The Ultimate Guide to Hire Remote Developers

The demand for remote talent continues to surge as businesses recognize the numerous benefits of tapping into a global pool of skilled professionals. It is important to remember that tech industry is experiencing a paradigm shift. The traditional approach of assembling development teams within centralized location is rapidly giving way more agile and geographically distributed model. By leveraging the power of remote work, businesses gain access to the global pool of skilled developers, fostering innovation and unlocking a competitive advantage.

When you hire remote workers for your project, you can be sure that you are getting the right people for the job. The best thing is that you don’t have to look for one who is willing to relocate to your city. For the same reason, it will not come as a surprise to you if I say that a greater number of companies are interested in offshore development and looking for more and more remote candidates for their project.

As per report from DemandSage,

• 7% of permanent employees work from home, while 28.2% work in a hybrid model
• 16% of companies globally are fully remote, while 63% offer hybrid work options
• By 2023, demand for remote work will increase by 30%
• 98% of employees prefer to work remotely
• 5% of the American workforce works from home
• 59% of employees will prefer employer allowing remote work
• Organizations can save up to $11,000 per worker after switching to remote work
• 93% of employers would prefer executing job interviews remotely
• 69% of remote employees experience burnout

Scaling Your Dreams: 5 Advantages of Hiring Remote Developers

Remote developers offer several benefits for businesses. It equips you with key to a global talent pool, fostering diversity and innovation. Hiring remote developers can be cost-effective, saving on office expenses. It enables flexible team scaling without long-term commitments.

Global Workforce Accessibility

Traditional recruitment methods can severely limit your development team’s capabilities by limiting your search to a specific geographic area. This can force you to get less than the right candidate, which can hinder the success of your business. However, remote development offers a variable solution. By leveraging a global talent pool full of experienced professionals, you prioritize skills and experience over location. This empowers you to assemble a high-performing team that perfectly matches your business needs and business vision.

Cost Effectiveness

Hiring Remote developers can result in significant cost savings. Costs associated with office, equipment, and supplies are eliminated. Additionally, depending on your location, you may find competitive pricing from more experienced contractors compared to your local market.

Improved Productivity

According to the Software.com, 64% of developers said they are more constructive working remotely compared to 55% in 2021. According to the study conducted by Microsoft, only 12% of leaders said they are confident about their team are productive.

Higher Retention Rates

Do you know that remote developers tend to be more satisfied with their job and are able to reach a clear work-life balance? This is absolutely true. They manage to build up a healthier lifestyle and have lower stress levels. Now, this can be the main reason why people who work from home are not ready to quit the arrangement.

Scalability

Remote development allows you to scale your team up or down as a project’s needs evolve. It can easily acquire new developers for specific projects or projects without incurring significant costs.

Flexible Working Hours

When it comes to improved productivity of employees, flexibility in terms of working hours can play a great role. In order to achieve the best of productivity and quality, remote developers follows a precise schedule. They go ahead and choose the working hours which best suits them and this result in an excellent outcome. This allows the employer to focus on other important issues that concern your business. So, this turns out to be a win-win situation for both parties.

Top Strategies to Hire Remote Developers

Find out the most effective ways to hire remote developers. From finding talent globally to developing effective networks, this guide gives you the insights you need to streamline your remote hiring process and build a successful distributed team.

Offer Detailed Work Description

If you want to hire a remote developer for your project on a short-term basis, then you should make it a point to offer all the important information related to the project in the first place. You should talk about expected deliverables and related tasks too. You can even come up with some questions which are either completely technical or something related to their availability for the project.

Come up with a Robust Screening Process

Once you start getting the applications you need to speed up the hiring process by taking necessary steps. One way to start this is by drafting an email which offers more information about the company and comes up with a bunch of screening questions. These questions can be based on specific technical tasks which come as a part of the job profile. If you are looking to find the question that you should ask to developers, then this article is a way to go.

You can even ask them to build a test project so as to understand their skills, quality, and experience in work. However, you will have to pay them for the time to get this done.

At this stage who is motivated to work for you will be carrying on with the process and the rest will drop off.

Look for Soft Skills

If you have managed to find two to three candidates who have performed well in the above process, then it is time to take a look at their soft skills. Just looking at their education and experience is not going to tell you how they will perform as a remote software developer. You need to look for soft skills like time management, ability to work in a distributed team and communication skills.

Things to Consider when you Hire a Remote Development Team

To hire a remote development team which you can trust is the first step. You can be sure that such a team will offer expertise and deliver ideas which can add value to your software project. As we saw above, building an effective relationship from the beginning is important with your remote development team or say, developers. This will ensure everyone is on the same page and avoid any kind of mishaps.

