How to Hire Dedicated Developers: a Complete Guide for 2023

In case you’re interested in long-term collaboration with service providers and have little money and time resources to manage an internal development team, this cooperation model is the best match for you. Let’s consider its essence.

The dedicated development team model is one of the most popular outsourcing patterns when the client can employ remote but highly experienced IT specialists. They would be deeply involved in the project and solve a significant part of the issues from both the client’s and the vendor’s side. However, Forbes notes that “...several other technical decisions require client input both during and after the development process as well, and these decisions would usually fall under the purview of the chief technology officer.”

One of the essential differences of a dedicated development team from other collaboration models is that the client can fully control the working processes. That includes not only development workflow but also a recruitment process. Thus, some clients can also participate in job interviews and acquaint themselves with CVs. Furthermore, the work scope is estimated so that you may know the size and costs in advance.

First, you should understand WHY you need to hire dedicated developers and what advantages you get.

According to Capital Counselor, outsourcing is a business branch, minimally suffered from COVID-2019 related issues. Techavio said that the IT outsourcing market can grow over $97 billion in the next 4 years, and there are important reasons for such an increase. So let’s discuss them on the example of dedicated team employment.

Employing dedicated developers, you should foresee a bunch of factors that will help you build strong working relationships with your chosen team.

Remember that soft and hard skills are both crucial for an excellent dedicated team. However, they should be checked independently from each other. But while the hard skills can be varied from project to project according to their complexity, tech stacks to use, and so on, a set of soft skills is pretty changeless.

When you work with a specialist remotely, you should bear in mind that you won’t be seeing this person each day in the office. In addition, remote work doesn’t give you complete control over the team, and that’s why dedicated developers should have solid soft skills.

The list goes on. Still, those are the primary soft skills to look for in dedicated developers.

There are a lot of convenient services where you can hire dedicated developers. Though, what are the most popular ways to employ talented developers without failure? We’re going to get acquainted with the two best methods and single out their advantages and disadvantages.

In case you don’t know where to outsource development, you can have a look at the top offshore IT companies and mark those offering dedicated teams for employment. First of all, you can use the following resources to hire a dedicated team:

• Clutch
• GoodFirms
• IT Firms
• TopDevelopers

Traditionally these popular services typically appear in search results upon the requests like “hire dedicated developers.” Once you've chosen one or several companies that seem appropriate, you should pass through the following steps:

• Analyze the company position in search results. If you can find its site on the first pages of search results, this means the perfect SEO work and readiness for cooperation.
• Check the company website. The company looks after users ' first impressions if the UI/UX is intuitive, and the navigation is clear.
• Check the experience of the company you want to cooperate with. It’s better to deal with a firm that has been on the market for one year and over, and can demonstrate their hands-on experience.
• View the portfolio represented on the site. Properly investigate the types of created products and the industries the company worked in. You can also look through customer feedback on such platforms as Clutch or GoodFirms.
• Have a look at the number of employees. A good and reliable offshore IT company should have a full team capable of implementing projects of any degree of complexity and scale by their own force.

Pros:

• No unexpected charges. The project price is known in advance, so you don’t have to pay for additional software/hardware or taxes.
• A vast pool of specialists. You can always choose a suitable expert or team among the company employees.
• Proper quality and communication. A reputation is always crucial for offshore IT companies. That’s why their offered dedicated developers always meet project requirements and deadlines in time. Moreover, you can always contact your dedicated team.
• Lower hourly rates. You can find experienced dedicated developers in regions where hourly rates are much lower than in your country.

Cons:

• Language obstacles. There are not so many offshore experts who fluently speak English, like those from Central Europe.
• Time difference. You might have a significant time difference with your partner company because it can be situated on another continent.

Nevertheless, time differences and language barriers are not the major disadvantages for us here, in Cleveroad. We always contact our customers, setting up comfortable meeting schedules. Moreover, all our managers are fluent in English and ready for fruitful communication.

Another way to employ freelancers is to find them on conferences or special internet platforms and job boards. For online searching, you can use such popular resources as Toptal or Upwork, sorting developers by their location, experience, and other factors.

Moreover, you may attend IT conferences where talented developers gather together to learn about tools and modifications in the software development sphere. Your future dedicated team or one specialist can also be here.

