How To Hire Developers For A Startup - A Definitive Guide

A brilliant idea came to your mind, and you decided to create a startup. Great! But have you already thought about where you will find and hire a programer or a team of developers for your project? Hiring developers for a startup is a difficult task for startup owners. You do not have either a stable profit, brand credibility, or any product yet, and the competition in the market makes you rush. Not every developer will prefer working in a startup rather than accepting an offer from a large tech company. Find coders for your startup is really challenging.

And yet, startups hire developers and often succeed. How do they do it? In our article, we will look at the main challenges associated with hiring technical specialists and finding programmers for a startup and what employment models are preferable.

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Challenges While Hiring Developers for a Startup

Hiring developers is always associated with a lot of difficulties, even for large companies, not to mention startups. In addition, there are specific recruitment problems in the case of early-stage startups in the goal to find coders for a startup. We will review them below.

_{SHORT ON TIME}

You need to hurry if you've come up with an original startup idea. Thousands of new companies appear every month, and your idea may become secondary tomorrow. In order to have time to capture market share, you need to be the first. To do this, you must assemble a team of skilled specialists to quickly release an MVP.

These time constraints mean you can't wait for a developer to leave their previous project. You have to hire those specialists that are available on the market right now.

_{No or newly built HR department}

A startup can start with just one person. If you are still at an early stage, it is unlikely that you have an entire HR department – at the very least, this would be strange for a small startup. Accordingly, most likely you do not yet have a well-developed recruiting, interviewing, and hiring flow.

_{Lack of local tech talent}

_‍This is one of the main problems that companies face. Take a look at these stats:

In addition, since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the job market has changed a lot. If you're determined to only hire full-time developers for in-office work in your city, you might be in big trouble. Today, remote or project-based work is becoming the standard. It`s more problematic to find cheap startup developers.

_{Disorientation within teams}

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The best options to hire developers for new business

There are several options for hiring developers for a startup. You don't have to use only one of them. You can mix and match hiring models depending on your startup's results and market success. Let's look at the main models for hiring software developers for startups.

_{Hire a developer on your team}

If you are looking for long-term cooperation with a developer, you can hire them on staff. This is a rather rare case for startups, but sometimes such a decision makes sense.

Pros:

• A full-time employee can devote 100% of their time to your project and be involved in all internal business processes. Perhaps this will speed up development.
• You can always contact the programmer with questions and suggestions and make quick decisions together.

Cons:

• You are fully engaged in recruitment, and the responsibility is all yours. If you hire a programmer on staff but then realize that they do not fit in your team, you will have to fire them and look for a new developer. All this will cost you lost time and a lot of money.
• Narrow-profile developers are expensive. Such specialists work with large companies, and their salary expectations are appropriate.

_{Hire a freelance developer on a project basis}

This is one of the most budget-friendly approaches to hiring a developer. You can hire a freelancer who will devote part of their working time to your project. A freelancer can be located anywhere in the world.

Pros:

• You can save a lot on salaries. Freelancers are often willing to work for little money. In addition, you will be able to cut the cost of management and maintenance of the office.
• There are a lot of freelancers: you can definitely find a web developer for your startup. If you need a finished project very urgently, you can hire several freelance developers.

Cons:

• A freelancer's reputation is not confirmed by anything: a person can disappear in the middle of a project, lie on deadlines, or take an advance payment and make a frankly low-quality product.
• If you do not have a technical background, you are unlikely to be able to distinguish a serious specialist from a beginner. This means that you will hardly be able to assess the reliability of a specialist and the justification of his prices for services.

_{Hiring a dedicated development team for your startup}

Over 68% of US businesses outsource their development, so why not give it a try? Hiring an IT development agency is a popular business strategy that involves temporarily hiring an entire team of developers to work on your project.

Pros:

• Full delegation of tasks. Your active participation will be only required to set requirements at the start and review the work done at the end of every sprint.
• You pay – you get the result. The hired team is responsible for the result and will definitely not disappear without completing the project.
• Looking for experts you should consider UI design agency for startups

Cons:

• A dedicated team usually does not cooperate with full-time programmers, so it is important to properly distribute tasks and responsibilities and maintain communication.
• If the contractor did not take into account something and ran into difficulties, you risk either overpaying or getting constantly shifted deadlines since changing the contractor in the middle of the project will lead to high costs.

_{Which option would be good for a startup?}

As a rule, at the origins of any startup, there are 1-2 developers who, at some point, can't independently complete all tasks on time. As we wrote above, the speed of delivering the product to the market is important for any potentially successful startup.

In this case, another model for hiring developers may suit you – staff augmentation. A company provides you with specific specialists for you to complete your team. The provided specialists integrate with your in-house employees or specialists from another provider.

This model will be especially effective in the case of an established but slow product development process, or a lack of rare competencies when the throughput of the in-house team does not allow for reaching the required pace. Staff augmentation can be a great option if you need a few people rather than a whole team.

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How to find an engineer for a startup and what should you pay attention to when hiring a developer? Below you will find the 10 most important points for any startup:

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A source of inexhaustible talent

Okay, you know which developers you need, what technology stack you need, and how much you're willing to spend. But where to find developers? There are not many free experienced specialists on the market, and many simply prefer to wait for interesting offers rather than apply for open vacancies. Especially you should try to find a Ukraine developer for startups.

• If you are looking for a freelance developer, you can go to online platforms like Fiverr or Upwork. However, be prepared for a long search for a really experienced specialist.
• You can also search for developers on job boards such as Glassdoor and Indeed. There you will find many resumes of developers with different experiences and technology stacks.
• Another option is social media. The first thing you can do is go to LinkedIn. Facebook and Twitter can also help you.

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All you need is to contact our experts and tell us about your startup, its goals, and its objectives. We will study your requirements and suggest the most suitable hiring model and type of development that will allow you to enter the market as quickly as possible.

We have dedicated teams with project managers that cooperate closely with your marketing department. Together we create beautiful and high-converting websites and other software products.

Conclusion

Hiring programmers for a startup can be a real challenge since not all programmers want to work with start-up companies without a product and a stable income. First, decide which hiring model you prefer and how many developers you really need. This may differ depending on the type of your project and the scope of work. In the first stages, you do not need a large staff of in-house developers, as this incurs high costs. Staff augmentation can be a profitable solution.

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