Establishing and leading a startup to success in this era takes smart decisions followed by precise and market-focused execution. Being technologically well equipped with the right skills, resources and infrastructure is the first condition to become innovative and agile in decision making and execution.
But being tech-equipped properly involves competitive exposure spanning across years and a big investment. This is why a startup establishing its mobile app footprint needs to look outside for resources and skills. As a startup, are you concerned about how to extend the app development team? Instead of making big holes in the budget. Startups can hire remote developers with the right tech skills and project experience.
Here in this blog post, we will provide a detailed step-by-step guide to hiring remote developers for startup app projects.
Make a Well-articulated PRD
Before looking for remote resources, the unavoidable first step is preparing a detailed Project Requirement Document (PRD) that mentions the app idea and its objectives in clear terms besides mentioning the required tech stack, development budget, and estimated timeline.
When you have identified the skills and tech stack through a PRD. You have a clear roadmap to hiring the best experts for their respective skills. But that is often not enough to communicate with the experts and achieve better bargains for your requirements. It is advisable to supplement the PRD with a brief Proof of Concept (POC) as a wireframe.
The detailed PRD coupled with an app wireframe will help you approach the best development teams and communicate your requirements more precisely. This is the most important preparatory stage for hiring remote developers.
Know Where to Find the Skilled Resources
Now as per your project requirements, you need to find the right developer talents. Here budget also becomes a key consideration. Skills of successful full-stack developers in building a complete app from start to finish are in high demand as it allows startups to reduce development team size and save cost. Based upon these considerations, you should look for developer talents across the following channels.
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Job Boards for Developers
This is the most immediate and commonly preferred channel to find remote developers across the skill sets. You can either browse developer resumes and approach them or post job ads by mentioning your requirements. Some job boards frequented by developers include LinkedIn, RemoteOK, AngelList, CrunchBoard, and several others.
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Search Leading Freelance Developer Platforms
Though there are pros and cons of hiring remote freelance developers for an app project. Hiring skilled developers from freelancer platforms can be equally effective for a startup if you can implement the right checks and balances. Some leading platforms for searching for skilled freelance developers include Upwork, freelancer.com, and a few others.
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Make Social & Peer Search
Searching on social media platforms can also be effective. Only if you have a robust following or social circle comprising industry leaders, developers, and other startup businessmen. From their own experience, these people can come up with highly effective suggestions for hiring and talent search.
Shortlisting Developer Candidates
The remote hiring process ultimately can overwhelm you with hundreds of credible options. And it is important to remain in complete control by implementing a time-tested screening process. A meticulous screening process should consider the following steps,
Evaluate developer’s accounts on Stack Overflow and GitHub
To hire remote programmers with the desired skill, you can start by screening their developer accounts with popular platforms such as Stack Overflow and GitHub. You should first screen developers from these two platforms. Check the following things on these two platforms.
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Check Portfolio and Previous Clients:
First of all, check their previously built apps and the app projects where they played key roles. Download those apps and analyze their weaknesses, strengths, and similarities with what you need in your project. Based upon portfolio screening, shortlist a few developers, reach out to their previous clients, and know about their experience working with the respective developer.
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Check Developer Community Platforms:
There are developer community platforms where seasoned and experienced developers have ratings, responses, and glimpses of their expertise for others to see. In StackOverflow, you can check the knowledge and skills of developers through their responses. Similarly, on GitHub, you can check their completed projects, repositories of code associated with them, their ratings, and time spent on the platform.
Conduct Interview Video Conference
As soon as you have finished the discovery and screening process, it is time to start interviewing them through a video conferencing tool like Zoom or Google Meet. The interview should be conducted by the technical team headed by the CTO and should comprise members with relevant project experience.
Asking the incisive questions concerning their project experience and development skills should make the more significant part of this technical interview. Once the skills are evaluated on a fundamental level through verbal communication, it is essential to explain the new roles and responsibilities and ask developers how they can figure out playing significant roles in the project.
Test their Programming Skills in a Collaborative Environment
At the very next step, you need to test their programming skills through a demo project, and while doing so, you also need to check how well they collaborate with the in-house team back at the office.
To make such technical tests easier. You can also take help from leading online coding test platforms. Where actual assignments are given, and skills are professionally measured according to best benchmarks. These platforms offer candidates a real-world coding environment with access to several frameworks, libraries, and GitHub repositories.
This sample coding test will reveal the programming skills you are looking for. But you also need to test their in-project collaboration skills. And for this conducting a peer programming session involving both in-house and remote developer teams is necessary.
Soft Skill Assessment & HR Interview
When you have finally assessed the technical skills and come up with your preferred candidates. But wait you are still not finished with the assessment process. Don’t undermine checking the communication skills, job attitude, integrity level, and zeal to excel with their work. This is why taking the soft skill assessment or HR interview as a statutory walkover step in the hiring process is never appropriate.
Onboarding the Remote Team
After selecting the remote developers and finishing the joining formalities. After that, You need to go through another step to get the team ready for the app project. The hire developers should be welcome with an onboarding process full of enthusiasm & the opportunity to get acquainted with the new processes and practices. A brief and process-specific training to orient them with their job roles and expectations is necessary for all new developers onboard.
Wrapping Up
So even startups can venture to build an ambitious app without getting rattled by the challenge of finding developer talents in their region. They must follow the above-mentioned steps tested and tried through thousands of successful remote development projects. Getting onboard exceptionally skilled remote resources is not rare for those who do not overlap any of these steps in haste.