Keep in mind, before hiring freelancers as dedicated developers for your project, you should weigh up all the pros and cons of such a decision. Thus, employing freelancers is good for small projects. Furthermore, it’s cost-effective — you don’t have to pay high wages for freelance specialists.

However, your project’s quality can suffer because of hiring freelancers. Here’s the thing: you’ll have to control the schedules of such specialists constantly. Due to their lack of commitment, they can miss deadlines or even abandon the project. Moreover, if you’ve got no technical background, it’ll be hard to check the candidate's hard skills.

Thus, it’s up to you to decide what option to choose.

After a conversation about the ways and sources of dedicated team employment, it’s time to discuss how to contact your potential workers. Primarily, you can apply to the chosen company by email containing a description of a project and a list of required team members to start negotiations and find a company offering the best quality and conditions. Moreover, you may contact the chosen vendor using the request forms on their site.

This is usually followed by:

To contact company representatives, you should phone them and find out their experience, projects from the portfolio, and hourly wages. Then, ask them in return if they have any questions, and tell them more about the upcoming project. You need 20-30 minutes of the first call to obtain a first impression of your future partner company.

After finding an experienced company with the best conditions you need, you may ask them to gather a team for you and interview each candidate individually if you need it. On top of this, having a solid tech background, you can verify the candidates’ hard skills online during a video interview before sending detailed technical questions. If you’ve got no technical education, you may ask your in-house specialists to assist you or employ an independent technical advisor.

Questions for an interview can vary since everything depends on a developer’s position and programming language (Kotlin, Swift, .NET, JavaScript). Here’s a sample Q&A list for Angular developers to verify their hard skills.

Even if you’re not a tech person, you may ask common questions, checking the candidates’ soft skills. They are important as well as hard skills, so you should devote special attention to them. Bear in mind that proficient communication and teamplay are a must-have for a good dedicated developer.

Below you can get acquainted with our Q&A list for candidates’ soft skills check.

The development process is not as easy as pie; it may have a lot of challenges. For instance, the developers can quickly fix one bug for one day, but the other can immediately appear and take even a couple of weeks. That’s why you should know how to wisely manage your chosen dedicated team and set clear goals and deadlines concerning force majeure circumstances.

To manage your dedicated development team successfully, you should know the project management methodologies. What is it? Project management methodology (approach) is an idea or practice that can assist you in the management of development workflow.

Some of the fundamental approaches are listed below:

• Waterfall
• Agile
• Scrum
• Kanban

Let's briefly discuss each of them.

If you want to know each detail of the project workflow, you should track your dedicated team’s work using special tools, such as Kantree, Trello, or Jira. They can help you manage the development process and see every minor change.

Here, in Cleveroad, we work with Jira since it has all the required characteristics for software development process as well as intuitive and convenient UX.

Software development is quite a fluid sphere. New programming languages and evolving technologies make the programmers know them all to be relevant due to the tech tendencies. Thus, your dedicated team should be quick, committed, and well-educated in everything new because new methods are preferred more than old ones. For instance, experienced programmers can quickly define and fix bugs. However, using special tools can make the mentioned operations faster than usual.

That’s why your team's adaptation to new tech innovations is crucial. You can also take care of it by offering online presentations, workshops, and other ways of team self-education.

It can be challenging to choose a region of the world for outsourcing. You should determine a time zone that’s preferable for you and an acceptable hourly rate since each country has its average hourly rate for software development. According to the Accelerance report for the second part of 2021 and 2022, the hourly rate in various regions looks as follows:

In Estonia, the average hourly rate is about $25-45 per hour.

Finally, we’d like to tell you how Cleveroad strives for a high-quality level and why our programmers can work on products of different complexity.

• We care about our employees’ speaking skills by providing compulsory English courses. That’s why all our developers (as well as the project managers) can communicate with clients fluently, having a high level of English.

• Even if you’ve got a significant time difference with us, it’s not a problem. Our dedicated team will adapt to your hour zone, meet all the deadlines, and implement your project on time.

• Our technical team knows how to implement modern innovations in website and app creation properly. The reason for that is simple: the programmers always stay tuned, attending different conferences, workshops, and meetups devoted to modern technologies. This way, they can remain experienced and competitive.

Having read this article, you can start looking for a software developer for your project in the chosen region. If you want to know more about our technical staff and ask more questions, get in touch with us.