The IT labor market is a real battlefield: considering the scarcity of talents, businesses from all industries literally fight for top developers. While specialists’ experience and hard skills matter a lot, hiring right is more important than hiring expensive.
We, at Overboost.pro, believe that a coherent team with proper communication is a major driving force in business. You should establish a dialog with new developers so that both parties understand each other well.
The ad hoc approach can hardly be efficient. Without clear objectives, a company risks recruiting the wrong employee who may have outstanding skills but be irrelevant for your project. In such a scenario, recruitment costs are wasted, and high-quality software is unattainable.
Right hiring consists of several factors that we will elaborate on in this article. Here is a brief step-by-step guide on how to hire a professional who will contribute to the success of your project.
1. Identify the Gap
You can’t find the best solution if you fail to identify the problem. You can’t have the same approach for every problem, in other words “If your only tool is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.”
Abraham Maslow’s famous idea highlights the importance of a personalized approach to every case. That’s why your first step is to identify the gap. Try answering the following questions:
- What business needs does my company need to address?
- What business objective does my company want to achieve?
- What skills does my team lack that prevent the company from achieving the objectives/needs?
- What professional experience should a candidate have to contribute to the objective’s achievement?
What you should do is break the problem down into small challenges and address each one separately. Then, you will have a clear understanding of the required competencies. Once this is done, you can build an image of an ideal developer with a precise set of soft and hard skills, knowledge, and suitable professional background.
2. Source in the Right Place
Now that you know who exactly you are looking for, you need to know where to find such talents. Typically, businesses choose between:
Freelancers
The freelance market is huge, but it is not so easy to make a right decision while you are looking for a developer that you need in a short time. You have a pool of developers who will eagerly work on your project. Besides, you can find a specialist for any budget, which is an amazing advantage if you are short on finances.
While finding a highly skilled developer is a matter of luck, patience, and time, managing a scattered team may become a real nightmare. Considering that a freelancer is going to join your team permanently, you need to think through the management of distributed teams. Lack of proper communication is a common problem to address. To increase productivity, you need to consider the candidate’s soft skills. They are crucial in communication and teamwork with other developers, UX designers, QAs, and DevOps.
Outsourcing agencies
Turning to an agency is more expensive than hiring freelancers. However, it’s more stress-free, because you don’t need to hire talents one by one. You are getting yourself an aligned team, where specialists have already come together. This boosts effectiveness and productivity. However, if you need a full-time employee, outsourcing a team of developers or a single specialist isn’t a good idea: you will have to make a better offer than their current employers does, which may be costly.
Labor market
By labor market, we mean sourcing developers via traditional channels: platforms like Glassdoor or social networks like LinkedIn. You can potentially find suitable candidates on your own or post a job opening and wait for a flow of applications.
Since the labor market is full of specialists, you will have a lot of developers to choose from. On the flip side, prepare to devote a lot of time as you will have to consider them all to shortlist those with the required competencies. If you aim for a true professional with a lot of experience, you will have to cover not only management costs but also additional benefits for an employee: perks is a competitive advantage that helps sourcing highly-skilled talents.
3. Interview
When you find candidates who seem to suit your position, it’s interview time! You need to evaluate the developers’ competencies and soft skills. Moreover, you need to explain the position and specify your company’s expectations from the employee. The interview is broken down into three main stages:
- Introduction. An HR manager briefly tells interviewees about a company and asks about their background in general.
- Technical interview. Team lead, tech lead, or a project owner (any other person who understands a project the developer applied for well enough) discusses all the technical details of the future work so that a candidate has a clear picture of the required performance, personal and team goals. At this stage, an interviewer asks project-related technological questions to test the interviewee’s knowledge.
- Coding exercise. It can be either live coding or homework. You prepare a test task, set time limits, and let a candidate show what he/she is capable of. A skilled developer from your team is the one to check the task and discuss it with the candidate.
Further stages vary from company to company. They may include additional technical or cultural fit interviews. After this, you are to discuss legal issues, salary, benefits, and any other unsolved matters.
4. Welcome a Developer in a Team
Provided you have found a perfect fit, what is your next step? Set a trial period in a contract: during this time, new hires can quit without long notice period, or you can fire them easily if the collaboration fails. Assign a mentor who will supervise the new hire and give simple tasks for adaptation to the company’s infrastructure and warming up.
