With the rise of remote work, the talent pool for software developers has expanded beyond local boundaries, offering greater opportunities but also adding complexity to the hiring process. Finding and hiring remote developers from different regions and time zones requires a strategic approach and I am here to guide you to do it right.
First of all, you may ask: “Why Go Remote?”. There are several reasons on why you should hire remote developers:
- Talent is not limited to America: Remote hiring drastically increases the size of the talent pool to a global scale. With the U.S. facing a severe tech talent shortage (expected 1.2 million+ developer shortfall by 2026 ), tapping into remote talent is becoming essential, maybe mandatory in the long run, I dare to say.
- Costs are reduced: Hiring people from, let’s say, Latin America, instead of New York allows you to feel that your employees are valued and well-paid by paying them New York salaries. Additionally, every dollar saved on office space means more capital to invest in real assets that have the potential to produce real growth.
- Greater employee retention and less employee turnover: Companies that offer remote work with equal pay have an almost unfair advantage in attracting and retaining the best people in the world. 72% of employers say that remote work helped them to get a bigger employee retention.
- Greater employer/employee satisfaction: Remote work is a way to remove the final barrier to doing the work you’re supposed to do, with the people you’re supposed to do it with, in the most rewarding and profitable way possible.
- Enhanced productivity: Some studies show that remote workers are more productive than office workers. Check those here, here, and here.
But maybe you are still not convinced, because it is not an easy task. we all know it. You have to ensure your remote developer will be qualified and committed to work. After that, you will have to dance between time zones to ensure communication, payroll logistics, and legislation. So how to hire right from the start?
The Eight Steps of Hiring Remote Developers
- Craft Attractive Job Descriptions
- Find Remote Developers on Online platforms
- Vet Candidates
- Evaluate Their Work Portfolio
- Conduct In-Depth Interviews
- Assess Remote Working Skills
- Make The Final Offer
- Onboard And Support Your New Remote Developers
1. Craft Job Descriptions That Attracts Candidates
No secret here, right? You won’t get your dream remote developers if you don’t tell them what you expect from them.
Here is my tips on how to write a list to hire remote developers:
- Outline specific responsibilities, required skills, and level of experience.
- Include technical and interpersonal skills, such as proficiency with virtual collaboration tools and excellent written communication skills.
- Evaluate the role’s compatibility with remote work, considering whether tasks can be completed remotely and the convenience of team collaboration and client meetings.
- Determine the type of contract desired (full-time or part-time), based on the project and budget.
- When writing the job description, discuss deliverables rather than just requirements.
- Do not discuss deliverables by “how many” and yes by “which quality”.
- Use accessible language and professional terms that resonate with a global professional. Your remote hire may not understand the depths of our American mambo jambo. Keep it simple.
In the remote work era, candidate experience is vital as it influences your company’s reputation in the job market and platforms like Glassdoor.
In the job description, provide an overview of your company that outlines the mission, culture, and any other standout aspects of your organization. Explain what makes it a great place to work, as this will help attract potential job seekers.
2. 🔍 Find Remote Developers Beyond Job Boards
Often, the main question hiring managers have when seeking technical roles is where to find remote developers. Instead of looking for a candidate in a virtual marketplace, you should headhunt for top-notch professionals who already work somewhere else.
There are several places to find remote developers; these include:
3.1. Partner with recruitment agencies
Remote recruitment agencies are one of the easiest ways to find and hire remote developers. At DistantJob, we have succeeded in finding the right candidates for companies in just two weeks.
Besides the sourcing, evaluation, and vetting, we go a step beyond taking care of all the paperwork (this includes EOR, contracts, NDAs, IP protection, payments, and more).
3.2. Online Communities
Online communities are a great alternative to finding software developers. As these are built and managed by developers, they share experiences, tips, failures, and in most cases, job opportunities and recommendations.
The best online communities to find remote developers are GitHub, Stack Overflow, Hacker News, Reddit, and Hackernoon.
3.3. Professional Networks
LinkedIn is a premier professional networking platform, with close to 900 million users having provided detailed profiles, making it an ideal resource for employers to passively uncover potential candidates.
To begin, you can add the Hiring Badge to your company’s profile and start reaching out to potential candidates with your offer. Additionally, you can view their profile, work history, referrals, and more to get a better idea of their skills.
3.4. Freelance platforms
You can use Indeed, Upwork, Talmatic, Workana, Fiverr… the marketplace of your choosing to pick up candidates. But here is the catch: these freelancers are not the best you can get, for three reasons.
- Their status under the Law may change overnight
- Freelancers are autonomous, they don’t work for you, they work for themselves. Therefore, they may have tons of clients to work with.
The important thing from here is, your best bet is someone who is already working for someone else in another country.
