Discussing the salary question with a job candidate.
It is perhaps the most awkward and inconvenient part of the entire recruiting process. Also, it’s the riskiest point, where the whole hiring process can fail miserably if you don’t come to an agreement with the candidate. Even if everything went super smoothly up to this point and the developer is a great fit for your company, this could derail everything.
From a business perspective, it’s neither smart nor wise to overpay candidates to ensure they accept your job offer. If you’re too generous with salaries, you may soon run out of money to stay in business, especially if you’re a startup. Even if you’re an established company, a business has to generate a profit, and overpaying on salaries is surely not among your top priorities.
However, if you offer a salary that is too low, you may lose the essential developer candidates that you really need. You can also easily lose them to other companies competing for their talent who give them an offer that is better aligned with the market reality.
So how do you offer a good enough salary without overpaying?
That’s the question we will answer in today’s article. We will not only answer this question but also (spoiler alert!) provide you with the best solution on the market to discover the optimal salary of any developer (completely for free). However, before we do that, let’s look at the most important factors to consider when making an offer to a developer candidate.
Top 5 Factors to Consider When Deciding a Developer Salary
There are many factors to consider when making a salary offer to a developer candidate, but we have summarized the 5 most important for you. Failing to recognize these aspects when making an offer would usually result in a great mismatch between the offer and the expected salary.
1. Technical Skills
The first thing that appears in the mind of every person hiring a developer is technical skills. Naturally, the more and better the technical skills are, the higher the salary. If a developer can code in ALL of the technologies in your tech stack, their worth is higher. If they perform exceptionally well on your custom technical/coding test, again, higher pay should be the norm.
2. Language and Soft Skills
In today’s job market and especially when working remotely – language and communication skills are of utmost importance. English and communication skills are very important, but companies often search for other soft skills, such as teamwork, emotional intelligence, critical thinking, creativity, etc. Because developers are generally not known for exceptional communication and soft skills, a developer with many and/or well-developed (pun intended) communication and other soft skills may reasonably expect a significantly higher salary.
3. Seniority and Work Experience
Seniority is one of the factors that has the highest influence on developers’ salaries. However, you should also bear in mind that seniority could differ among countries. For example, in certain countries (such as Germany or Switzerland), a Senior Developer is usually somebody with at least 7 years of experience. In other countries, having 4-5 years of experience is sufficient to be considered a Senior Developer.
4. Location and Past Job Experience
A very important factor to consider is the location of the person. If they reside in a country with lower costs, they’ll be probably happy with less than a developer living in San Francisco.
However, it’s good also to combine the location factor with past job experience. More specifically, if the person worked with companies only on their internal market or has already some remote work experience with foreign companies. If they have more remote work experience and are used to receiving high salaries, naturally, this would affect their expectations.
5. Motivation and Benefits
Last but certainly not least, you shouldn’t sell yourself short. If a developer wants to work with you, their motivation should go beyond the salary, and they should recognize the other positives of working with you. Don’t forget to talk about those as well!
For example, if you’re offering 100% remote work, this is a massive benefit you can leverage in the salary discussion. In fact, many developers are willing to take pay cuts to work fully remotely, especially now that many companies are trying to keep people in the office.
What Are the Ways to Discover Developer Salaries?
Now that we have examined the most important factors for calculating a developer’s salary, we can proceed to the actual ways to do that.
Everyone in the software development industry talks about salaries, but not a lot of companies and people seem to know the best ways to arrive at the actual salary numbers. And that is perfectly okay. Discovering the optimal salary for a developer candidate is not as straightforward as it may appear at first.
But worry not, we’re here to help! Below, we’ll share 3 ways to discover developer salaries and discuss their pros and cons. Let’s begin.
1. Using Free Salary Data Tools
The first and most obvious way to do salary data research is using free tools, such as the one by Payscale. As easy and straightforward as it may seem, it’s highly likely it won’t be sufficient for you to achieve your goal.
There are a couple of problems with these free salary discovery tools that make them ineffective for accurate salary discovery. First, they give you information about very general developer roles. For example, you can find the salary for “software developer” or “mobile applications developer”, but if you try to do a search for “react native developer”, you’ll see there isn’t any data for that. At least using the free version of such tools (and the paid versions are usually very expensive).
