Hire employees
Nobody will judge you if you hire full-time developers through an official contract. The team will be under your full control and you will be able to change priorities and move employees from one task to another.
But… this is expensive. First of all, you must consider the employer obligations - everything from taxes to benefits to job guarantees for your workers. To make the economics work, you need to create constant task flow so employees are not idle. CFO’s are not in love with adding fixed costs into the business, especially in this economy. Also, the hiring process can be complicated and expensive. It’s almost impossible to build an engineering team around an office these days, and remote hiring opens up a new set of challenges. You can spend months and up to 5000$ per hire for just one good developer. Even more — if you are looking for a developer with special skills or huge experience.
If you choose to hire employees, saving money could be tricky. Today you can’t “hire developers from a small town and pay them half as much". Thanks to the global trend towards remote work, large tech companies are hiring technical talent all over the world, making it even harder to compete.
If you are hiring on staff, you will need an IT talent acquisition team, manage relationships with multiple recruitment agencies, and will face the challenge of how to recruit in the modern remote work environment. HR (and it will be one more staff unit) or go with agencies, which are not always safe to rely on.
If you are running this from the tech function, you can create a test task and interview your candidates yourself. Even so, you will need to distribute your offer across the many remote global job boards online, analyze CV’s, help new employees with adaptation etc.
Here is how long it currently takes to hire tech experts in the US:
- developer — 35 days,
- tester — 26 days,
- database administrator — 26 days,
- mobile apps developer — 24 days,
- junior developer — 16 days.
Work with outsource studios
Imagine you could find a ready-to-go team and trust it with every part of your project. Somebody you know well, who wouldn’t leave you with raw product and code access.
The challenge of this model is it lacks flexibility and customer-centricity. Outsource studios usually have a specialism they are great at, but struggle with work outside of the field of expertise.
Of course, there are always big companies with a bigger range of specialty options, but then you lose the relationship and their services are priced at a premium.
Outsource studios also have to build in a strong margin to de-risk any project at a fixed price, as well as a nailed down SOW. That’s why they are famous for being subject to Change Orders almost from Day 1 of a project and you lose control of the budget.
Work through a cross-functional platform
This is often known as staff augmentation. You engage a company to supply workers with specialist skills for your project, without the commitment of a permanent hire, and you keep the ability to scale up and down as required. With people who have been pre-vetted through technical tests, peer to peer interviews and HR interviews, you can access the best matching people to fit your requirements available on demand.
Skipp is exactly this kind of business; a global network of technical specialists. We come from technology companies, and experienced these hiring challenges, so we set out to solve the hiring problem. We have extensive networks across the world, understand how to sort for the different levels of talent and we know how to find the people to best fit your requirements.
After briefing one of our Talent Acquisition Specialists, they will provide you with a short list of great candidates for final interview so you can start working together within one week. In addition, we will assign a Customer Success Manager to meet you regularly, meet the developer weekly, and monitor their activity through our platform dashboard. We stay on top of everything from task progression in JIRA, to volume and quantity of code shipped, to your customer NPS score to ensure developer productivity. The CSM is your assistant manager to ensure all Skipp talents are always on track to help keep your project on time.
