Are you thinking of hiring a remote software developer or multiple remote developers for your next project? Then it is essential to do it the correct way!
When hiring for tech roles, it’s very difficult to find qualified developers that are open to new positions. It’s a fact that almost all developers already have a job. Having a great recruitment process is essential if you want to find & hire the candidates you need (and avoid costly hiring mistakes).
Most modern-day companies spend 70%+ of their money on salaries. Therefore, being really good at hiring is extremely important. Yet, it’s normal to feel overwhelmed, and many people and businesses simply don’t know how to start hiring remotely.
Don’t worry, we got you covered! In this article, we’ll share our step-by-step process for finding and filtering developer candidates. This 4-step process will maximize your chances of finding remote developers that will successfully fulfill the goals of your software job or project. Let’s get started.
Step 1 – Define Your Development Needs
The first and most important step in looking for a remote developer is knowing what type of developer/developers you need. This depends mostly on the software product that you want to build.
By looking at the scope of your project, you want to extrapolate the following:
- Technical stack – what programming languages, frameworks, platforms, databases, and other technologies are needed to execute your project.
- Time estimate – in what amount of time do you need your project completed, and how much time is your project expected to take
- Team size – would you need one or multiple developers to complete the project in the desired timeframe
- Seniority – depending on the complexity you may need junior, intermediate, or senior developers to complete the project. Or maybe a mix of different seniorities. This will define, to a large extent, the cost per developer that you should budget
- Budget amount – Knowing the timeframe, number of developers that need to work in parallel, and their seniority – it will be much easier to estimate the budget for the project (it’s recommended to leave about 25% buffer for unplanned expenses as they often occur in software projects
How to get answers to the above points?
Companies that have experience with building software usually know all of the above-mentioned points well. That allows them to define their needs in the job specs more easily when searching for a remote developer.
However, many businesses that are building software for the first time are NOT sure what tech stack, timeline, budget, seniority, etc., are the best for their software product. Even if done right, figuring out all of this on your own can be a lot of work/effort, and IT consultants charge hefty fees for it.
But seeing that many startups struggle with this issue, we decided to offer our help for free.
At RemoteMore, we’ve helped many companies get answers to the questions above. We’ve done it so many times over the years that we have now decided to standardize it as a FREE service for anyone who needs it.
You are welcome to schedule a FREE consultation directly with our CPO and CTO, who has 10+ years of experience in product companies – building both web and mobile software products.
In any case, once you’ve done “your homework” (you’ve figured out the questions above), you can move on to the next step in the process.
Step 2 – Build Your Hiring Scorecard
It is crucial to make a Hiring Scorecard that describes precisely what qualities a person needs in order to achieve the goals of their specific job role. Imagine it as the scoring sheet (i.e. a table) for candidates (that you fill out while interviewing candidates) – listing all the different qualities needed for achieving the “mission” of the role.
The scorecard should ideally begin with a section describing the outcomes you want to see by the hired person for you to think that this hire was a success – in the first 1, 3, and 12 months.
We stress the fact that these should be specific, measurable outcomes (results). They are NOT a list of activities that the person would be doing on a day-to-day basis. For example, complete the MVP version of the software by the end of the 2nd month; Release it without any critical bugs; Resolve any significant UI/UX/QA issues by the end of the 3rd month.
Once you define the outcomes, you should ask the following question:
What qualities and competencies does the person need to accomplish these outcomes?
Besides the obvious technical/hard skills needed, don’t forget to define thoroughly the soft skills that indicate behavioral and cultural fit with the job, the team, and the company at large. For example, being a very practical person (due to a limited budget), being self-driven and being good at taking ownership (due to having limited managerial capacity in the team).
How to Score Candidates?
After you defined the required qualities and competencies, you should come up with a plan for how to score the candidates for each of those criteria. Probably, it’s one or more interview questions related to each of the criteria. For example, “Could you show us some UI that you have built with React yourself?”.
Ideally, you should use a scoring system for the questions, such as a 0-10 point scale, that allows you to score the candidate on the given criteria.
It’s important to mention that Scorecards are NOT the same as job descriptions, although there is some overlap. They are a more crystalized version of the job descriptions. They even allow you to evaluate the performance of candidates after you hire them – as the qualities that you are hiring for are the same as the qualities that you should use to evaluate the person that you have hired.
