When you look for an effective way to shape your digital footprint for your business while keeping the costs low, hiring remote app developers becomes the ideal option compared to getting on board a sizable in-house development team.
No wonder remote hiring is gaining traction in technology-driven countries. But to make this successful, there are few considerations you need to keep in mind. To help you know cost to hire remote developers for an app project, here we offer some valuable suggestions. Read on.
Understand the impediments
At the very beginning, it is essential to understand the app’s size and complexity and the development challenges it comes with. Is it a large-scale project or a small and simple one? As for large and complex projects, hiring developers from a reliable development firm is ideal. On the other hand, even small projects and start-ups should ideally hire reputed firms. But for budget-constrained projects, hiring freelance developers with a good history and experience can also be a great choice.
It is essential to understand the cost of development and possible budget before starting with the hiring process. This is often done by creating a comprehensive list of variable factors impacting the cost. For remote hiring, it is also essential to consider the time zone, cultural differences, and linguistic gap.
Comprehensive PRD is a must.
As the obvious first step, creating a comprehensive Project Requirement Document (PRD) is necessary. This document should include the app idea, objectives, required tech stack, estimated budget, estimated timeline, and all other project details.
Now to help developers with a hands-on guide, you can get a brief Proof of Concept (POC), simply an app wireframe. This will help communicate the project requirements more effectively to the developers.
These two steps, namely PRD and POC, are practical stepping stones for successful remote hiring. The PRD and the POC will give you a clear roadmap and continue to remain a guiding reference for the development teams.
Here are the places to find quality resources
Finding the right developer talent who can address the project’s demands and that within an affordable budget is paramount for recruiters. Full-stack developers with the skills to build an app from scratch can save costs by reducing the development team size. Let’s mention here some channels to find quality developer resources.
- Job boards for remote hiring
You can search through hundreds of developer resumes and contact them. To begin with, you need to post job openings showcasing what you need. Some of the most visited job boards by developers include LinkedIn, RemoteOK, AngelList, and CrunchBoard.
- Online freelance platforms
Hiring remote freelance developers for a project has its strengths and downsides. But how by deploying the right systems and procedures, you get access to qualified and experienced freelance developers, which becomes the determinant factor. For finding talented freelancer developers, you can go to platforms like ValueCoder, Upwork, freelancer.com, and others.
- Social channels
Searching across social media channels can be another way to get introduced to expert developers and get recommendations from other entrepreneurs.
Screening developer talents
The remote hiring experience can be daunting with a multitude of qualified candidates. You must use a rigorous screening process to ensure you get on board the best of the lot. The screening process should emphasize the following.
- Go beyond portfolio: Begin by examining the apps made by the developers and the projects where they played a key role. Download these applications, find their shortcomings and strengths, and compare these to what you need for your project; after assessing the portfolio, narrow your selection to a few developers, get in touch with their past customers, and learn about their experience.
- Developer ratings and activity on community platforms: Developer community platforms are where skilled and experienced developers engage with each other and give reviews. Reactions are great places to spot talents. Both StackOverflow and GitHub are good community platforms where one can look at the finished projects and see repositories of code from them.
Technical test for developersÂ
This step requires assessing the programming skills of the candidates through a demo project. Thanks to this, you can determine their coding skills and how they interact and engage with other team members to complete the project.
For such technical tests, you can create a demo project on your own or just use online testing platforms’ help. These platforms, by offering no-holds-barred access to various frameworks, tools, libraries, and GitHub repositories, help build apps in a real-world coding environment. These platforms also help test their skills professionally by measuring against established industry standards.
This sample coding test will reveal the programming skills and aptitude level of the developers for the projects. Through the test, you must also evaluate their team collaboration skills and their adherence to best practices.
Personality attributes & soft skills
An experienced developer is more than an isolated expert only responsible for coding. He is expected to be a strong communicator in speech or writing. From conducting webinars to writing in journals or blogs, he must showcase his abilities to help the company establish thought leadership.
Apart from verbal communication skills, the app developer should always have an aspirational attitude and zeal to outshine. They should also master the industry-acclaimed protocols, practices, and benchmarks. They should also be prepared to walk the extra mile to make a project successful.
On A Final Note
Instead of reinventing the wheel, you can just take heed of the best hiring practices when planning to hire remote developers. Give priority to the talents, skills, knowledge, and developers’ familiarity with the challenges. When you adhere to these principles and practices, hiring the best talents becomes no longer difficult.
