6 Mistakes All Startups Make When Hiring a Software Developer

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The global software market is expected to amount to 1493.07 billion US dollars by 2025 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11 percent.

That’s why the success of your startup firm depends on developing the right products. Like most software tech startups, you have to outsource partial or full development of your product from another party. Unless the product is very simple, even established companies with more experience need software outsourcing.

Your vision and the right software development team can make your project a success. Even if you have a team, there might be some gaps that you need to bridge.

Here’s what you need to consider before hiring a software developer for your company.

Hiring Quickly Without Covering the Basics

We understand that the hiring progress can be strenuous and often burdensome. Especially if you’re new, you haven’t had many opportunities to learn. You’re growing your business and meeting product deadlines, so you might think time is of the essence. But this haste can end up being counter-productive. You have to realize that hiring software developers is very complicated, and the wrong “specialist” can slow down your growth or even bring it to a complete halt.

Did you know companies spend more than 30% of an employee’s salary on the recruitment process? And the turnover expenditure can cost your firm a loss of approximately 16-123% of an employee’s salary.

You might be tempted to hire the first impressive resume, but do understand the risks involved. You need to be vigilant about checking references and seeing examples. Don’t interview a simple company or one person, and hire them for a job. Instead, take your time to evaluate every candidate and their qualifications.  

Hiring a software developer

Moreover, don’t hire someone who knows nothing about your business. You might be enthusiastic and consider their work impressive, but industry knowledge is necessary too.

Hiring for Quantity and Not for Quality

Unfortunately, most software developers that look great on their resumes only follow the given guidelines. While this is what you need, you might end up hiring someone who is not good at problem-solving. A quality software developer should be able to figure out solutions to problems at any stage of the application development process. Your software developer should be good at solving puzzles and give you insights that will help your business evolve and enhance.

Most importantly, a problem solver will take a proactive approach and ensure that they have a solution for a problem even before they encounter one. This will cut down on development costs and save your business more time and other resources.

Not Paying Attention to Details

Your main focus would probably be on the look of your product and your target market. Sometimes, a software product looks perfect on the UI but is horribly built and doesn’t perform how it’s supposed to. This can happen if your team focuses more on the design side and not on the user interface.

You spend so much time, energy, funds, and marketing on a new product and find out that your consumers are complaining about slow-running web pages or that you are being charged too much money from the PaaS company. If an established company makes errors like these, they’d have the revenue to fall back on, but a startup has only this shot at getting it right when outsourcing software. This is why it’s important to pay attention to these details as they can make or break your project.

A software developer working on code

Not Mapping a Project Before You Hire

Before hiring someone, know your project completely. You might know what your product is, and you’ve done the market research to know it’s a viable product. But how does it work? Here’s where it gets a little technical but know the UX design, check out other products, pick out the features and functionalities, create your timeline and your budget. Moreover, select your delivery and only then hire your developer.

Creating a UX map will help, especially when you hire a developer who will ask for a breakdown of the user journey.

Not Hiring for Technical Skills

When you hire your software developer, you should see if they have the right background and important skills. Your software developer should have a background in SaaS products, modular structures, and microservice architecture. Moreover, your developers should have the technical skills and expertise to analyze potential users’ requirements, focusing on usability, performance, and scalability issues. Most importantly, they should be able to deliver responsive and user-friendly software for your target audience.

Not Understanding Team Roles

You must first establish defined roles with responsibilities for your software development team members. Firstly, you need a software architect or a chief technology officer who can understand your vision and develop product architecture and design.

Defined roles and responsibilities will help your team run efficiently. This will also help you know the gaps in your team that you need to fill and how to hire them.

A software developing team

Hire a Credible Outsourcing Company

Software developing companies are necessary for your business to succeed. You need to hire a company that understands your projects, objectives, and initiatives are up to your requirements. Moreover, the company should have IT industry specialists with proper certification and experience to meet and exceed your expectations.

When it comes to a credible software outsourcing company, hire Vates. We’re a leading nearshore software development and testing outsourcing company. We take pride in being an Atlassian Gold Solution Partner and offer only the best software outsourcing services and IT staff augmentation services.

We specialize in software development services, software testing, IT staff augmentation, custom software solutions, and more.

For more information about our services, feel free to reach out to us today!

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