3.5. Collect Referrals
Referrals are often one of the top three sources used by employers to find qualified candidates. Having an employee refer your organization to potential hires is a great way to connect with qualified personnel. While hiring through job boards can be costlier in the long run, offering a referral bonus is a relatively inexpensive way to source new talent.
3.6 Ask Employees to Share Job Openings on Social Media
Encouraging your employees to share job openings on their social media to reach a larger, more targeted pool of potential candidates. Your employees’ social networks offer an excellent way to connect with talented professionals who may not be reachable through traditional recruiting channels.
By sharing job openings through social media, your employees can help create a more positive image of your company in the eyes of potential new hires and the public at large.
3.7 Connect with recently laid-off professionals
Connecting with recently laid-off professionals can be a great way to find remote developers. Monitor lay off news , or open-to-work candidates on Linkedin. It provides access to a pool of talent that, due to unforeseen circumstances, are now actively looking for a new job. This can provide fast access to highly qualified developers.
3. Vet Candidates
The next step after you´ve sourced a pool of candidates is screening. Here you want to start filtering what candidates are suitable for the interview and evaluation and which ones are not. This may involve reviewing resumes, conducting initial interviews, and in some cases (depending on the role), conducting technical assessments.
Many companies use an ATS (applicant tracking system) to speed up this step. An ATS is a software application that manages the initial steps of the recruitment process.
Once candidates submit their job applications, the ATS filters them, extracting important information, and stores them in a database accessible to recruiters and hiring managers. Then, the ATS ranks candidates’ applications based on keywords and skills mentioned in the job description and screens them to ensure that candidates meet at least the minimum qualifications.
You overview this selection and choose with whom you want to move forward in the application process.
4. Evaluate Their Work Portfolio
A work portfolio from the candidates helps you evaluate their skills and experience. This is particularly important in technical roles, where evaluating these skills can often be challenging.
At DistantJob, all of our recruiters have technical backgrounds, so we decide the type of evaluation based on the role, and we suggest you do the same.
If you need a software enginner for a specific project, evaluating them based on the project will help you get a hint about their skills. Also, check their portfolio and credentials to see how they’ve applied their skills in previous projects.
5. Conduct In-Depth Interviews Like a Pro
After you’ve evaluated their work samples, conduct in-depth interviews to know the candidates better.
These interviews involve not only gaining a deeper understanding of candidates’ strong skills and qualifications but also learning more about their experience working for similar roles, their strengths, and their weaknesses. They also involve getting to know them more personally, learning what motivates them as remote developers and why they like their profession.
When preparing the questions and evaluations, be creative. Candidates sometimes memorize questions and answers, and the idea of these interviews is to get to know candidates authentically, not with prefabricated answers.
If you want to hire a web developer, per se, don’t ask them the basics about web development; go a step beyond, asking them questions that require them to apply their knowledge and experience.
When conducting these interviews, it is also valuable to ask other team members to be part of the interviewing process. Group interviews give other perspectives or things you are not seeing, and it’s also an opportunity to check how a candidate interacts with their potential colleagues.
6. How Should You Assess Remote Working Skills?
Since you’re hiring for a remote role, it’s important to assess the candidates’ ability to work independently and effectively communicate with team members.
Not everyone is suitable for remote work, so it is important to ensure candidates enjoy this type of dynamic, where work happens mostly asynchronously and they do not need to rely so much on other team members.
Skills such as communication, time management, collaboration, self-motivation, and adaptability are key.
7. Ready to Make The Final Offer?
After going through all evaluations and assessments, it’s time to make an offer that your remote developer candidate cannot refuse.
Choose the best candidate for the role, and remember that not only does their technical expertise matter but also their personality and how they interact with others.
Keep in mind that offering a high salary is not enough for competitive roles such as software development. When making the final offer, highlight all the benefits they will enjoy associated with this role, such as flexible schedules, remote work, PTO, and more!
Also consider that remote workers value a good work-life balance.
8. . 👟 Speed up his remote onboarding
We are almost there. You finally have chosen which remote developer you wish to hire; now all you have to do is to guarantee that you and them will be on the same page!
A robust onboarding process: That works for any kind of hiring, right? Both remote and local hires need to know what is going on, or they won’t be able to deliver anything. Don’t forget to do an onboarding meeting with your hire.
I can’t stress this enough: the onboard meeting is the most important step of the hiring process.
Even if you manage to hire the Almighty God of Remote Programming himself, he can’t do much for your company if he doesn’t have a clue on what is going on.
If they don’t know what is going on, they will start to work on meaningless things.
The success of your company lies in your employees knowing what they are doing and having their expectations aligned with yours.
Bureaucracy made easier
Now it’s the easier part of hiring remote developers, I swear. You must have two things in mind while dealing with remote workers: they work at a different time zone and there are laws concerning them in the U.S..
