How to Find and Hire the Best App Developers
These days there is a new catchphrase raging among the business circles. “Every company is a technology company; some just don’t know it yet”. And if you think closely, that’s a profound and to a large extent, absolutely true statement. It doesn’t matter if you manufacture flavored soda, manage events, or run schools, technology may already have disrupted your industry. Yes, not all businesses have software developers on their payroll but they need their services at some point. But the problem is, with millions of app developers globally, finding the right talent in itself remains a major challenge.
If you are one such business looking to hire developers, here is your detailed roadmap to finding the best of them:
Zero-in on a destination
The first thing you need to decide when hiring app developers is where you are going to source them from. The problem is, like oil, app developers aren’t spread evenly across the world and are generally found in clusters. The largest of such clusters exist in the USA and India followed by smaller players like in Ukraine and other European markets.
Now depending on your location and budget, you can choose to hire developers from any of these locations. For instance, the hourly rates in the US are almost twice as much as Indian developers. Similarly, Ukrainian developers charge less than European developers. And if you compare Indian developers with Ukrainian developers, they charge almost the same but Indian development firms are known to have larger resource pools and expertise to handle large projects.
Shortlist prospective developers
Even after you select a destination, there would be possibly hundreds of app development firms to sort from. And though there are multiple factors that can help in this regard, there two key benchmarks:
Experience and expertise
Experience is definitely one of the key factors that reflect the potential competence of any developer. And by experience, we don’t necessarily mean their total industry experience but rather with any particular set of technology. After all, any five-year-old mobile app development would definitely be more competent than a ten-year-old web development firm that has just started building mobile apps.
Now the best way to gauge their expertise is to simply look at their portfolio. The more diverse projects they have been involved in, the more expertise they can be expected to have. But you shouldn’t always take their word for it and that takes us to our next point.
Reputation
Never take developers at their word but look for their action. If they claim high client satisfaction rate, cross-check with their previous clients. If they claim to be among industry leaders, check out their reviews on ratings on such portals. The point is, there are numerous research agencies that aggregate ratings and reviews of IT companies that you must also consult before shortlisting.
Get in touch
Once you have shortlisted the developers, it’s time to actually test the waters. The ideal way is to send them a proposal for your project and ask for a quotation and consultation. In this consultation, you can ask all the relevant questions like how they would manage the project. How would deliveries work? How they would communicate? And so forth.
Take your pick
Once you have aggregated quotations and responses from all, simply hire the best mobile app developers who you believe are best suited for your project as well as workflow. For instance, many businesses in the west prefer to hire Indian app developers because of their large gap in time zone.