Factors to Consider When Hiring Software Developers: 20 Tips

Hiring software developers, whether it’s on-site or offshore, it’s important that you’re picking candidates that are the right fit for your team and the organization. You can go with many choices based on different situations, and picking the right software developer can become an overwhelming process.

To ease your mind, we have 15 factors to consider when hiring software developers. But before we begin, let’s look at the general prerequisites for picking the right candidates.

Prerequisites of Picking The Right Candidates

Hiring the right team members is an incredibly challenging task for the entire team. Screening through applications and interviewing hundreds of people while keeping the right criteria in mind can be overwhelming.

Regarding software developers, it’s not just about the skill sets they have mentioned in the resume. It’s more about the additional insights that will enable them to create a product that can stand out from the market.

1. Choose The Best Methods

Remote work and outsourcing have made the selection range far wider, and you have a bigger pool. When there’s a lot to select from, the selection process must be flawless to attract and recruit the right team member for the project.

There are multiple ways you can choose a good software developer;

• You can ask your in-house team members to refer good potential candidates
• Use a recruitment and staffing agency to help you find a developer suitable for your project
• Look on freelance platforms to find someone who matches your business requirements
• Outsource to a project development company

Regardless of the method you want, it’s best to test its effectiveness with a trial period before making your final choice.

2. Clarify Your Business Values Before Hiring

Hiring a developer from a different part of the globe who can instantly adapt to your workplace culture and practices is a great benefit. However, finding a candidate like that is extremely rare. But here are a few ways for you to increase your chances

• Ask them to imagine their ideal workplace.
• Ask them about the likes and dislikes of the characteristics of a manager or a boss.
• Ask about the kind of workplace that would make them unhappy or unproductive.

If their preferences match your workplace, you’ve found the right candidate for your team.

3. Check If The Portfolio Is Heavy Enough

Experience is highly important when you’re planning to outsource tasks. The best way to verify someone’s experience is through their portfolio. The heavier the portfolio, the better you choose them as your team members.

However, it’s not just about choosing someone who has done many projects before. It’s more about quality than quantity. If one candidate has hundreds of projects that are low value and don’t contribute much, the experience cannot be utilized at a larger scale later on.

However, someone who has previous experience working with high-end organizations whose skills and prowess have significantly helped the company is a better fit for your dev team. People with prior experience in complex projects can perform tasks more efficiently, regardless of the scale of the project.

4. Make Sure You’re Getting Your Money’s Worth

When paying for outsourcing contracts, whether an individual or an entire team, it’s best to ensure you’re getting your money’s worth.

Outsourcing vendors and teams mostly charge based on the number of tasks completed or hours they have worked.

Either way, it’s up to you as the product owner or project manager to ensure you’re getting the most productivity out of the team during those specified time ranges.

Employee management software is a great way to keep track of employees. These applications can show the amount of work someone’s completed or the number of hours they’ve worked on certain tasks. This allows for better time and development phase tracking and lets you pay fair amounts to the working team.

5. Certificates And Portfolios Aren’t Always Everything

Though we’ve emphasized certifications and portfolios since they’re proof of their claims of expertise, it isn’t everything that you should be content with. Many different aspects come together to make a great team member, and it’s not just the skills.

“Manners maketh man,” and that’s one of the core elements you should note when onboarding employees. You should also notice

• Manner of speaking
• Eagerness for communication
• Collaborative mindset
• Task completion rate
• Speech patterns

15 Qualities To Look For In Your Potential Candidates When Hiring

1. Fundamental Programming Skills

Though what the title suggests, we’re not just talking about basic knowledge about programming languages. Software product development requires extensive knowledge of different programming languages, and implementing the right knowledge to solve an issue plays a big part in an efficient software development cycle.

The developer should be able to solve different development-related issues with the right programming knowledge, like coding fundamentals and data structures. Knowledge about the ins and outs of programming allows a developer to build innovative features for the product that can take your business to the next level.

2. Browser Tool Knowledge

Different browsers offer different experiences to their users, and it demands consistency from the developers. To maintain consistency of the software across all different browsers, a developer must understand customizing the look and feel of the software in a way that matches the business’s brand guidelines.

While responsive web design can solve this problem to an extent, knowing the layout and the right use of different browser tools give developers an upper hand when developing web pages for web apps.

3. Interpersonal Skills

A software developer works in a team with designers, testers, and other stakeholders. The team member should possess adequate interpersonal skills to collaborate with everyone while progressing development. A good team player who can balance their task with all the other team members can create the right product for any business.

4. Tech Stack Expertise

Modern software development relies heavily on different tech stacks, and the choice of the tech stack can make or break a project. A good developer should always have a decent knowledge base about all existing latest tech stacks on the market so they can work with what they have and come up with solutions for issues with their current available resources during development.

5. Critical Thinking

The Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is full of problems, and it’s normal for a problem to appear during any development stage. Developers should have a proficient thinking mindset that allows them to come up with solutions as soon as they arise to find a logical way out.

