What is a Remote Development Team and How to Hire One?

In the ever-evolving software development industry, changes are considered, adopted, and chucked faster than ever. And while there have been several prominent changes in the industry, none was so jolting as the pandemic in 2020. The pandemic has forced people to work from home, and this trend has continued – albeit in a different way. Remote is the new preference. For employees and recruiters. For startups and enterprises. For FAANG organizations or run-of-the-mill firms. Surprisingly, it works so well that remote working has become a regular trend for companies like Google, Twitter, Upwork, & Shopify with enterprises and startups catching on to building remote teams for their own projects and products – not wanting to miss out on the lucrative advantages and benefits. Upwork predicts that 1 in 4 Americans over 26% of the US workforce will work remotely by 2021. It is also estimated that 22% of the workforce (36.2 million Americans) will work remotely by 2025. – Apollo Technical Over 80% of CEOs plan to allow remote working at least part of the time. In addition, 7% said they would allow full-time remote working, and 2% would offer flexible hours. – Gartner Startups, as well as large enterprises, understand the importance of doing business remotely and are adapting quickly. Therefore, with this particular article we will help you understand the aspects of a remote team as well as how to build a stronger, more diverse, robust, and effective remote team structure while helping you with the nuances of the remote part. So, without further ado…

What is a Remote Team?

The remote development team consists of qualified and experienced professionals who are committed to achieve performance purposes and reach certain milestones vis-a-vis the software project that they’re working on. They work as a singular unit or collude with internal staff on a feature, a project, or a software and share responsibilities. Their goal is to achieve defined software development goals and deliver the best.

Advantages of a Remote Development Team

Hiring a remote development team is a good option for companies that want a highly qualified tech professional to work temporarily for them. For example, Google has hired so many dedicated remote developers and teams in recent years that they now outnumber full-time employees. Below are the main advantages of hiring a remote software development team:

a. Expands your Hiring Sphere

Hiring a remote programmer doesn’t limit you to one field, location, or country when you’re looking for talent. You can select candidates from all over the world, in different tech stacks, and different levels of expertise. It enables you to augment your software teams, and also allows you to integrate developers with medium to lower hourly rates in your developer roster.

Budget + Experience + Skill flexibility.

b. Expands your Market Reach

Collaborating with web or mobile application developers from different parts of the world allows you to expand your market reach. Your remote team acts as an unpaid brand ambassador who can promote your products to potential consumers in their region.

c. Promote a Positive Work Culture

With remote teams contributing to your projects, your in-house teams will constantly look for new ways to benefit the company. Additionally, it fosters better discussion, brainstorming, ideas, and whiteboard visions, since you brought in experts to help and work with your team. More bright people, more productive ideas, better discussions, and better product iterations.

d. Outstanding Productivity

Often, teams are confined to the facility and monitor their productivity to meet business goals. In contrast, remote development teams are significantly more productive since they work on a goal-based engagement.

e. Reduce Operating Costs

Don’t want to pay rent, utility bills, office management technology, and benefits but still want an entire team? In that case, hiring remote developers couldn’t be more perfect for you. Talk about starting a business in a way that saves you a lot on investment; which otherwise, you would have spent on the office. Additionally, hiring remote teams or dedicated developers removes the attrition losses and offers a comprehensive check on any hiring requirements.

• Need a developer – Scale with the vendor
• Want to reduce team size – reduce requirements
• Hire on a project/feature basis
• Pay for milestone based development, or number of lines of code, or feature, or product rollout, or hours – much better than considering in-house hires

How to Hire Remote Developers in 2021?

Hiring an employee you’ve met in person is great, but bringing someone you’ve never met on the team can seem like a daunting task, right? If you are hiring a remote development team, you might want to consider some helpful information on the topic we’ve created and structured for you. The goal here is to simplify the process of recruiting, hiring, and integrating your new virtual team –

a. Creating Attractive Job Descriptions:

Identify the important key skills and experiences to the people working on your project. Write a detailed job offer outlining the responsibilities of the future worker and the must-have skills. And then, share it with vendors. Make sure you have researched those vendors as well!

b. Check the Resumes Thoroughly:

Check every candidates’ resume thoroughly so that you don’t miss any best-fit talent. Vett the talent profiles that you receive. Cross-check with references and reviews. Go through the references completely and pose a few inquiries about the initiative, or their work experience. Remember that you need a driven team to work on your project that does not require a supervisor investigating over their shoulder.

c. Test the Candidate’s Skills:

You can do this in the form of a meeting, an interview or an ability evaluation, depending on your requirements and the employee’s specific role. For example, if you need a PHP dev, give the candidate a problem set to solve. Pay attention to a candidate’s autonomy and independence – which you can experience in a trial run.

d. Take Time to Understand:

Spend some time on the introductory phase, where you and your future virtual team can understand the dynamics of remote collaboration. The most important thing at this point is communication. To manage a team remotely, you need to know how your new hire utilizes their time, focusing on their weaknesses and strengths. A good option is to develop a small initial project that helps employees demonstrate their skills, initiative, and ability to work independently. Try to spend a lot of time on video calls and texting to interact with the team. Make sure your new partners get the support they need to be productive.

e. Hire the Right Talent:

If you can’t trust the person you’re hiring at the interview scene, it’s best not to hire them. You will save a lot of time and effort. By choosing to outsource, you have access to a vast pool of talent around the world. It is the best option you can imagine to build a crew that you feel entirely comfortable with. There are several options available for remote team building. You just have to search the best CVs, talent profiles and select candidates. This process is quite complicated and time-consuming. More importantly, if you need a large team to develop software or build websites, the alternative is to look for companies that provide IT services on an outsourcing basis.

Netsmartz – Perfect Choice for Hiring a Remote Team

Working with a remote team is most certainly the ideal alternative for a new project or a team extension plan. You can’t use classic methods like networking, posting job boards, or overpaying local recruiters to find your best-fit development team. Also, this is a tedious and expensive process. Additionally, Traditional recruitment methods are no longer effective and are pretty outdated. They take time and need resources you don’t want to waste. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to leave the recruitment process to specialized outsourcing companies – experts in delivering effective remote services meeting your needs? Netsmartz, with its 20+ years of experience can assist you with developing a team fairly quickly. Our experienced managers choose the top remote software developers based on your project needs and business goals, introduce pre-vetted talent profiles, and have you up and running in days, not months. Start building your project with Netsmartz’s remote teams.