Remote hiring steadily became a more and more popular option for many business owners in recent years. But, despite many top tech professionals preferring this type of employment, a lot of managers and product owners had their reservations.
With the COVID-19 pandemic a few years back those employers basically ran out of options and now hiring IT specialists remotely is the new normal. By 2025, according to the latest research, three-quarters of developers will work remotely, so you better start becoming familiar with this option right now.
Reasons to hire remote developers
Let’s find out why remote hiring is so popular with thousands of business owners all over the world. First of all, it is cost-effective. You will save money on renting office spaces, buying hardware and other supplies for the development team, and taxes and additional bonuses. But the main way for cutting costs, if you are located in North America or Western Europe, will be the ability to hire tech talent from abroad. Foreign developers from many countries in Eastern Europe, South Asia, or Latin America will charge you two or even three times less for their work, providing you with the same level of expertise and decent English proficiency.
An ability to hire all over the globe brings another big advantage. You will have access to a global talent pool, and if you tried to find candidates with a specific set of skills or knowledge of a less-popular programming language in the past, you know that being limited to only one country can be very uncomfortable. But with a whole planet of skilled tech professionals, you will definitely find what you are looking for.
Another great positive of remote hiring is the flexibility of team structure and different employment models. For example, you can hire a core dedicated development team full-time and bring freelancers for specific tasks or small portions of code. This will help to save a lot of salary budget and provide you with almost endless possibilities for building an effective remote team.
Possible challenges
Of course, it can’t be all positive. The main challenge business owners struggle with when hiring remote developers from other countries, different time zones, and the language barrier. The first issue can be resolved by hiring tech talent nearshore, and the second one can be resolved by a thorough interviewing process and confirming the candidate’s English knowledge.
Other problems with remote hiring can include the low level of developer’s expertise, lack of work ethic and self-discipline, and struggle with tracking team progress. All of this can be avoided by writing clear and detailed job descriptions and paying close attention to confirming not only tech knowledge, but also soft skills. If you hire candidates with previous experience in remote work or other proof of strong discipline and ability to strive without constant supervision, you will be okay.
Hiring options
Of course, before you will start going through all possible hiring options, you will need to have a clear plan of a future digital product, preferred team structure and roles, already written job descriptions with a clear list of requirements for every position, and an absolute certainty that hiring full-time developers will be better for your project than any other model of cooperation available. Then you can start to weigh on different ways to find tech professionals.
You can start by going to all popular job boards for IT specialists. There you will find thousands of software developers looking for new projects. If you have decided on hiring overseas, you will want to search online for local job boards in countries you look for candidates, this will increase your chances compared with looking just on global sites. Another place to search for remote developers is social media.
On Facebook and Twitter, you can browse through various professional communities and search through hashtags. There are also communities dedicated to numerous programming languages and frameworks on sites like Reddit, GitHub, and StackOverflow. There you can contact some IT professionals, and look at examples of their code at the same time. You can also try to meet potential candidates offline at various professional conferences and meetups, this option is somewhat dated but still fairly popular.
If you are unable to find developers on your own, and you don’t have a dedicated HR department on the payroll, you will need to ask professionals for help. IT staffing services have expert recruiters and an extensive database of tech specialists in any field possible. For a reasonable price, they will help you to assemble a strong remote team for your project. Just check the company’s references and conduct some online research to avoid being scammed.
But your local staffing service will probably have a database of local talent, and as we established earlier, most of the time hiring abroad can be the best way to save some money on salaries. You can try to search for recruiters in countries you want to hire from or try different options. For example, through an outsourcing company, you can hire an individual developer or a whole dedicated team if needed.
Another way is contacting local IT companies and negotiating to hire their employees for your project needs, sometimes they provide this type of service for foreign clients. Of course, hiring full-time developers can be less effective than other options, but widening your search is never a bad thing.
Final thoughts
Finding and hiring remote full-time developers is an absolute must-have skill in today’s market reality. Most IT professionals are open to this cooperation model, but finding a perfect candidate can still be challenging sometimes.
Because of the great number of obvious advantages of hiring tech talent remotely, you will need to become a real expert in various hiring options or just pay some extra and hire trained recruiters to help you in this task. Believe us, it is better to start building a strong team of remote developers today so you won’t stay behind on all the trends later.
