Hiring Remote Developers: 10 Common Mistakes Businesses Make
Hiring remote developers comes with many benefits, such as access to a wider talent pool and cost-effective contracts. Nonetheless, a lot can go wrong if you get carried away and ignore the usual hiring practices.
We’ve put together a comprehensive list of the most common mistakes that enterprises make when hiring remote developers. Keeping them in mind can help you find the right talent as well as have a positive work relationship with them and a successful project outcome.
Top 10 Mistakes When Hiring Remote Developers
1. Believing that Hiring Remote Developers Is Easy
Finding remote developers may be easy per se. After all, the sheer amount of remote work marketplaces allows you to tap into a seemingly endless pool of talent. Hiring the right remote developers for your business and project, however, isn’t exactly a walk in the park.
You need to invest a great deal of time and resources into the hiring process. This involves crafting a good job proposal or ad, attracting, screening, vetting, and interviewing possible candidates to ensure that they have the skills, qualifications, and experience needed to lead your project to fruition.
You may also need to onboard your new hires to ensure that they understand what your company is about and what is essential for a successful outcome of your development project.
2. Not Searching Thoroughly for the Right Developers
Remote work significantly expands your talent pool. You are not confined to a single geographic location and can work with developers from a wide range of countries. While that increases your options and can help you find developers much faster, you still need to put time and effort into onboarding the right talent.
Even if the geographic borders no longer limit you and you get access to cost-effective options, hiring principles still apply. Hiring cheaper talent may seem compelling, but will they deliver the quality of work you expect, and will they be able to deliver a product that your clients or customers will be happy with?
Therefore, don’t let the number of options distract you. Get specific on what you are looking for and take the time necessary to find the right people.
3. Not Conducting Job Interviews
Hiring remote developers does not mean that you should be skipping the regular hiring steps. This means that if you would conduct a job interview with a local developer, you should do the same with a remote one.
Communication is essential for a development project to go smoothly, and interviews can help you detect red flags ahead of time.
A few things you should be looking for are:
- Language skills: If you are hiring remote developers from overseas, it’s crucial to ensure that you both understand each other and that their language skills would not cause communication problems. Language barriers can be stressful and can even derail your project.
- Interest in the position: Observe their disposition. Are they excited about the opportunity, or do they seem indifferent or just willing to get any job? Do they ask you any questions about the company and project? You may hire the best available talent, but if they are indifferent or dislike your company, this can absolutely affect the quality of their work and their willingness to go the extra mile when needed.
- Personality: Does it seem like they’ll fit with your company? Do they share your company’s values? And do they understand your ideal clients? You can eliminate many challenges by selecting people who can be a part of your team, even if they work remotely.
4. Hiring Individual Talent
The go-to strategy for many is hiring individual remote talent. Yet, this tends to come with various challenges. Brand new developer teams need onboarding and time to learn about your company and get used to working with others and the tool stack you require. Work procedures and practices may differ, and disagreements and power struggles can and do happen.
To prevent many of these problems from affecting your project, you can greatly benefit from hiring a team of remote developers. This can grant you access to talent that already has experience working with each other and has established team chemistry. So, they can fully focus on your project from day one.
5. Micromanaging Your Remote Developers
“Productivity paranoia” is a new phenomenon permeating the workplace, especially with the rise of remote and hybrid work. Since employees are either partially or fully remote, many employers are increasingly concerned about their productivity.
A whopping 85% of employers do not trust their remote employees at face value and believe that they aren’t as productive when working remotely. In fact, only 12% of CEOs think that their team is fully productive. This leads to excessive micromanaging and the use of monitoring tools.
Meanwhile, 87% of remote employees report that their productivity is optimal and even feel burned out.
Your takeaway from this should be that micromanaging is not necessary to get a development project successfully completed. While there absolutely are bad apples out there, assuming that each and every remote developer needs to be micromanaged can end up having the opposite effect.
Instead, focus on setting clear expectations and having regular communication and performance checks.
6. Not Taking Time Zone Differences into Consideration
When you hire remote developers, they don’t only work outside an office; they may work in a different time zone. This may mean that they will not be available during your working hours. So, it’s important not to assume that they will be working the same hours as you or will be available 24/7. You also should not assume that their working hours will be the same even if they reside in the same time zone.
If time zones and availability during your work hours are important to you, you need to consider those when you hire new talent and discuss their availability and working hours before you hire them.
7. Hiring Remote Developers that Are Culturally Incompatible
Team compatibility is something that tends to be often overlooked when hiring remote talent. However, it can affect the outcome of the project.
The developers that you hire may not get along with each other, demotivating them in the process. They may have different values that don’t align with those of your company. Or they may believe that something is beneficial for your project based on their cultural experience, leading to them developing a product that is not addressing the needs and expectations of your audience.
8. Not Using the Right Communication and Collaboration Tools
Communication and collaboration tools can help remote developers remain productive, track progress, address issues in a timely manner, and plan ahead. Therefore, it’s essential to determine whether you are looking for synchronous communication, one that occurs in real time, asynchronous, one that doesn’t need an immediate response, or a combination of both.
Determining this can help you pick proper communication and collaboration tools and know when and how often you’ll hear from your developers.
Hiring a team of remote developers can be especially beneficial for this purpose. That’s because teams often use cutting-edge technology and have established routines and work practices. For instance, our team is well-versed in using Jira and Slack for project management and communication, respectively. Dedicated development teams also tend to come with a project manager, a person whose responsibility is to ensure smooth communication and work processes.
9. Forgetting that Remote Developers Are People Just Like You
You have a life outside work, and so do your employees, remote or not. Thus, it’s essential not to forget that when hiring remote developers, especially if they are from different cultures and time zones.
So, be sure to know their working hours and not expect them to perform a task after dinner, in the middle of the night, or during cultural holidays. Avoid requests such as “I want that done by tomorrow.” This may not be possible for your remote developers.
Not respecting the fact that your remote developers are people with regular lives will sooner or later demotivate them, affecting work quality.
10. Not Setting Clear Expectations
Clear expectations are always important, especially when hiring remote developers. Since most of your communication will occur via online collaboration and communication tools, setting clear expectations will ensure that your project is on track.
Here are a few ideas to set expectations around:
- Quality expectations
- Features
- Project milestones
- Deadlines
- Budget constraints
- Working hours and availability
- Performance tracking
- Communication frequency
Get Your Project Completed with Datrick’s Remote Developers
Datrick’s team of remote developers has over seven years of experience with a wide range of development projects. We work with carefully vetted talent, and our developers know and have experience working with each other. So, by contracting with us, you can rest assured that our focus is on your project alone.
If you’d like to work with a team that’s passionate about their craft and respects your project deadlines and budget, schedule an intro call to get started.