Moreover, you can use the Scorecards as a process documentation – that allows you to have a feedback loop for continuous improvement with questions like:
1. Did I define correctly the criteria needed for being successful in this job?
2. Did my interviewing questions result in the correct assessment of the candidate?
After your Hiring Scorecard with your questions is ready, you can move on to the next step.
Step 3 – Plan Your Screening Process
The main goal of your screening process is to assess the candidates on the criteria that you have written in your Hiring Scorecard. But how much in-depth should you go?
That is the main consideration when planning your screening process. Unfortunately, there is no way to avoid the trade-off between quality and resources spent. If you want a very thorough and high-quality recruiting process, you’ll need to spend more resources (time and money) on it and vice versa.
For large corporations, investing heavily in their recruitment process makes a lot of sense. They have both the money and time to run a very detail-oriented screening process.
However, the situation for startups is often quite different. Most of the time you don’t have enough time and money to aim for perfect quality. At the same time, hiring the wrong person can cost thousands (typically 2-3 monthly salaries in lost productivity) and 3-4 months of wasted timeline on your project, during which you don’t get any closer to your goals and objectives. For a startup with a short runway, hiring mistakes can be deadly.
So ultimately, how much time and effort should you put into candidate screening to make it sufficiently good? Of course, it depends from company to company. But to give you a rough estimate, here is the outline of the step-by-step screening process that we use at RemoteMore (startup with about 15 employees):
Our recruiting process:
- Initial interview [15-30 mins]
- Technical screening [usually around 20-25 hours to test properly 5 candidates]
- Personality test (optional step)
- In-depth interview [60-90 mins]
- Light background check / references check (optional) – e.g. utility bill, bank statement, etc.
- Make an offer
At the end of this process, you should have high confidence in the scores of the different candidates on your scorecard questions.
In Part 2 of the series about Hiring Remote Developers, we’ll go much more in-depth for each step of our 6-step screening process. That includes what questions to ask at each interview step, what tools to use, etc.,…so stay tuned!
Step 4 – Choose Your Sourcing Strategy
Broadly speaking, there are 2 main ways to reach the remote developer candidates that you need (or any sort of remote workers, for that matter).
1. Passive sourcing
With passive sourcing, you usually create a job description and then wait for developers to come and apply for your job. As good as it may sound, this method has a few very big problems.
First, passive sourcing is slow, it usually takes at least 3-4 weeks to get enough candidates in the pipeline. This means that your recruiting process gets prolonged by 3-4 weeks compared to the alternative (see below).
Second, the chances of attracting the candidates that you actually need are low (when using passive sourcing). This is the case specifically when hiring developers (not so much for other roles). Good developers are RARELY opening job board websites. They are almost always working somewhere already. In 2023, the unemployment rate for Software Engineers is rather low, only 1.8% of the developers are unemployed!
Those who are good usually get contacted with job offer messages pretty much every day. Ultimately, this means that through job boards, you are unlikely to get better-than-mediocre software developer hires.
Last but not least, passive sourcing actually requires lots of manual work. Since anyone can apply to your job listings, you’ll get lots of low-quality candidates that you’ll need to read through and decide whether to interview or not.
2. Active sourcing
When you use this sourcing method, you reach out and connect only with developers who meet your pre-defined requirements. On most platforms where you can do active sourcing, there are filters that you can use to find the right candidates.
On top of that, some platforms for active sourcing do the heavy lifting for you upfront. For example, on our hiring platform (RemoteMore), we pre-screen the developers for availability, Technical skills, English skills, and more. On top of that, we manually handpick the best candidates for your specific job/project.
This means you can usually start interviewing available developers that are high-quality and a great fit for your project within 1 week (or even within days). Compared to passive sourcing, you need 3-4 weeks just to get enough applications before you start filtering candidates.
In Part 3 of the series about Hiring Remote Developers, we’ll share the different passive and active sourcing channels that are great to use in 2023.
Final Words
Planning your process for sourcing remote developers can be challenging. But equipped with our 4-step process, your recruiting will be much more successful compared to most other companies.
However, we know some of you may want to get more help with it. If you want to get help with your own remote developer recruitment process (i.e. tailored to your company and hiring needs), we can help you with it for free. To get started, book your free recruiting process consultation today and open the doors to the perfect hiring in your company.
