How to Hire a Web Developer – 6 Tips to Help You Find Top Talent

How to Hire a Web Developer - 3 Main Strategies to Consider

Hire a freelance team

Pros

The freelance market is booming, giving you unlimited opportunities to find skilled web developers to create apps for any industry. Almost half of all businesses use freelance services for hiring a website developer, and the popularity of this approach is projected to grow. Here is why. 

• Global talent pool. When you need to hire web developers, keep in mind that there are 1,1 billion freelancers globally (just for the comparison - they count for ⅛ of the global population), and most of them are IT specialists. The freelance market allows for finding quality developers with any expertise you need. 
• Cost-effective. The opportunity to pay the fixed price for the work done means avoiding overpayments. What’s more, the opportunity to choose from the global talent pool allows you to tailor the freelance developer’s rate per hour or per project to your budget expectations. There is also a huge gap between the rates of freelancers from different countries - up to 4 times the difference(just compare the salaries of freelance developers in the US with those in India and take it into account when you need to hire web programmers)
• Short-term relations without strict obligations. In contrast to full-time web developers, freelance programmers are good for short-term projects without the need to burden your company with additional obligations. The only thing you have to do is to find a web developer on the freelance platform, make sure they are suitable for your project, assign them a task, and pay after the task is completed. 

Cons

• You can get overwhelmed by the choice of opportunities. When you need to hire a web programmer for your project, choosing from 1,1 billion freelancers can be frustrating. Too many choice options significantly decrease the likelihood of making the final decision but increase the probability of feeling disappointed with it, according to Psychology Today. Plus, you have to spend too much time researching the candidates, interviewing, and comparing web developer skills and qualities, which significantly delays the start of the development process.  
• Lack of control and commitment. When you hire a web developer on a freelance platform, be prepared that freelance developers are often difficult to control. The only way to control them is to use time tracking and screen capturing software but not all the candidates will agree to such an offer.  Freelancers are also less committed to the projects they are working on - most of them work on several projects at once to retain their customers. 
• The risk of miscommunication. Remote communication is the only option for the companies that decide to run all the processes from home or use a mixed model, but it has its pitfalls. Miscommunications and misunderstandings, response delays, and huge differences in time zones can make your communication with freelancers less effective, which can lead to failed deadlines, more mistakes in the process, more time to finish a project, and a significantly higher cost at the end. 
• Freelancing can cost more if there is no clear development strategy. When you hire a website developer and you aren’t sure about what and how you are going to develop, clarifying your project strategy along with hiring freelancers can become one more challenge, which is likely to end up in significant time and effort waste. 

How to Hire a Web Developer in house

How to hire a web developer that would be fully devoted to your project? Hiring your development team in-house seems to be the most intuitive option. Still, it also comes with its pros and cons. 

Pros

• Full control and clear communication. Face-to-face communication is still effective (but less safe). When hiring your web developers in-house, you give them an opportunity to communicate and collaborate clearer, faster, and better. According to the statistics, companies with effective communication practices have 50% lower employee turnover, so hiring your developers in-house can also be a chance to build an effective, collaborative and productive team with an aligned vision. 
• You can build an effective team once and grow your business with it. An effective team of full-stack developers can give your business an opportunity to grow at no additional costs, developing the solutions you need to make your business processes more effective. 
• Better opportunities for following Agile methodology. Some experts argue on in-house employee agility, stating that it is difficult to stay Agile without instant access to specific tech talents and expertise. Still, having an in-house team is a better opportunity to stay Agile within the project - the team can instantly respond to the changes and challenges with no communication delays. 

Cons

• The opportunities for staff choice are limited to location. Hiring locally is a good strategy when you explain your physical business presence to foreign countries. But when it comes to the need to hire PHP developers, for example, limiting your choice to your location means limiting your opportunities to find top talents with niche-specific expertise. 
• Increased responsibility as an employer. What’s more, when hiring staff in-house, you have to accept an increased responsibility which will be highlighted by the contact. You can’t fire your team if your development course changes, can’t avoid paying taxes and should be compliant with other legal regulations. You are also less flexible with your team in terms of paying them their salaries, which is likely to be fixed regardless of the actual workload. 
• High operational costs. How much does it cost to hire a web developer in-house? Indeed, this is the most expensive option compared to freelance and dedicated development team. In this case, your expenses include but aren’t limited to renting an office and buying equipment. There also will be hiring costs (the average cost to hire an employee is $4000), training and onboarding costs (it costs $2300 per employee on average), plus retention costs which can’t be calculated less or more precisely, and potentially, the employee replacement that can cost you $15,000 per person for a programmer earning a median salary of $45,000 a year. That is, the costs of gathering and maintaining a team in-house can go beyond your web development budget.

Contact us for instant development team extension services!

Outsource your development process

Accounting (37%), digital marketing (34%) and software development  (34%) are the top 3 business processes outsourced most frequently. Software development outsourcing, which means the process of hiring for services instead of hiring people, is a pretty popular approach, which is here to stay. According to Deloitte, in 2021, more and more companies are going to outsource their non-core business processes either in full or powering their core team with an extended one. Below are the pros and cons of this approach when it comes to web development outsourcing. 

