How to Lose Thousands of Dollars on Remote Developer Recruitment Process

You’re a startup or scaleup entrepreneur. Your company’s product development is excellent, and you’re gaining new customers. You’re making a good profit, but you are facing that very common yet critical problem, you’re understaffed. You decide it’s high time to hire a remote software developer, what could go wrong? Actually, quite a lot, including your remote developer recruitment process!

As outlined below, there are many critical issues that employers, who are looking to hire telecommuting developers, must consider to avoid serious headaches.

Wait for remote developer candidates to apply to you

When recruiting remote developers, you can opt between doing this in-house or using the services of a recruitment agency. We’ve done some cost breakdowns in a previous article using an example of hiring an on-site software developer in New York City:

As you can see; in-house recruitment is not the cheapest option available since you have to take into consideration the productivity loss of your whole team. The in-house developer recruitment process will require the allocation of resources to writing up the job spec, presumably by one of your marketers.

You will also need an HR professional to screen the resumes and reach out to passive candidates. A developer will be required as a technical recruiter whose role would be to prepare a technical test and check the results afterward. Necessitating the involvement of you and other employees takes valuable resources away from daily tasks. Can small companies afford to do this? No.

Alternatively, utilizing an IT recruitment agency can lead to fees costing 15% to 30%. Is this worth it?

Taking into consideration how much money you will spend on in-house remote developer recruitment + the productivity loss costs, we recommend that you do a cost breakdown of your needs and compare the two methods. If you decide to conduct remote developer recruitment on your own, then the first thing is creating a job ad, posting it on social media and any relevant job boards.

This will undoubtedly increase the number of visits to your website and build your employer’s visibility and branding. But paying only for posting job ads and not doing any other sourcing is an easy way to waste funds and time. Let’s say you’re looking for a Senior Front End Developer with over 7 years of experience. Do you think such professionals check job boards? The reality is they don’t because they don’t have to.

Recruiters contact them daily, via email, LinkedIn, referrals, and any other possible ways. Relying purely on job boards as your only sourcing strategy is setting yourself up for failure. It’s different for junior developers as they’re actively searching telecommuting opportunities by seeking remote job boards to gain remote work experience.

If you’re not experienced with outsourcing – we do not recommend hiring a telecommuting junior developer. It’s normal that you won’t have time to train up a junior developer on remote team best practices. Plus, communication between you and them could prove to be an obstacle in fulfilling product development tasks.

Do not respond promptly to candidates

If you manage to get applications from candidates actively looking for a remote job, this is excellent! The worst thing that can happen now is to lose them through inactivity.

Imagine: you’re busy with all your daily tasks, and a candidate had applied on Sunday. You finally get some time to check the application, read the resume, and you think, “What a great candidate!” You contact the applicant, and they respond, “Sorry, I’ve already had a few recruitment processes, and I’ve accepted another offer.”; this is a very typical outcome.

As previously outlined – high quality, experienced developers are contacted by recruiters daily. Generally, if they’re looking for a new job, it usually doesn’t take long until they find one. If you don’t want to waste your time, money and startup resources, you have to respond immediately to push the candidates through your recruitment pipeline.

For more information on how to manage the timeline of your developer recruitment better – check out our other article – How to Design a Recruitment Process That Saves Weeks on Hiring Remote Developers

Lose track of your candidates

You may find yourself in a situation where you have received more than 30 remote software developers applying for a position at your company.

You’ll have screened their resumes; each with different experience levels, expectations and individual concerns. You’ve exchanged a few emails with some of them, but you don’t have an Applicant Tracking System. Instead, you try to store the conversations with the remote developers in your email account or a job board inbox.

Recruiting tools like Workable or Lever are pretty pricey for startup and scaleup resources, and without these tools, the majority of the companies struggle with keeping track of great remote software developers.

What can you do to prevent the loss of any more money? The most straightforward solution is to utilize a spreadsheet to enter the candidates’ data and planned tasks like contacting the remote developer, checking their test results and scheduling an interview. It may be much more time-consuming than recruiting software but if you need to make some budget cuts – we suggest the old-fashioned way of keeping data in spreadsheets.

Fail to screen the remote software developer’s technical skills properly

Without the correct screening and examination of your remote development applicants, you risk wasting valuable time and resources. Tech interviews require a specialized test. Ask any technical recruiter – giving a coding challenge is a must.

Not correctly checking and testing the candidate’s technical skills will undoubtedly cost you more money in the long term. Hiring a developer based only on their resume and one tech interview can lead to disastrous effects on your product development. In the best-case scenario, you are in the same place as when you started, in the worst case – you have new bugs and problems.

If you’ve hired a below-par developer, you’ll need to seek a new hire. However, this will add to already existing costs that you’ve incurred from the recruitment such as onboarding, the remote developer’s monthly salary.

Providing no feedback

Not providing feedback may seem like a minor problem, but not providing any feedback to your candidates will backfire. It destroys your employer’s branding and establishes a negative reputation of your company when it comes to recruiting.

When a developer goes through your recruitment process, they devote time to complete your coding challenges and attending interviews with you or your technical recruiter. If you choose not to hire your candidate because of a flaw or insufficient tech skills, giving them detailed feedback is a must. When remote software developers gain more experience and improve their technical skills, they may, in the future, come back to you.

Being the company that offered detailed feedback that helped guide a developer’s career is always a good position to be in. It’s also a great way to increase your employer visibility since remote software developers are often part of communities and share experiences concerning employers and the companies they were recruiting to.

Conclusion

Startups and scaleups that don’t implement a definitive recruitment strategy struggle with their recruitment processes. Employing a remote software developer doesn’t have to be a waste of time, money, or startup resources – you have to be mindful and rigorous.

If you want to learn more about remote developer recruitment, check out these 5 must-know facts when hiring a remote developer while scaling up your company. You can also read how we helped Northern.tech find an amazing Senior Back End Developer. Follow ITCraftship’s blog to get more actionable advice concerning managing remote teams.