When it comes to deciding on a team to build your software product, you have several choices: hire in-house software engineers, rely on freelancers, or outsource a part or a whole development process. But which option is best for you?
As of 2020, the global market for outsourcing services was worth almost $93 billion. A vast number of businesses delegate their software development projects to other companies. In this article, we talk about the ways to find a reliable outsourcing partner. Keep reading to find out:
- which outsourcing engagement model will fit your project
- what steps to take to find a dependable outsourcing company
- how to interview dedicated team members
- why you should consider Ukraine as an outsourcing destination
We’ll share our experience as an outsourcing company that offers dedicated teams and show you how your business can benefit from working with Clockwise Software. Ready to dive in?
Hiring dedicated developers: choosing the most suitable engagement model
Before speaking about the best outsourcing engagement model for your case, let’s take a quick look at all the possible variants you have when you need to create a software product. There are three of them: hiring an in-house team, cooperating with freelancers, and outsourcing the development process. We provide a short comparison of these models in the table below:
| In-house team | Freelancers | Outsourcing | |
| Time to hire professionals | 1-2 months to hire one team member | 1-2 months to hire one freelancer | 1-2 weeks to sign a contract with an outsourcing team |
| Development cost | The most expensive | The cheapest | The most reasonable |
| Pros |
|
|
|
| Cons |
|
|
|
As you can see, all options have their pros and cons, and in different situations, you might want to use each of them. But we will examine outsourcing as the most reasonable option in terms of price, quality, and effort required from your side.
There are two engagement models you can consider if you decide to delegate the creation of your software: hiring dedicated developers to work on your product and outsourcing the whole software development process.
Dedicated developers are software engineers you hire from a software development vendor to work on your project together with your existing specialists. It’s a winning choice if you need to speed up the development process or lack professionals skilled in particular technologies. In such a case, you can address a software development company and hire as many developers as you need. When you hire dedicated developers, you manage their work, provide them with tasks, and check the results, meaning you are fully involved in and therefore own the development process.
If you decide to outsource a whole project to another company, you’ll need not only software engineers but other technical and non-technical professionals such as project managers, UI/UX designers, and quality assurance specialists. Together, they form an autonomous team that knows what to do and how to do it. With an established workflow, outsourcing teams can lead the development process from idea to successful release. Choose this if you don’t have any experience managing developers or prefer to invest your time and resources in business development activities rather than project management.
No matter which of the two outsourcing models you choose – working with dedicated developers or delegating your project to a team – you will benefit from such cooperation. Here are some of the advantages of outsourcing:
- You get the results you expect
The main peculiarity of dedicated developers, be it separate software engineers or a whole team of IT specialists, is that they work only on your project. It means that they are fully involved, so you can expect the best results from such cooperation.
- You cut development cost
Hiring dedicated developers is the most reasonable option you can choose when it comes to software development. Looking for the most budget solution, you may want to consider giving a chance to those who want to find web developer internship jobs on Jooble or hiring freelncers, but you can’t expect full engagement. Having an in-house team is the most expensive option: You have to pay your employees salaries even if they don’t have tasks to do, plus cover office expenditures, sick leave, bonuses, etc. In turn, by choosing to cooperate with dedicated developers, you get the best price-quality ratio.
- Effective communication
Both outsourcing engagement models ensure flawless communication. In the case with dedicated developers, you take full control of your cooperation and communication in particular. If you delegate software development to a team, there’s always a project manager who manages the software development process on your behalf.
Whatever engagement model you choose – extending your existing team with dedicated developers or outsourcing a whole project to an autonomous team – you need to decide on a software development company that can provide you with these professionals. You’ll discover a working strategy to finding a reliable outsourcing partner in the next section.
Steps to hire dedicated developers
When considering the steps to hire in detail, keep in mind that you hire a software development company that provides you the needed professionals. This means that your hiring strategy will differ from the strategy you would use to recruit freelancers or in-house developers.
Let’s have a look at a strategy to find a reliable company that will provide you with a dedicated team.
Step #1. Make a list of potential partners
There are thousands of companies that offer dedicated teams and outsourcing software development services. According to Clutch, there are more than 17,000 IT service providers worldwide, but you need to choose only one company. One of the best strategies to narrow down your choice is to focus on companies based on their specializations and the industries they work with.
You can start with industry-specific sites where development companies list their services, such as Clutch, Upwork, and GoodFirms. These sites allow you to filter all available companies by region, service, industry, hourly rate, etc. It’s important to pay attention to the industries companies work in, the technologies they use, the services they provide, and the approaches they apply to make sure that all companies you’re considering meet your requirements.
Step #2. Check a company’s portfolio and reviews
When you finally choose several companies among a long list of software development providers, it’s vital to check whether they have experience that’s relevant to your project. The easiest way to do this is to check the company’s portfolio. Most companies share their success cases on their website. But you can also request a detailed portfolio via the contact form.
You’ll probably want to get some proof of a company’s reliability. To get that proof, you can read client testimonials on the company’s website. You can also take advantage of reviews on external websites. Clutch, for example, ensures the authenticity of testimonials on their site by conducting personal interviews with clients. Thus, you find only genuine feedback on Clutch.
Upwork is another great site where you can validate a company’s reputation. If a company provides their services on Upwork as well, you can see their rating, the number of projects they’ve completed, and client reviews. On Upwork, you can also see if a company has any repeating orders that are an indicator of reliability and quality service. Finally, if you check a company’s profile, pay attention to the Job Success rating — the best companies have 96+ ratings.
Step #3. Contact companies to discuss possible cooperation
If you haven’t done so yet, it’s time to contact company representatives. At this stage, you’ll tell companies you’re vetting about your project, clarify the details of the development process, and decide which company you want to hire dedicated developers from.
