How to Hire a Programmer In 2023 - Complete Guide.pdf

How to Hire a Programmer In 2023:
A Step-By-Step Guide
Quick Summary: In the rapidly evolving digital landscape of 2023, hiring a programmer
has become a critical task for businesses. This comprehensive guide to hire a
programmer explores the key steps, considerations, and strategies to successfully
recruit and onboard top programming talent in today’s competitive market.
In the new normal, we saw a paradigm shift in the modus operandi of businesses.
Today offices are no longer seen as a place but have become digital spaces. Business
operations are becoming more diverse, evolved, flexible, and hybrid as employees are
no longer restricted by physical boundaries.
Many major players have completely gone remote. And by doing so, they can now hire
a programmer globally to augment their development team easily.

And if you are one of the businesses that want to avail the benefits of hiring a remote
programmer for your IT development but don’t know where to start? This
comprehensive guide will help you find the right programmers to eliminate the
tech-talent shortage you are facing in your local geography.
Before we begin, let’s evaluate why businesses today opt for remote developers over
in-house ones.
Key Takeaways
● In 2023, the programming landscape is continuously evolving, with new
technologies and programming languages emerging. Stay updated on the latest
trends and skill requirements to make informed hiring decisions.
● While technical expertise is crucial, don’t overlook the importance of soft skills
such as communication, problem-solving, and teamwork. Look for
programmers who can effectively collaborate and adapt in dynamic
environments.
● Explore various sourcing channels like online job platforms, professional
networks, offshore development companies, and developer communities.
Diversify your recruitment strategy to reach a wider pool of qualified
candidates.
Why are Businesses Choosing to Hire a Remote Programmer?
Today western nations are facing a significant resource shortage in the IT sector.
A survey by Manpower Group reported that 46% of US companies are facing a
challenge in finding tech talent.
● The hiring cycle in IT has increased to 66 days from 55 days.
● Cyber Security, Big Data, Software Engineers, Artificial Intelligence, Machine
Learning, Cloud, Robotics, IoT, or Blockchain are most in-demand.
Factors such as the slow and limited supply of talent in the local market, aging
workforce, and the growing demand for skilled workers have forced companies to
consider hiring remote teams for their IT needs.
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Besides, when compared, the benefits of outsourcing a team of remote programmers
outweigh in-house sourcing in many aspects. So, what started as a survival technique
has today become the most practical and profitable opportunity for businesses.
Hiring a programmer for your IT development project is a convenient and practical
option in 2023. But before you do so, it is important to create a business plan to ensure
smooth and hassle-free hiring.
Recommended Read: In-House vs Outsourcing: Pros, Cons and Use Cases
Factors to Consider While Hiring a Programmer
While you may decide to hire a programmer for your project, you must consider the
following factors:
1. Evaluate your Need to Hire a Programmer
To build a successful plan to hire a programmer, you must define the need for the
same. You can achieve this by answering the following questions.
Why do you Need a Programmer?
This is the most critical question you must ask yourself before hiring a programmer.
Identify the true purpose of hiring a programmer.
● Whether you need the programmer to build a new product or upgrade the
existing one?
● What coding language and technology stack should they know?
● Is the programmer to work on a particular aspect, or is it required to develop
multiple elements?; thus requiring him to wear multiple hats and have a
working knowledge of different operations.
Answering these questions will make your hiring more precise and empower you to
find programmers that are the best match for your project.
2. What will be the Priority of Hiring a Programmer?
When developing a software project, you need multiple IT resources that are required
to work at different stages of the project. For example, you may need a development
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architect and coder at the beginning of the project, while the DevOps and QA functions
may come later.
It is important to understand the sequence in which the resources are to be deployed
on a project to establish the priority of hiring programmers. This will help your HR
team focus on priority hiring and fast-track the process.
3. What Experience Does a Programmer Need to be Hired?
When hiring a programmer, it is essential to establish what their experience should be
in terms of
● Number of years in the profession
● Number of successful projects delivered in these years?
● Industries that they have worked with in the past?
● Complexity of the projects that they have delivered
Defining these attributes will save you time, effort, and resources in finding and
shortlisting candidates.
4. What Skills do you Seek in a Programmer?
Developer skills can be categorized in two ways- technical skills and soft skills. Before
you start shortlisting candidates, you must clarify what technical skills the
programmer must possess. The technologies they should know, the coding languages
they must know, and the development methodology they follow.
One must also evaluate soft skills such as communication, team player, time
management, accountability, etc.
You must define skills under:
● Must have- skills without which the candidate should not be hired.
● Desirable- additional skills you want candidates to possess but are not
dealbreakers in hiring.
By doing so, you create a clear outline for the HR department and expedite the hiring
process.
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5. Create Quantifiable Goals
You must define the objectives and milestones that programmers are to deliver.
Whether it is building software solutions or enabling cloud migration, the
programmers must know what they have to deliver. Creating quantifiable objectives
against delivery timelines will streamline your project development.
Following the completion of your business plan for hiring, let’s take a look at the steps
you need to take to hire a programmer.
Step-By-Step Process to Hire a Programmer
The following steps will help you hire the best programmer for your project.