Second, the provided salary ranges are usually very broad. Also, they are country-specific and reflect only the salaries local companies pay, which could be misleading if you’re hiring remote developers.
Third, the tool doesn’t consider many of the crucial personal factors we’ve discussed, such as a person’s technical skills, language & soft skills, when giving these broad estimates.
In conclusion, such tools are very good for a general overview of the market. This can be useful, for example, if you’re looking to expand your on-site operations in a new country and want to get a general feel for the average salaries in a given country (because perhaps you aren’t familiar with the benefits of remote hiring).
Unfortunately, free salary data tools are definitely NOT a good solution for discovering the optimal salary for a specific developer candidate.
Pros:
- Provides a good general overview of the salary rates in specific countries
- Easy and fast to search and get a basic understanding of a market
- Free to use
Cons:
- Limited amount of data for a more specific case
- Salary ranges are too broad
- Salary ranges focused on on-site hiring
- Not considering personal skills and situation
- Inability to calculate the optimal salary for a specific developer
2. RemoteMore’s Free Salary Discovery
When RemoteMore was founded, we were very much aware of the salary discovery problem. So we decided to not only solve the problem but also embed it into our product and services.
You’re probably aware that we do salary discovery and pre-negotiate the salaries with each and every developer on the RemoteMore platform. This means that the price you see on the developer profiles on RemoteMore is the final salary you’ll be paying, and the developers have already confirmed that they are happy with this salary level.
Today, for the first time, we unlock the power of RemoteMore’s salary data calculator for hires outside of RemoteMore through our free salary discovery service. 💯🚀
We can help you discover the optimal salary for any developer candidate that you may have. Regardless of their location, skillset, experience, etc. Our calculator takes into account all 5 key developer salary factors and much more.
The unique thing about our salary calculator is that we combine advanced global salary data with real-time data we receive from all of the developer candidates on our platform. Currently, RemoteMore has over 35,000 signed-up developers. This massive candidate pool gives us a unique position in the industry to know the optimal salary for pretty much any developer candidate with a high level of precision. This makes RemoteMore’s salary discovery arguably the most accurate on the market.
Unfortunately, we can’t give direct online access to our salary calculator, as we don’t want to reveal our competitive advantage to everyone in the industry. However, we’ll be happy to give you the answers that you need on a per-request basis. To learn more and get the answers that you need, you can visit this page and book a short call with our team.
Pros:
- Advanced salary data from 150+ countries
- Real-time salary data from 35,000+ developers
- Ability to calculate the salary for any developer candidate
- Arguably the most accurate developer salary calculator
- Completely free service for you
Cons:
- Restricted access to the general public
- Not available to use in your browser
3. Salary Data Surveys
One of the most common ways for companies to get accurate salary data is to purchase global data surveys, such as this one, conducted by Mercer and Gartner.
These data surveys are similar to the ones we use and contain very detailed information about salaries in many different jobs in tech. However, they are rather expensive, and if you open the above page, you will probably notice that it costs between $2,700 and $7,065 to purchase and gain access to this data.
Another disadvantage is that the data is gathered in a specific timeframe, meaning it will soon be outdated, and you’ll have to buy a fresher dataset once again.
Furthermore, this data still doesn’t give you the ability to calculate the salary of a developer based on the input of their personal skillset, experience, and so on. It allows you to estimate the developer’s salary by comparing it with a generalized, pre-made profile, even though it is much more detailed than those in the free salary calculators (other than RemoteMore).
Pros:
- Detailed salary data with a high degree of accuracy
- Answers from real people working in the market
Cons:
- Usually very expensive
- The data becomes outdated quickly
- Can’t calculate salary by inputting personal characteristics of a developer
- Often difficult to navigate and use the information effectively
Final Words
Discovering the optimal salary for a software developer candidate is sure to bring many benefits to your hiring strategy and, ultimately, to your business. Yet, calculating the best possible compensation for a developer without overpaying isn’t easy and can often cause a lot of frustration.
Utilizing tools and services such as our free salary discovery, however, can lift the pressure off your shoulders. And if you want to find developers that fall within your budget, you don’t have to actually go through the entire recruitment cycle just to find there is a salary expectation mismatch at the end. You can just go to RemoteMore and get qualified developers with pre-negotiated salaries that fall within your range!
P.S.
Once again, here is a link to our free salary calculator.
