in this article in order to help you move quickly and confidently into the market.

Understanding the skills that are needed

A detailed description of the company's software idea and high-level implementation strategy should be brought up along with the list of software functions which the company wants to realize.

The search can be boosted faster if the company understands the kind of competencies that they are looking for (such as web, mobile, or desktop developers, cloud, integration engineers, testers, and more). Companies that have no experience on-board before and have no ideas of what they need are recommended looking for a professional technology consulting organization or software outsourcing partner for help.

Deciding on the hiring model

After the companies come up with the final decision on the size and capabilities of the future development team they want to hire, they need to choose one of the following sourcing models to adopt: in-house development, outsourced development, or a combination of these two options.

In-House Development Team

Companies can have direct supervision over the process of developing and team productivity if they follow the in-house developing sourcing model. Companies can always reach out to the dedicated in-house team whenever they want. In-house talents are likely to have a higher level of involvement and deeper understanding of the company, the company's goal, and culture compared to the outsourced development.

But everything has its weakness, so does this option. Following the in-house development also means that the company has to deal with:

Higher costs. Companies need to keep this in mind if they want to assemble in-house development: they have to take responsibility for not only monthly salaries for their in-house talents but also a wide range of charges such as taxes, training expenses, bonuses, vacations, and more.
Long commitments. This option requires a full-time commitment with in-house talents for a long period of time and it is definitely hard for software startups to remain a long commitment at the start of their journey.
Limited skills. If software startups utilize in-house development, there might not be enough specific competencies that are needed for a future project including practices such as DevOps, big data, IoT, matching learning/AI, etc. Moreover, it might be time-consuming and not really effective in the financial aspect for bringing much-needed expertise.
Prolonged project start. There are a lot of efforts that are needed to recruit members for the in-house development team and train them from scratch. Hence, this in-house development approach will be much more time-consuming.
Companies need to take responsibility for all hiring and managerial efforts.

Outsourced Development Model

This approach can bring out two major benefits that every software/tech startup might need which are reducing costs and launching faster. There will be other pros and cons waiting ahead depending on which outsourcing strategy the company uses, such as freelancers, or full-process outsourcing. In Step 2, the other benefits and bottlenecks of this approach will be discussed in more detail.

To perform tasks with companies can combine the two models above into one

A hybrid approach

You may hire an in-house CTO and key tech specialists and reinforce them with outsourced software developers to perform the tasks with lower impact or tasks that require specific knowledge.

Deciding on The Hiring Options

If a new startup decides on using the outsourcing model, the executives should carefully consider the following options below in order to pick the most appropriate one for their firm.

Hiring Freelance Developers?

This option can provide a major benefit which is lower costs for the company. However, there are still some drawbacks which are:

Chance of facing missed deadlines and not getting the quality that the company wants. There should be enough control and strong management. It is obvious that freelancers usually do not have enough insights or experience in dealing with large and complex software.
Low level of security and confidentiality. Freelancer developers usually use their own equipment. It is not guaranteed that the security in their software or equipment might be good enough to prevent the company's code or data from being misused, theft, or lost.
To sum up, it might be time-consuming for software startups to find the appropriate freelance developers. This option might be only suitable for small software projects.

Out-staffing

Companies can work with a blend of tech talents that are carefully pre-selected and a wide range of backgrounds with this option. Companies that offer out-staffing services can provide professionals as individuals or as a team such as PM, designers, and more. With this option, startups can quickly hire professionals who have years of experience in working in this field and only pay when the work is done.

Moreover, these professionals can flexibly scale the team up and down depending on the startup companies' demands. However, there are still some disadvantages regarding our staffing option:

Software startup companies will have to take responsibility fully or partially for the delivery concerns and risk management.
Startup companies have to create appropriate channels for collaboration and resolve difficulties that might possibly occur during the collaboration.
Software startups also need to be totally or partially responsible for onboarding and managing.

End-to-end Software Development Outsourcing

A vendor providing full-process outsourcing is fully responsible for the team arrangement and management, quality of the outcomes, and risk management. This can be the best choice for newly established tech companies with zero experience nor skills, and no desire for creating and coordinating the processes of development so that they can fully focus on marketing and strategic initiatives. Skype, GitHub, and Viber set good examples of startup companies that became successful thanks to leveraging the benefits of outsourced teams.

This technique is not time-consuming due to the fact that vendors usually have their own teams beforehand and the teams' structure can quickly be adjusted to meet the needs of the project. Companies, especially start-ups, can obtain more insights, expertise, and best practices related to the vendor's process of established development. Another huge advantage that should be listed here is that the vendor who takes part in the project will take full responsibility for the project's quality.

The service-level agreement between the customer company and the vendor will guarantee the quality of deliverables and timeline alignment. If the quality is not reached, the vendor has to take penalties for breaching the agreement. Despite having many pros, this option still has a major drawback that should be mentioned:

Among the three outsourcing models that were listed above, this one has the highest costs.

START THE PROJECT

From MVP (minimum feasible product) to a full-fledged product

After the product gets validated by the market and it can gain traction, the startup companies can start changing the priorities of recruiting and hiring based on the development strategy. More complex design patterns (such as cloud solutions), more advanced software development and management practices (such as DevOps, cloud computing) are required in order to meet the ever-changing needs and expectations of the increased number of users. Introducing data analytics, offering support for users 24/7 should also be taken into consideration.

Overall, the startups will need a development team possessing experience in working with complex software systems along with connecting and collaborating between team members to work in unison more consistently. It means that, at this stage, hiring and building a professional in-house team or utilizing a pre-assembled team from outsourcing vendors are the only doable options.

Side-note:

There are several factors that might affect the right hiring model for a startup, namely an available budget, timeline, software complexity, experience that you have in recruiting and hiring tech specialists, etc.

The core of success for most startups is marketing and sales. With full-process outsourcing, you can completely focus on it while letting a vendor take care of the development process for your company. Hiring an agency with years of experience in outsourcing is the best option in many cases. An experienced outsourcing agency knows how to quickly reinforce the team both in quantity and quality depending on the demand. Outsourcing vendors have experience in many projects and many are trustworthy with established several processes, experience in project management, tested KPIs, and more.

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