How to deal with Time Zones
The wonderful thing about remote working is making us change the focus on the things that really matter. Why do I say that? Because before you probably measured how much you can trust a worker by his or her attitude in office and now you don’t have that.
Instead of micromanaging your remote hires, you have to check on what they deliver to you and focus on the results.
Because, let’s be honest. A guy can spend all day long in the office acting like he was a dedicated employee while actually he was just goofing around.
A remote developer can’t do that remotely. The developer has to give his best and show progress or be fired.
The secret about dealing with Time Zones is not dealing with them.
Of course, sometimes you have to accommodate his or her Time Zone and all your other hires for an important meeting.
What if not everyone will be able to attend it?
In that case, just record the meeting and send it to everyone (including those unable to attend). Easy peasy.
There are tons of project management tools where you can check regularly if people are doing their tasks on time, Monday, ClickUp, Slack…
Here is some advice on how to deal with these GMT differences:
- Have a project management tool where everyone knows what their colleagues are doing. It will help them to organize their tasks effectively and it will help you to understand the progress of their tasks.
- Daily Communication. This report will guarantee that you know exactly what they have been doing lately. Every day, ask your hires to answer you three questions by audio or text (your call):
- What did I do yesterday for the sake of the project?
- What am I going to do today for the sake of the project?
- What are the obstacles that are burdening me to advance the project?
- Periodic Meetings. Focus on metrics used to measure the project’s advancements. Is the team going well? Could it perform better? How so? Most importantly, will we change course or keep doing all the same? A meeting of 25 minutes will be long enough. Don’t forget to record it and pass it to everyone.
The Laws Concerning Hiring Remote Developers
At least, we will deal with the law. Despite that anxiety that we all feel about forgetting a specific law that may make us the worst employer ever, I got you covered on that.
Federal laws in the U.S. protect remote workers, granting them rights and benefits similar to those of in-person employees. Key laws include:
- Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA): It covers all employees in the U.S., setting standards for minimum wage, overtime pay, and recordkeeping. Remote workers are entitled to the federal minimum wage or the highest state/local minimum wage (use your own state/local as a basis), as well as overtime pay (1.5 times regular wage) for hours worked over 40 in a week. Employers must keep accurate records of time worked.
- Do not classify employees as independent contractors or vice-versa. If you hire a freelancer, he is considered an independent contractor unless he is dependent on your money. If your hire relies on his job with you to get his income, he is your employee.
- This is why I insist on you headhunting a professional who works exclusively for you rather than having a freelancer; under the Law, your freelancer may be or may not be an independent contractor. It depends much more on him than on you and his status may change overnight without you knowing it. And if you classify him wrongly, you are cooked.
- Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA): Provides up to 12 weeks of unpaid, legally protected leave for specified family or medical reasons. Remote workers are eligible as long as they meet eligibility criteria, including minimum employment tenure and hours worked.
- Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA): Prohibits discrimination against employees with disabilities. Employers must provide reasonable accommodations, which may include remote work. If an employer offers a telework program, it must allow a qualified employee to participate. If you already employ someone who has a disability, he may require working remotely.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA): Prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, and disability. These protections extend to all aspects of employment, including hiring, firing, promotions, and training. Just don’t be a bigot and you will be just fine.
What to Avoid When Hiring a Remote Developer
There are a few things that can negatively impact your hiring. Here’s how to overcome those challenges:
1. Timing
Recruiting talented and trustworthy remote developers is challenging for many businesses, regardless of location. With a vast pool of qualified candidates, it can take time to find the right fit. This is why sometimes timing in the hiring process becomes a crucial factor.
When recruiters or the HR team can identify the right candidates at the right time, the process is smooth and fast. But when they are inexperienced and have no idea where and how to look for the right candidates, the process becomes slow and inefficient.
2. Knowing How to Evaluate Remote Developers
Your hiring manager should be well-prepared to know how to evaluate developers´ both technical and personality aspects.
A practical solution is having candidates complete a test project. Here you can have a more hands-on evaluation of their skills and overall better understand their work style, rather than just relying on an interview.
Remember that the evaluation you conduct should adapt to the type of developer you´re seeking.
3. Legal Challenges
Legal considerations add another layer of complexity when hiring remote developers. Protecting intellectual property, navigating tax laws, securing insurance, drafting employment contracts, and understanding different legal systems are just a few of the legal challenges that must be addressed.
Before hiring a remote developer, it’s important to ensure that your company can legally do so and that the arrangement complies with the laws of the region where the contractor is located.
While hiring a developer from a country with lower labor costs may be tempting, verifying that their compensation complies with local standards and that they are not being taken advantage of is essential.
Hence, working with recruitment agencies like DistantJob becomes valuable as they focus on taking care of all the payroll and legal aspects.
