How to Hire Software Developers For a Start-up?
It is obvious that the most crucial point for a start-up is to deliver its product to the market as fast as possible. And there are many reasons for that: competitors can appear on the market with a similar product faster or start gaining first customers to get the funding for further development and promotion and so on. But how can a start-up accelerate development time?
Actually, there are several options but the most efficient is to hire an external development team. While transferring this job to the development team, the business can concentrate on core activities like business promotion, marketing, strategic planning, etc. Let’s have a look at how to hire a team of software developers and what are the alternatives.
Challenges Of Hiring Developers For A Startup
The necessity to hire developers for a start-up is inevitable as it does not have its own team at the very start. However, finding and adding software developers to the project isn’t easy and is usually associated with a number of challenges. Let’s have an insight into the issues that startups can face when looking for a development team.
Local Market Talents Shortage
Hiring locally implies many benefits for companies, especially when they onboard the specialists to build an unconventional product. Local specialists are always at hand and it’s easy to get hold of the needed specialists and quickly discuss the development issues on the spot. However, in most cases, it’s a perfectly modeled situation. In reality, the shortage of local specialists equally affects small and big companies, and startups are no exception.
The tendency is observed around the world. For example, the Local reports that the Swedish public sector is already suffering from IT talent lack in the public sector. As a result, many businesses and startups reject the idea of hiring locally only and handing their project over to software outsourcing companies around the world, instead. Find out how to find professional software developers overseas and how to effectively hire outsourcing specialists for your projects.
Talent Retention
Even if a startup has landed some highly-skilled local software developers for its project, it doesn’t provide any guarantees that it’ll manage to retain valuable specialists.
The main issue that startups face at this point is that they have to compete with large corporations which are also constantly searching for unique talents to hire. In addition to corporations, startups have to consider big and medium businesses. Often, they offer more instant perks than startups while the latter can promise the same or higher benefits only in the future.
This way, apart from hiring unique specialists, startups also have to search for “developer enthusiasts” who are ready to contribute to the project, hoping for the possibility to double or triple their income in the case of the project’s success.
Budget Management
When hiring software developers in-house startups have to consider all the financial expenses associated with their onboarding, e.g. taxes, benefits, social security, annual leaves, relevant software and hardware equipment, and more.
Unfortunately, the resulting sums can be too significant for businesses that often have limited budgets. Many startups find a way to reduce costs while outsourcing their software development projects to an external provider. This way, they can eliminate most of the additional expenses on hardware and infrastructure, taxes, and operational costs as outsourcing companies take care of all that.
Benefits Of Hiring Software Developers For a Startup
Here are just some benefits that startups can reap if turning to hiring developers from a service provider.
- Cost-effectiveness
By hiring a software development team, startups can significantly cut down their costs. This becomes possible due to many factors, including lower cost of living and lower taxes in the outsourcing countries, no need to pay social benefits, vacation compensations, and saving on expensive equipment and office space.
- Large Tech talent pool
When startups turn to outsourcing service providers they get access to the pool of software developers across multiple technologies, niches and expert levels. Along with that, software development outsourcing companies have various specialists for diverse IT project needs (UI/UX designers, DevOps, QA specialists, Business Analysts, etc).
- Flexibility and scalability
Usually, outsourcing providers are super-flexible to work with. They can quickly adjust the number of team members when product requirements are changing fast. Startups can easily scale up or down their development teams to align them with the current project needs.
Hiring Developers For A Startup: Steps
Specify Your Project and Product Needs
Before starting to look for a development team, clearly outline the scope of the project, describe as precisely as possible the requirements, and preferably prepare a technical and business specification, or requirements. Also decide who will be responsible for managing the team, a Project manager on your side or a vendor Project manager, or even an independent Project manager. Who will be responsible for the UI/UX design of the application or is it already in place? If you have a prototype, it will ease the design to development hand-off. If you have an MVP and already tested it on real users then most likely you know what features should be added firsthand and what the rest development plan should look like.
Do not forget about the deadline as it is essential for a startup project.
Here’s a sample of a checklist of what you need to prepare:
- Outline the scope of the project;
- Prepare the requirements;
- Create UI/UX design;
- Describe the features and split them by priority;
- Outline the timeline and budget;
- Decide on the management;
- Look for the developers.
Once set with the above mentioned points start looking for the developer or a development team.
Decide on the Cooperation Model
When your project and product requirements are ready, consider under what terms and conditions you want to cooperate with your software development partners. Usually, outsourcing companies provide several cooperation options so that you can choose the one best suited for your business needs.
If you don’t have any software developers and need an entire IT team of skilled software specialists then a software development provider can assign you a fully-equipped team of professionals suitable for your project tasks. This team can include front-end and back-end developers, UI/UX designers, a project manager, and other specialists. Usually, such teams work on a time and material basis as long as you need.
In case you want to implement some cutting-edge technologies in your project like Blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT), and Artificial Intelligence (AI), you can hire stand-alone specialists and complement the existing team with the required experts from a service provider for a certain period of time. In this case, hiring on an outstaffing basis can be a good option if you already have someone to manage them internally.
Consider the Outsourcing Destination
There is a wide range of software development outsourcing destinations around the world. Therefore, it’s easy to get confused when choosing an outsourcing destination. When considering where to hire a software development team many startups opt for Eastern Europe, namely Poland.
Poland has become very popular to outsource development work due to a great number of highly-qualified developers to choose from and reduced rates in comparison to the local market. For start-ups, time and cost are almost crucial points in their intention to deliver the product, so hiring a development company with all processes set and a huge pool of engineers to choose from can be a real goldmine.
There are several large outsourcing places in Poland where big and small companies search for software developers. In this article, we’ve outlined the top IT Polish cities where virtually any company can find developers for their software development project needs.
How We Cooperate With Startups?
SCAND is an experienced software development company operating on the international market for more than 20 years already. We have vast experience in delivering software for both large and small businesses from various domains, including building innovative development projects for startups from scratch.
We have established an effective approach to screening and selecting IT professionals for each software development project.
Here are some steps we take when starting working with startups:
Clarifying Project Requirements
The first step is to determine the requirements of a particular project. The information that we ask for is a brief product description or a complete SRS, whatever a client can have (basic features and functionality), etc. Then we make an estimation for the project which includes the required team size and time required for its delivery. We decide on the technology stack, best-suited software development approach or workflow and discuss it with our customer.
Selecting the Right IT Specialists
Once the project scope and requirements are set, we start screening our internal talent pool of tech specialists to define those who would fit best the development project. At this stage, we allocate all required team members like project manager, business analyst, team lead, UI/UX designers, software developers, QA and DevOps specialists.
Integrating Software Developers Into Your Team
Often it happens that startups already have their own tech team and they search for standalone IT experts with narrow specialization to enhance their team performance. In this case, we do our best to make the knowledge transfer and onboarding process as smooth and fast as possible.
Project Handoff
This is the final stage of cooperation with our company when a startup obtains the project source code and all IP rights on the product. Once the project is released we transfer all IP rights and source code to the customer who can further develop it.
Bottom line
Hiring a software development team is one of the important steps for a start-up. Therefore, startup companies have to take this process seriously, think thoroughly about the scope of the project, do research and investigation before making any choice.
The final step is to weigh all the options and decide whether to hire in-house specialists or a software development company like SCAND, with a pool of 250+ engineers on board, 20 years of experience in IT, and more than 300+ satisfied customers across the globe.
Our hard work and dedication to quality have been appreciated by our customers and reflected in their reviews. We are committed to long-term work with our customers, starting working with them at the very early stages and helping grow their business.
