Developers are in-demand, from startups to large government agencies and everything in between. No matter the size of your business and budget, or the requirements of your projects, developers with the desired skill sets can be tricky to find.We’ve broken down the process of finding the right talent into 6 simple steps. Read on for a bonus step at the end that will help you speed through this process.

Step 1: Define your Goals

The first question is the most important. Why do you need to hire a developer? What do you need them to build? This question sets up the rest of this list, not only in defining your requirements, but guiding you to the correct places to seek out the talent you need. Building an app? Then maybe you’re looking for a Flutter dev, or for someone particularly skilled in JavaScript. Need to work on your UI? Then maybe you need a React js specialist. Once you know what you need you can move on to step 2.

Step 2: Scope your Project

Scoping your project means a few things.

• What’s your timeline
• What coding/development skills will be needed throughout
• What other teams will need to be involved (marketing, sales, etc.) Do you need additional people outside developers to work cross functionally?
• How many developers can you afford/do you need
• How will the project be managed (and by whom) once it is completed

Step 2 is all about project management, and if you don’t have a dedicated project manager - answering the above questions is a good place to start. This is also the time to start talking about what your user needs and what their experience will be. In addition to dedicated developers you may also need designers proficient in tools like figma to build out the wireframe for your product.

Step 3: Make your Culture Match your Needs

With hiring trends fluctuating between great resignations, layoffs, and the continued wave effects of the general workforce moving more to remote models - culture is a massive aspect of what attracts potential talent to your team. This looks a bit different depending on where your company is in its growth.

Startups

Depending on your capital/funding, startups are usually the companies with constrained development budgets. These are the organizations where everyone on the team wears multiple hats - so finding full stack developers with a variety of experiences is a good tactic to take vs. focusing on specialized talent.Startups are attractive for a few reasons like getting in on the ground floor of something, working with a smaller tight-knit team, and having more crossover between your senior leadership and general workers. Startups have a reputation for being idea factories with a lot of fresh energy.When looking for dev talent for your startup consider:

• Finding fullstack developers - these devs can straddle between front end and back end tasks
• Hiring devs that work with React.js - this open source JavaScript library supports webpage updates and single-page app development. Have UI problems to solve? This is the language you need
• Consider working with augmented teams - you may not be able to hire full time talent at this stage in your business, and the best developers either work for themselves, or seek out pay that is usually above the startup scale.

When hiring talent for your startup projects remember, you don’t have to find full-time talent to create full-time solutions.

Midsize Businesses

Congratulations! You’ve scaled up and are now building the foundation to grow exponentially year over year. Now that you’re a larger company your needs and motivations may have changed.Midsize businesses hover between the pressure cooker environment of a startup, and the well-oiled mechanics of an Enterprise company. This is the phase of your business where you really start to define your culture - and the majority of that is done through the growth of your teams and in how you communicate internally. Midsize businesses know that ease of use and adaptability are two of the most important user-facing functions. So developers need to be adept at scaling websites and updating applications to keep use consistent despite provider updates and changing landscapes. This means hiring devs that are:

• Familiar with large, stable libraries and languages such as React.js and Python
• Front End and Back End specific developers to manage and maintain your growing infrastructure
• Data analysts and devs with experience in SQL to help get you the data you need to scale to Enterprise

Enterprise

The enterprise level is maybe the most attractive to talent - perks like stipends for office setups, company equipment, travel, and enticing paychecks are all huge selling points. At this level, needs start to get specific so your dev requirements will likely be 1) more specialized, and 2) more likely to be short-term and project specific - especially if you already have a substantial dev team to manage your daily growth and needs.For Enterprise:

• Look for the specific skills you need to complete high priority projects
• Don’t be afraid of short-term contracts
• Utilize your network by hiring from recommendations from your team’s network

Step 4: Full Time or Freelance?

We’ve touched on this a bit with our company size breakdown above. When hiring, you need to know if you’re looking for temporary or for full-time - these decisions will determine where you go to find your devs, be it specialized slack communities, freelance or gig-economy sites like Upwork, or job boards and recruiters.

Step 5: Vet your Talent

Regardless of your answer to step 4, one of the biggest hurdles in the hiring game is making sure the people you interview, and eventually hire, can actually do the job. The ease of this step can largely depend on where you are in your growth. For startups, this step can be challenging because often there is no dedicated HR or recruitment team to evaluate candidates.Larger companies have structured recruitment and interview processes complete with background checks (that can be pricey) and other validators that help vet incoming talent. The processes between hiring fulltime and contract differ in terms of payment and also management - which can put strain on smaller teams.

Step 6: Keep your Talent

Once you’ve hired your talent, you have to keep them around. Transparency is the best tool here - during the hiring process set clear expectations and accurately convey the culture and current state of growth of your company. Less surprises = less turnover.Communication is also key here. How does your team communicate internally, and what is your onboarding like? We’ve got some good retention tips here to help you out - especially if you’re new to working with growing or augmented teams.

Take a Shortcut

Hiring the right team is a full time gig. Maintaining that team is a full-time commitment - and the requirements change as you grow.Want to skip steps 1-6? Explore Staff Augmentation with TECKpert for a faster, focused solution. No long-term commitments, unlimited scalability, and a support system for managing your augmented team and executing your goals.