There are a few that you can keep in mind while you Hire a Remote Development Team:

Hire the Right Development Team

The future of your software project completely depends on the team of developers you hire for your project. It would be better that you find remote developers who have experience in your industry. In order to offer you the best software solution, the developers should stay updated with the latest technology trends. Asking questions is quite effective at this stage! You can ask questions about their work ethic, values, communication style and the kind of development process they follow.

Go through their Previous Projects

Good work always speaks! So take some time to go through the work samples of your potential remote developers in the same niche. You can even ask for documentation and look for solutions that they have found for tricky issues.

Protecting Company Information

When you are working with a remote team you will have to share proprietary information about your concern with them. Now if you enjoy a competitive edge in the market, this can seem to be intimidating. So make it a point that you come up with a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) with the team and make it clear that the source code belongs completely to you.

Define the Objectives and Requirements of the Project

You need to be sure what you want to achieve through the software project and communicate the same with your remote work developer. If the developer or the team does not understand your requirements properly then chances are more that the finished product will not be appealing.

Define the Deliverables Clearly

You need to define the term “done” for every milestone to achieve and set a deadline for the same. Simply don’t come up with a project plan that is vague. Have a detailed plan in terms of design, development, and testing. You need to resolve bugs the moment it surfaces by including effective troubleshooting process.

Assign a Project Manager

The duty of a project manager comprises of monitoring the progress of the project while ensuring the scope and budget is met properly. He or she will be responsible to keep everyone on the track. Whenever the requirements change or delays come up, the project manager will ensure that the project does not get derailed. This person ensures the standard methodology is followed in software development and is accountable for everything. You should have one rather than going blind with your project.

Have a Constant Communication

Ensure your team keeps on talking while they are working together. You can come up with communication solutions like email notifications, project management software, chat apps, team meetings and others which can help all the stakeholders and developers on project updates.

Stay Involved

Having personal connections between the team members can make things better when any issue comes up. If possible, try to have a one-to-one meeting with the development team before you get ready for the launch. If it is not possible then you should have videoconferencing to discuss weekly goals and bridge any gaps that have been built in the process. Having better engagement on both sides will be visible in terms of the positive final product.

Be Agile

Here we are not talking about following any specific methodology. Let’s leave it to your project manager. What we are talking about here is that you should have some basic elements defined to keep the project moving. You should have a word with your development team about how the documentation process should go on, what and how should be the means of communication and specific terms to be used in the project. You should tell your team to be flexible and adaptable in terms of the development process as well as your approach.

Have Trust in your Team

Once you have made all the efforts and found the right remote app development company then it is time you trust them with the job. Their experience and expertise of past projects will help you have insights which can help you add value to your application. Such a step will help you reach your goals faster.

Challenges of Hiring Remote Workforce and its Solutions

Nowadays more and more number of companies is coming forward and incorporating flexible working hours and remote workers into their workforce. A good number of popular companies like Buffer, Mozilla, GitLab and others have their teams comprising of remote developers from different parts of the world, though there are some challenges too to have remote developers. Here’s what:

Challenge #1 Bonding with the team

When the developer is working within the office premises,he or she tends to build some bond with the other teammates. He or she will be seeing others everyday and have small talks regarding their personal lives. They will also come together to share their opinions regarding the work. As the personal relation builds up they will get to know each other better which will work towards building a rapport and trust within the team.

Now when the developer is working remotely within a distributed team, he or she will not be able to achieve this easily. Building a personal relationship with other teammates will not happen like that, he or she will have to work on that.

Solutions:

Start the conversation

The developer needs to start talking about things which are not directly in the context of the work. This will help him or her start building a rapport with others. He or she needs to find the common interest area of teammates with time so as to have personal conversations. Cracking some jokes once in a while can help to break the ice.

Making it a point to meet the team in person regularly

Meeting the team in person always works when it comes to building a relation for a remote developer. He or she will know the team more than just the names and figures he or she sees in the emails, chats and video conferences. It is important for the developer to be part of the company retreats and celebrations which takes place every year or even take some days off each year just to visit the office and meet the rest of the team.

Challenge #2 Getting Feedback

When it comes to working remotely, employees seldom get feedback and in some cases it is nil. Without receiving feedback it is hard for the developers to know their strengths as well as the areas of improvement. They may even not know whether they are doing it right or not. This will reflect in their work.