As a rule, if you confirm your intention to cooperate with a company, you don’t have to interview dedicated programmers, testers, and other team members, since you have already discussed expertise-related questions with a company representative. The company of your choice is fully responsible for the team composition for your project. However, if you want, you can interview team members to make sure they perfectly suit your project needs. In the next section, you’ll find useful tips on how to do it.
How to interview members of a dedicated development team
If you decide to get acquainted with dedicated developers or team members on your own and check their skills personally, you can benefit from following several tips that will make your interviews productive.
Prepare a list of questions
We bet you value your time and don’t want interviews to take too much of it. To make interviews as effective as possible, you can prepare tasks and the questions you’ll ask in advance.
During interviews, you might want to check the hard skills of dedicated engineers that will potentially work on your product. If you have a technical background, this might not be a problem for you. During the interview, you can ask the following questions to find out developers’ hard skills:
- What experience do you have discussing technical aspects of your work with non-technical people such as stakeholders?
- What methods do you use to estimate a new project?
- How do you test your code?
- How do you ensure quality under tight deadlines?
- What do you do to improve your skills?
You can also prepare some technical tasks such as fixing errors in a piece of code or offering algorithms to solve a particular problem.
If you can’t check dedicated developers’ hard skills on your own, you’ll probably need to hire a third-party technical expert who will help you with skill assessment.
Pay attention to soft skills
While hard skills are important to decide if a candidate fits a position, more and more employers consider soft skills just as important. The thing is that it’s possible to practice hard skills and increase knowledge to become a better professional, but acquiring soft skills is much more difficult.
A good team member usually has the following soft skills:
- Great communication skills. No matter what job people do on your project – code, design, or test – they should be able to communicate with other team members and stakeholders. Clear communication is the basis for effective teamwork.
- Open-mindedness. With this soft skill, your team members are ready to get and accept feedback. Open-minded people are flexible and ready for improvements.
- Creativity will help your team members solve even routine tasks in a new way. Working with people who can think outside of the box, you can create something really outstanding.
You can extend this list with such soft skills as teamwork, self-management, empathy, critical thinking, the ability to work under tight deadlines, stress resilience, and so on that you believe are necessary for your team. Here are some examples of questions you might want to ask during a soft skills interview:
- How do you react when someone criticizes your work?
- How do you handle projects that push you out of your comfort zone?
- How do you approach working in a team?
- What are your strengths and weaknesses?
- How do you handle conflicts in the workplace?
Take advantage of a video call
Outsourcing development tasks doesn’t offer many possibilities for offline communication, and the majority of software development teams communicate with their clients via video calls. As the most effective way of communication nowadays, video calls give you a number of advantages:
- They are quite personal, which allows you to get acquainted with every dedicated developer better.
- By watching people, you can notice their body language, which can tell you more about them than words.
- With numerous video conferencing apps like Zoom and Google Meet, you can effortlessly establish effective business communication with your partners from all over the world.
Now that you know the process of hiring dedicated developers, let’s move to outsourcing opportunities. In the next section, we shed light on the reasons you might want to choose a Ukrainian outsourcing partner.
Why hire dedicated developers in Ukraine?
Ukraine has proven to be one of the leading IT hubs in Eastern Europe, with more than 200,000 professionals working in the IT industry. Ukrainian companies are frequently featured in lists of top software development companies globally. And that’s not all. See more reasons to consider Ukraine as your outsourcing destination below.
- Strong education. More than 75% of technical and non-technical specialists in Ukraine are university graduates. Technical specialists have degrees in computer science, software engineering, cybersecurity, and other technical fields. Thus, they have a solid theoretical knowledge base not only in their industries but in related fields. Moreover, they devote their free time to self-education. Ukrainian specialists read professional literature, attend courses and industry-related events, take part in meetups, and engage in other forms of professional development.
- Ability to focus on different industries. Ukrainian developers have proven their expertise in more than 30 industries. E-commerce, travel, healthcare, real estate, logistics, education, finance – software engineers in Ukraine can handle projects in any of these fields and even more.
- Reasonable price–quality ratio. An attractive hourly rate is one of the major reasons why business owners outsource their projects to Ukraine. In comparison to the USA, Australia, Canada, and Western Europe, where development costs can reach up to $180 per hour, in Ukraine, they are almost four times lower. You can expect the average hourly rate of Ukrainian developers to be $45.
- Remarkable English skills. By choosing a Ukrainian company as your software development partner, you can be sure there won’t be a language barrier if you speak English. The majority of IT professionals have an intermediate English level or higher. Moreover, IT companies do their best to improve the English-speaking skills of their employees by organizing regular English lessons.
Do these reasons sound good enough for you to outsource your project to Ukraine? If they do, we’d like to tell you a bit more about our company and how you can benefit from our cooperation.
Clockwise Software’s experience as a dedicated development team provider
Developers at Clockwise Software have a portfolio of more than 150 completed projects, and we aren’t stopping there. We aim at providing our clients with the best level of service and robust software solutions. You might want to cooperate with us if:
- You’re looking for specialists with considerable expertise in JavaScript development
- You lack a couple of software engineers to complement your software development team
- You want a motivated team that has a clear workflow and can manage the development process from start to finish
- You value transparency, consistency, and clear communication
To find out more about the way we work on our projects, visit our Case Studies page where you’ll get more insights.
Conclusion
By choosing to hire dedicated developers to work on some tasks of your project or outsource a whole project, you get such advantages as the ability to hire necessary professionals in one go and to reduce HR-related hassles. By choosing Ukraine as your outsourcing destination, you get even more benefits like a reasonable hourly rate, flawless communication, and high-quality results. Finally, by choosing Clockwise Software as your dedicated team provider, you get a reliable partner who can meet your business needs.