4. Knowing How to Conduct a Background Check
The challenges of remote interviews can often lead to difficulties in verifying a candidate’s qualifications and experience. It can be challenging to accurately assess a remote developer’s abilities through a video call or phone conversation compared to an in-person interview.
When evaluating potential remote software engineers, you should build a detailed process to ensure all their educational credentials, skills, and experiences are real.
Here’s how you can do background checks on remote developers during the evaluation process:
- Check references: Ask the candidate for professional and personal references and contact them to ask about the candidate’s work history, performance, and dependability.
- Verify credentials: Contact the schools or companies listed on the candidate’s resume to ensure the candidate’s education and work experience are valid.
- Verify work samples: Ask the candidate for work samples and check them for quality and authenticity.
- Check online presence: Look for information about the candidate on social media, professional networks, and other online sources to see if any information may raise red flags.
5. Sourcing Candidates on Your Own is Challenging and Expensive
Sourcing remote candidates can be a challenging and costly process due to the difficulty of recruiting for roles outside of the standard location of work.
A major challenge is the sheer size of the remote developer market, which is estimated to be between 5.5 million and 6 million professionals, according to Glassdoor Economic Research.
The two major factors that lead to higher costs of recruiting remote workers include:
- Increased cost for advertising job postings – Advertising job postings tend to cost upwards of 39% more than it does for on-site positions.
- Recruiting from a remote pool requires a higher level of decision-making skills and experience.
- Longer recruiting process for remote software developers—The process of recruiting, interviewing, and onboarding a remote employee takes 2.5-3X longer than recruiting on-site employees.
The added costs of recruiting a remote dev team need to be weighed against the potential benefits of managing remote workers. Many companies are finding that the cost of remote workers is well worth it when one considers the long-term benefits of having a well-trained, remote team that can handle more complex tasks in a shorter period.
Many companies recognize the complexities that come with this process, so they choose to outsource it or hire the services of an IT headhunting agency for assistance. One of the benefits of IT recruitment agencies is that they can take charge of the process and offer you the best candidate that fits your needs… in record time!
Why Full-Time Developers and not Freelancers are Key to Startup and SMB Success
When starting a new business or a small-medium enterprise, you want a team that’s as invested and passionate about your vision as you are. Choosing between hiring full-time developers or freelancers can significantly affect the development and success of your business. Here’s why opting for full-time developers could be the winning strategy for your startup or SMB:
As a general rule, these are the considerations you need to keep in mind when evaluating what type of developer fits best:
| Differences | Freelancer | Full-time Developer |
| Contract Type | A freelancer typically works on a project-by-project basis, with a set agreement for the scope and timeline of each project. | A full-time remote developer is a permanent employee who works for one company. |
| Availability | Freelancers often take on multiple projects at the same time, so it makes it harder for them to be available. | A full-time remote developer is always available and committed to working for one company. |
| Skills and expertise | Freelancers may have a wider range of skills and expertise as they work with multiple clients. | A full-time remote developer will typically have a more specialized skill set. |
Takeaway: A freelance developer is a good idea when you need help with a specific project within a limited time frame. But if you need someone who is fully committed and willing to evolve in the role, a full-time developer is the best solution.
Is The Process of Hiring Remotely Expensive?
Hiring developers can be expensive, and the cost can vary depending on several factors, such as the company’s location, the developer’s experience level, and the demand for developers in the particular field.
Here are some of the usual costs associated with hiring remote developers:
- Recruitment costs: Recruitment costs can include advertising the job, attending job fairs or events, and paying for services such as recruitment agencies or job boards.
- Salaries and other benefits: Developers’ salary and benefits package can vary depending on their experience and skills and the company’s location. In some locations, such as major tech hubs, salaries can be higher due to high demand.
- Onboarding and training: There may be costs associated with onboarding and training, including providing equipment, software, and access to tools and resources.
While hiring remote developers through third-party organizations can add up an extra cost, depending on the organization itself and their experience, these, in the long term, can be more efficient as they will seek out remote developers in locations where the cost of living is lower.
For instance, hiring a senior remote developer in the U.S. is around $100,000 per year (if not more), while hiring skilled Eastern European developers costs between $60,000 to $90,000 per year.
Conclusion
Finding the right remote developer can be done if you follow these simple steps. But if you find it overwhelming to do it on your own, don’t worry. Leave it to us. We will take on the challenge and commit to finding you the developer you need in just 2 weeks.
Our specialized recruitment agency offers access to top talent, a customized recruitment process, and ongoing support to ensure a successful hire. By partnering with us, you can save time and money while you can focus on other aspects of your business, while we do the heavy lifting such as recruiting, vetting and interviewing.
We provide a customized recruitment process based on your needs and preferences and can get you the perfect match in less than 2 weeks. Interested? Contact us today online or visit our offices in Montreal.