Solutions:

Offer regular feedbacks

Make it a point that you send regular feedback regarding the work received from the remote developer. It is also recommended to have a 1-on-1 conversation with the remote developer to talk about the project performance in detail.

Retrospectives

Having retrospective meetings is always good when it comes to finding out the issues and making improvements. Plan retrospective meetings with your remote developer on a regular basis and try to discuss the project. This can be a good source to offer your feedback too.

Challenge #3 Time zone differences

Now this is an issue that will surely pop up when you have remote workers working on the project. When you have started your day and want to discuss a key point in the project, you cannot do. This is because the remote developer has already called the day off.

If there are only a few hours of differences between the time zones, then it will not be a big deal. The issue starts when the time difference is quite more and the working hours of both sides do not overlap at all. In such situations it is not possible to have real-time communications between the teams and if it may occur it will be a rare thing.

Solutions:

Define time slots for calls and meetings

Discuss and decide a time which is comfortable for the team to have calls and meetings. This can be used to discuss the dailies. This way no one will have to make last moment adjustment for calls or even make sacrifices on the personal front just to be part of the call or meeting. For ease of managing, you can plan to go for timezone converters to find out the comfortable time for both parties.

Write it down instead of frequent meeting

Don’t wait for the meetings to convey all the messages to the remote developer. You can simply write everything down in the chat so that the developer will find it when he or she starts their day. If you want some emails to be sent at a said time then you can easily schedule it.This will ensure the email reaches the developer at a time which does not disturb them when they are not working.

Challenge #4 Focusing and avoiding distractions

When it comes to a remote developer, he or she may be tempted to watch Netflix or carry out a hobby during the working hours. With no one around to stop or tell, it becomes the sole responsibility of the developer to remain motivated and self-directed.

Again, if the remote developer has kids or other family members who stay at home then it will be not easy to focus on work. Any urgent tasks or constant interruptions can disturb the work and they may tend to be less productive. Again, it will not be easy to take up some calls or attend meetings amidst the chaos.

Solutions:

Having a proper workspace and set working hours

You will be able to focus on your work properly when you have minimum to no potential distractions around you. The same goes for your remote developers. Before you start with the project, ask your developer to set up a workspace of their own from where they can work without any distractions. Keeping personal gadgets away is effective too. It is also suggested for the developers to set a list of tasks to be completed in a day and plan their breaks accordingly.

Challenge #5 Keeping your personal and work time separate

For a remote developer there is no fixed schedule to work on. So in the end it may happen that they will be working from morning to night due to a number of careless reasons. This can lead to burnout. This will not look good either for the developer or for you. It is important for your developer to know when they should stop and disconnect.

Solutions:

Set working hours and set an alarm

As a remote developer there will be no fixed time for your extended team. But, when he or she sets an alarm it becomes easy for him or her to know how the work is progressing and when should they call off the day. Again, you should ask your developer to let you and the rest of the team know about such a fixed schedule as they will know when the remote developer will be available to approach.

Setting up work boundaries is another thing which your remote developer can do. The time when the kids are back from school or when your spouse comes back from work can seem to the appropriate time for the developer to take a break or logout. Based on such external factors, the day can be set and followed.

Log off during the lunch hours

Ask your remote developers to mark their lunch hours in the calendar so that no project meetings get scheduled during that time. You can even ask them to set reminders for lunch time so that they log out and here you and the rest of the team will know when and how to handle work. Again, this will mean a lot when it comes to boosting the productivity of the remote workers as they will take the break properly and will be back on the desk with more energy.

Keep devices different for personal and professional use

It would be better that the remote developer keeps things different for personal and professional use. This will help them build separate boundaries for a healthy work-life balance. For the remote developer it is always a challenge to keep things different and knows when to disconnect. You can help them with it and ensure they are giving their 100% to work. Moreover, this will also ensure their personal life is not at stake.

Why Hire Remote Developers from South Asian Countries like India?

Today digital transformation is taking place at a great speed and this had led to the increasing demand for software solutions. With globalization on its way, the demand for offshore software development has spiked in South Asian countries especially India.

Even though there are other countries which is into outsourcing but India stands out in terms of quality and costs. Outsourcing to India comes with a set of benefits and they are:

Conclusion
It will not come as a surprise if you find more and more number of companies coming forward and choosing remote developers for software development needs. They are cost-effective, offer quality services and come with the flexibility which you will need for your software development project. Still, you need to be sure you have the right people onboard and for the same;you need to follow the best tips.

Cutting Costs but
NOT Cutting Quality
that’s how we roll! 🚀

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