Pros

• Web development outsourcing is the most cost-effective development approach. According to different estimates, this strategy allows for saving up to 60% of the development budget because of the opportunity to pay for the actually delivered services and the significant pricing gap between the home country and the outsourcing destination. As an example, cost-efficiency combined with the strong tech expertise of the developers makes Ukraine a promising outsourcing destination. 
• There are three types of contact to fit your project. What do you need to know before hiring a web developer according to the outsourcing models? You need to know that there are three collaboration opportunities, and each of them can be perfectly tailored to your project needs and specifics. 

1. Fixed price contract. It suits small web projects with a predictable workflow, created according to the Waterfall methodology.
2. Time and material contract. This is an option for the small to medium projects with less predictability, for example, legacy web sites modernization.
3. Dedicated team. In this case, you can hire a team of Laravel developers, for instance, and manage them in a way your project needs it. The team works on your project exclusively, and the vendor pays them full-time salaries.

• Top-tech expertise. There are several outsourcing destinations you can choose from. The companies can choose on-shore (hiring in the US or Europe) or offshore outsourcing, hiring the developers from remote destinations (Eastern Europe or the Middle East). Countries such as Ukraine are some of the most promising countries to develop your project remotely. In this country, you can hire professional web developers with strong tech expertise and engineering education tradition, real-life experience in working with American and European projects, business ethics, and cultural match. In 2020, Ukrainian IT exports exceeded $5 billion and are projected to grow in 2021. Hiring specific talents here is also trouble-free. For example, you can hire Node.js web developers or almost any other tech talents pretty fast. 
• No language barrier, convenient time zones overlap. When hiring a website developer, consider that most Ukrainian programmers are English (and not only English) proficient - you can interview developers on your own to make sure of it. Plus, Ukraine has convenient time zones that overlap with the US and Europe. 
• Affordable cost. The average salary of a US programmer is three times higher compared to the wage of a Ukrainian developer. This means that even a dedicated team outsourcing contract is still affordable in this case, although it is the most expensive option to collaborate with the development vendor. 

Cons

• You have to choose a development vendor carefully. There are a lot of software development companies in local markets, so you have to be careful with the choice. The best strategy is to partner with a company that has experience in your niche (it should be shown in their portfolio), is skilled with the technologies you have chosen, and has no reputational issues (consider the companies with 4,5+ rating on Clutch/Good Firms only). 
• Cultural mismatch and mentality gaps. While some of the companies embrace cultural diversity as an opportunity to find out-of-the-box solutions because of the different thinking paradigms, cultural diversity should have reasonable limits, while the business values and approaches of the customer and their team are better to overlap. That’s why outsourcing to countries with a huge mentality gap can be risky. 
• Possible communication issues. Remote communication has its pitfalls. To avoid them, you should discuss the communication practices, approaches, rules, and tools in advance. You can also specify them in your software development outsourcing contract. 

Software Development Outsourcing Best Practices at A-Team Global

Still doubt the feasibility to build your web project remotely, outsourcing it to the third-party vendor? Let us explain how this process can be effective and transparent for you. Below are the benefits we can offer along with the best practices we follow when creating dedicated web projects for our customers.

Consider hiring an in-house team. 

How much time do you need to hire a web developer? The average time to hire an employee in-house is 4 weeks. The average time frame to hire a freelancer can be even longer because of the abundance of choice. Hiring a dedicated team with our company will take up to two-three weeks since we already have front- and back-end developers under our roof. 

Gather a team according to the project-specific needs. 

Suppose you need to build a project using technology less popular than JavaScript. For instance, you may want to hire ASP.NET developers. In this case, we will be able to quickly source the necessary development talents according to your requirements and launch the development process with all the project-specific specialists on board. 

Make the hiring process transparent. 

At A-Team Global, we stand for clarity, transparency, and honesty. Surely, you have the right to know and personally meet the programmers who will work on your projects. You can interview your developers as well to make sure of their skills and competencies. 

Choose the most fitting type of outsourcing contract for your project. 

Each of the contracts suits different types of projects, and we will help you find your perfect match to avoid overspending and follow the best suitable development methodology. 

Acquire effective tools for your project development according to its specifics. 

We know the issues most of our customers struggle with. They are trying to find the best framework for web development, the right programming language, the most effective project management tool, and much more. We are here to help you with all these issues. 

Organize a hassle-free communication and control system. 

We would also be glad to discuss the communication, reporting, and control system that will be convenient to you. 

Feel like outsourcing your website development is right for you? Let’s get in touch now! 

Conclusion

Hiring the right web developers for your project can be a challenge.  Still, outsourcing your website creation to the tech-savvy vendor can make the process easier. This approach comes with a set of business benefits, allowing you to significantly decrease the cost, control and manage your development team, stay flexible and make use of the up-to-date technologies and expertise.