How to Hire a Developer: Key Steps

1. Defining requirements to candidates

Before you start searching for developers to deliver your project, we recommend seeking for IT consultants, who will help you prepare a software requirements specification (SRS). When designed properly, this document contains detailed information on the technical skills (programming languages, platforms, development tools) that you need to look for in the future candidates.

To form accurate soft skill requirements (communication abilities, mentorship experience, problem-solving skills, etc.), consult your PM, software architect, or a team lead: these are the people who will work closely with the developers, and their preferences matter.

2. Screening and interviewing

In case of in-house hiring, entrust the screening and first-round interviewing of software developers to the HR department.

In case of outsourcing, you start with the vendor search. Once you find and contact a suitable vendor, you receive their assistance in choosing required talents:

• For a dedicated team – you discuss your project needs with a vendor, receive their proposal with a project plan and cost/time estimations, and proceed (or don’t) to the next step – requesting CVs for assembling a self-managed team – based on your impression of their offer.
• For team augmentation – a vendor analyzes your requirements and provides you with the CVs of fitting candidates from their pool.

After the HR department or a vendor shortlists the top candidates, it’s time for an in-depth technical interview with a PM, a team lead and a software architect. It’s best to break the interview into 2-3 stages and run a technical test. The interviewers should focus on a candidate’s technical savviness (adherence to coding guidelines, ability to solve architecture challenges, etc.) and general attitude (being progress-oriented, complying with the established processes, openness to communication) to make sure they won’t hold back your project or bring unnecessary negativity into the team’s dynamic.

3. Hiring

When done in-house, all the legal processes mostly lie with the HR department. In vendor cooperation, the vendor remains an official employer of the developers, which saves your company all the legal paperwork trouble. The key cooperation-related document that you should expect from the vendor in both team augmentation and dedicated team models is Service Level Agreement.

The vendor is responsible for using a wide range of SaaS collaboration tools to set up two-way communication between:

• project stakeholders on your side and the developers you hired,
• the developers on their team and the developers on your vendor’s team (for team augmentation).

However, you need to set up the vendor management process to manage pricing quotes, control delivery and payments dates, as well as monitor vendor KPIs.

4. Onboarding

The multi-step interviewing for in-house hiring significantly shortens the onboarding period as it generally helps select a natural fit for your working environment. Still, any accommodation to new conditions takes time, and this time depends on a person.

If you don’t have much time to spare and want your hired developers to full-on dive into the working processes as soon as possible, your best solution is to cooperate with a vendor. Their software developers for hire are extremely flexible and can adapt to new project conditions in just under 1 week. It can take up to 2 weeks in case of the dedicated team model, but an on-site visit can significantly speed up the process.

5. Building a team

To create a team, you need to build proper communication between the team members. For an in-house development team, launch team-building training or let the team have a test drive by working on a small project or a project part to practice communication techniques and problem-solving approaches.

If you don’t have enough time and resources to provide complex team training, we recommend to opt for a dedicated self-managed team. With this model, you won’t need to worry about solid team building processes as the vendor will take care of them.