Hire Software Developers for Startup — 5 Easy Steps for Founders

Analyze the market

You should begin your search for developers for your startup by analyzing broader market trends. Some basic research will give you a good idea of the available developers for your startup and the existing demand for skills working in a specific tech stack.

A greater demand will translate into higher salaries and higher competition. We did some research and found some interesting facts in the research paper - 2021 State of Software Engineers, published by Hired:

• The demand for software engineers is seeing steady growth despite the COVID-19 pandemic. Many employers opted to hire outside large IT hubs and collaborated remotely instead of relocating.

• It seems like remote work is here to stay, as shown by the 54% of remote developers who surpassed in-house teams in productivity.

• Skills and company culture fit is the main criteria for evaluating candidates. Credentials, diplomas, and certificates continue to lose their significance in the software development market as more and more engineers are self-taught.

The pandemic also normalized and encouraged hiring software engineers remotely, which wasn’t a widespread practice before.

When analyzing talent availability, you should also look at technology adoption levels. By analyzing technology adoption levels, you will understand how difficult it is to hire a software engineer with expertise in a particular technology. Knowing this will help you make better decisions when hiring and help you stay within your project budget.

Research current salary offers to understand what a reasonable budget should look like and how many software engineers you can hire given your own budget. Hiring outside major hubs is a great way to find cheaper talent. Consider looking at hiring portals from other countries to get a clear image of the expectations in that particular country.

Define candidate requirements

After you have done some market research, you might find you need to adjust your initial ideas of what you were looking for in a freelance developer. Maybe costs are higher than you expected. Or perhaps the skills you were looking for are harder to find than you expected.

At this point, utilize the initial work you did above and rework anything that needs to be adjusted. Come up with a final list of requirements you have for the startup developers you are looking for:

• What is your development budget? And what part of it can be allocated to hiring developers?
• What are the required skills or technical knowledge you are looking for?
• What is your highest priority? Is it staying within budget? Finding a highly skilled developer? Or working with someone in a particular location?
• What will you offer as startup owners to the developers you hire? What’s in it for them?

Once you’ve decided what your company needs are and how you want your expectations met, you’ll be able to attract developers who are more enthusiastic about working with your software development company.

Build your hiring funnel

Efficient recruitment starts with building a hiring funnel. A hiring funnel allows recruiters to visualize all the steps in the recruitment process, beginning from attraction to the final hire.

The recruitment process is quite straightforward: at the top of the funnel, you should try to capture as many applicants as possible and narrow it down until you get at the bottom of the funnel. When you get to the bottom of the funnel, you should have one or more high-quality applicants.

The hiring funnel is ideally sectioned into several stages so you can focus on the parts of recruitment that require the most effort and time. This way, you can also determine whether you’re spending too much time and effort on the bottom of the funnel stages instead of the top of the funnel ones.

Once you understand your hiring funnel you’ll be able to create a robust recruitment strategy. While the hiring funnel differs from company to company, these are the main 4 stages:

• Post your job openings to job posting portals - Once you’ve determined the job requirements and created an adequate job description, you can publish the vacancy on job portals. You can opt for local job portals or even international ones if you’re looking to hire developers remotely.
• Create a careers page on your website - Creating and maintaining a career page on your website helps with both recruiting and employer branding. The career page will basically tell the world how you’re providing a great place to work.
• Post job listings on social media - This stage helps your software development company get recognized by the folks looking for jobs.. Job seekers go through a lot of online advertisements; making your company name and logo known increases the chances of them clicking on your job posting. This stage focuses on awareness and showing potential candidates that your organization is a great work environment.
• Have a good screening process - The screening process or the initial assessment consists of a call with the HR specialist to determine which candidates fit the role. While some companies prefer doing a technical evaluation first, we recommend starting with the general assessment. The reason is simple: if there isn’t a culture fit, you won’t waste the valuable time of the engineers responsible for the technical interview.

Interviews and hiring decisions

When you reach this point, you’ve already put a lot into attracting candidates and doing a first round filter based on resumes and sample work. But this doesn’t mean you get to slack when it comes to interviewing them. Here are some basic principles you should follow to ensure a great interviewing experience for both your candidates and internal interviewers:

Prepare for interviews using skills tests

Time is a precious resource in an interview. You should ensure you can make a hiring decision based on the few minutes you had with the candidate.

This sounds tough, but you can do it if you’re efficient with your time. For example, there’s no need to test a candidate if they have already taken a skills test. Analyze the results, look for the mistakes or drawbacks, and use this opportunity to ask the candidate about it.

Maintain the quality of remote interviews

While we can’t predict the future, one thing is sure: remote work is here to stay. This means that a lot of companies opt for remote interviews as well.

Remote interviews come with their own challenges. Just because it feels like an informal medium, you can’t assume candidates will overlook mistakes. Our advice is to remain professional at all times, keep the candidates informed, avoid last-minute cancellations and ensure that the equipment is functional.

Avoid making biased decisions

In interviews it is very easy to be biased. Most people aren’t aware of their internalized ideas, so you need to have strategies to actively avoid bias. Use a diverse interview panel instead of one-to-one interviews and consider making an interview scorecard to ensure equal chances for all candidates.

Prioritize communication

All the candidates that have reached the interview stage need to be informed about your decision, regardless of the result. Make sure to thank them for interviewing and let them know about the next steps and expected timeline for the decision making process.

You shouldn’t neglect unsuccessful candidates because you’ll ruin their impression of your company. Tell them the interview result and express empathy and encouragement towards them. Kind words can go a long way.

Of course, if you decide to partner with Softkraft you won't have to deal with the hassles of the recruiting process. We will provide the best candidates for your job requirements, skill-wise and culture-wise.

Onboarding and integration

Half the battle is won! Now it's time to get your new devoted developers ready to work. A professional vendor will surely assist you in organizing the onboarding process so that you may integrate your new hire into your existing team as quickly as possible.

But here’s what you can do to help the process go even more smoothly (especially if you are hiring freelance developers instead of a full-service software development company):

• Minimize any surprises or misunderstandings by laying out all of your expectations for your new hires.
• Provide a list of tools and all essential access for your new developers’ work ahead of time.
• Prepare step-by-step instructions on how the developers should set up their development environment.
• Set up a team meeting to welcome your new dedicated developers and explain their duties on the project to their in-house colleagues.
• Make sure your new team members are up to date on the project’s status. Make sure they understand the goals and have access to all current documents.