Critical thinking also helps a developer to juggle multiple complex operations by breaking them down into smaller tasks during the development cycle, optimizing the entire process. 

6. Mix of Perfectionism & Pragmatism

Nothing is completely perfect, but the effort to achieve the status of perfection is a goal every ideal software developer should possess. Whether the company is working on building an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) or on a large-scale app, a good developer will always come up with innovative ways to make the app perfect by adding unique features or updating existing ones.

7. Communication Skills

As one of the veterans of the software development industry, we cannot stress the importance of communication enough. Lack of communication between team members during product development can cause frequent delays or a complete halt of the entire project.

A good developer always knows how to communicate all their concerns and feedback to the right people, whether it’s other team members or the project manager.

Another great aspect of communication skills is to explain development situations to non-technical stakeholders in a simplified manner to keep them in the loop. Efficiency in tackling non-technical stakeholders is a great way to ensure transparency between the management and development team.

8. Time Management

Time is of the essence and can be considered the most valuable resource during any product development cycle. Proper time management allows for faster development cycles and lower market time, leading to faster ROI generation.

An ideal development team member can always optimize their workflow by cutting out the excess process while breaking down bigger objectives into smaller tasks and goals that are easier to achieve.

They should also be able to handle task management like a project manager to a certain extent, which can help them to be more efficient with time management.

9. Adaptation Skills

Modern software development is all about high adaptability due to the constant changes in the software market and the ever-changing demands of the target audience. Regardless of the scale of the overall change, an experienced software developer should always be able to adapt to different situations to meet the demands of both the management and the potential customers.

Problem-solving during development often includes getting familiar with an entirely new tech stack or formula to solve a particular problem, and high adaptability can help a developer quickly get familiar with the solution and work it into the final product, increasing the chances of risk mitigation.

10. Passion For Work

Though many say that passion is overrated, it’s a great driving force that can boost morale and motivation for work. Finding fun in your work is the best way to help you immerse into the task, and finding passionate developers is the best addition you can have to your team.

In a world where everyone’s racing for the big finale, finding passionate people who are willing to put their best skills to the test to offer you a great product are people who will always bring in high-quality results and offer increased efficiency through motivated work hours.

11. Proactiveness

Proactive developers are like mythical creatures to most businesses, but they exist. These amazing developers always steer away from laziness and take their work seriously. They are developers who are always looking for a solution and then looking for a different problem to solve, and they are self-motivated to do so till the end of the project.

Finding and adding proactive teammates don’t just help your development; they also boost the morale and mindset of other team members who are either within the development team or are working in-house.

12. Has The Right Kind of Attitude

Attitude is everything, and all the skill sets in the world can be meaningless if a person has a lousy attitude. Positive-mindedness is a great attitude, proactiveness, and passion when working on a project.

Any software developer frequently faces tight deadlines, and their responses to the situation tell a lot about their personalities. The right developer with the right attitude is ready to take on any challenge head-on with a calm and collective attitude, fixing every issue until the end.

13. Has The Ability To Fit Within Your Company’s Culture

As mentioned earlier, adaptability is a great skill not many developers possess. Different companies worldwide have different work cultures. When you bring in developers from different parts of the world, they are sure to find different work cultures and practices in your workplace that will come as a cultural shock to many.

But if the developer has all the right capabilities, they should be able to fit right in, accept your existing work culture as the norm, and continue to work on the project. Cultural acceptance plays a big role in employee productivity, and high adaptability removes the problem from the board.

14. Always Hits The Deadlines

Deadlines are a constant part of the development cycle. A good product, no matter how exceptional, must hit the market as soon as possible before similar products appear in the market to captivate the target audience. As a result, software development teams often face deadlines.

Find yourself a developer with a long record of hitting all deadlines regardless of their team members. When you have a team of people determined to reach the end goal with near-perfection status no matter what, you will surely have a great product in your hands in no time.

15. Has High Standards

Setting high standards during product development sets a product apart from the crowd. It’s not just about releasing a generic solution to the crowd; it’s about releasing a great product that will appeal to the majority.

When the developers have a higher standard that matches the ambitions of the product owner, the developer can deliver a product that aligns with the final product vision and has a higher chance of success in the target market.

To Wrap It All Up

Before we end the discussion, let’s take a quick look back at the 15 factors to consider when hiring ideal software developers:

• Fundamental programming skills
• Browser tool knowledge
• Interpersonal skills
• Tech stack expertise
• Critical thinking
• A mix of perfectionism and pragmatism
• Communication skills
• Time management
• Adaptation skills
• Passion for work
• Proactiveness
• Has the right kind of attitude
• Has the ability to fit within your company’s culture
• Always hits the deadlines
• Has high standards

Are you looking for a software development partner who can offer you a developer team with all the right qualities and capabilities? Our professional team housed at Impala Intech can offer you just that!

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