Step 1: Select a location
Location plays a critical role when you have to hire a programmer for your project, as it
is a major factor that determines the cost of hiring, resource availability, flexibility of
operation, etc.
When deciding on the location, you have three options to choose from:
1. Onshore: Hiring a programmer from your own country
2. Nearshore: Hiring resources from a country with the same or similar work time
zone as you.
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3. Offshore: Hiring from a country that operates offshore in a different work time
zone.
When you hire programmers from an onshore or nearshore, you may face the same or
similar challenges as hiring in-house resources. The resource crunch we discussed
earlier is not limited to just the USA. Most Western countries are facing similar
challenges.
So if you are a USA-based company planning to hire from Canada or a UK-based
organization wanting to hire from Germany, you will most likely experience higher
hiring cycles, expensive resources, and low retention rates.
Hiring programmers from offshore locations with a large IT talent pool, such as India,
can help mitigate these challenges. Besides the usual benefits of cost-effective
development and unlimited choices, hiring programmers from India gets you
around-the-clock development. With your remote programmers working in different
time zones, your project is continuously worked on and reviewed, expediting the
overall process.
Must Read: Why are Indian Programmers Good to Hire for Programming?
Step 2: Choose the Source
Once you have narrowed it down to a location, the next step is to choose the source for
hiring programmers. But, Where to Look When You Want to Hire a Programmer Online?
You can opt for the following sources while hiring remote programmers.
● Professional Network- LinkedIn is a great source for finding talented
programmers. At one glance, you get information on educational background,
work experience, and projects the candidate has worked on. LinkedIn jobs
provide you access to skilled professionals readily available to work.
● Career Portals- Career portals are a great way to find professionals with varied
experience across technologies to choose from for your development project.
● Freelancer Platform- If you are looking to hire a programmer, freelancer listing
platforms are a good option to explore talent globally.
● Offshore Development Company- If you are hiring remote programmers, an
offshore development company is one of the most reliable sources. As it has a
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better understanding of the market, it helps you navigate the nuances of hiring
remote programmers. Besides, you get access to a large talent pool that has
been pre-vetted and assessed on their technical and soft skills. Saving you time
and effort in finding candidates.
Step 3: Creating a Job Description
A well-written job description can help you attract good candidates, but the right job
description will help you find and hire a programmer that best fits your project.
A job description is the first impression that a candidate will have of your organization.
Hiring a programmer that best fits your company would require a well-written job
description. A clear, concise, and engaging summary of the job opening is a must.
A Well-written Job Description Includes:
● Candidate’s Educational Qualification
● Expected experience in the field and work portfolio.
● Responsibilities of the job
● Location of the job
● Title of the role
● Your company’s work, mission, vision
● Nature of the project
● Must have skill sets
● Additional nice to have skills
You must include why the candidate should choose your organization. What kind of
experience will they get from the project, and what is it like to be part of your
company? Describing these aspects will encourage suitable candidates to apply to
your posting actively.
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Here is a sample of how you can write a job subscription.
Source: LinkedIn
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Once you have created a job description, share it on sources from where you wish to
hire a programmer for your project.
Step 4: Shortlist Candidates
Once you have posted the job description, you will likely get a huge response from
different sources. Since the openings are limited, creating a multi-layer assessment is
essential to shortlist the right candidates’ CVs.
Candidate shortlisting can be divided into three steps:
● CV Mining: CV mining is the step where candidates are shortlisted based on the
CV they have shared. You often receive CVs of candidates that are outright unfit
for the job in terms of their qualifications, experience, skill sets, geography, etc.
These CVs should be eliminated in the first round itself.
● Candidate verification: Once you have identified the candidates that match
your requirement in the CV mining round, the next step is to assess if these
candidates can be shortlisted further. To verify candidates, you must email
programmers who cleared the CV mining round, requesting them to share their
work portfolio and experience certificate. This will help filter out those
candidates that are not the right fit for the job.
● Assessment Task: Once you have shortlisted the candidates further, send them
assessment tasks to gauge their working knowledge and skills. This would be
the last round for shortlisting final candidates for the interview round.
Though these tasks may sound easy, evaluating hundreds and thousands of CVs can
become time-consuming, error-prone, and tedious, delaying hiring a programmer.
Robotic Process Automation is a great way to fast-forward the candidate shortlisting
process. You can automate tasks like CV mining, candidate verification, sending
assessment tasks, evaluating results, and aligning interviews by deploying a software
robot. Processes that would have taken your team weeks or even months can be done
in hours by RPA bots.
Step 5: Selecting the Final List
Once you have the list of final shortlisted candidates who cleared all three layers of
assessment, the next step is conducting interviews to hire a programmer. Interviews
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are one of the most critical processes of candidate selection and should be conducted
by the right people to ensure the right hiring of programmers.
Before you start interviewing candidates to hire a programmer, you must have the
answer to the following questions.
What is the right number of interviews? Or how many interviews should be conducted
for the job opening?
The number of interviews for a job opening depends on what level/role the
programmer is hired. For an entry-level job, two to three rounds of interviews suffice.
But when you are hiring a programmer for a managerial position, you need multiple
rounds of interviews with technical screening.
Who should conduct these interviews?
Again, this depends on the role you are hiring the programmer for. For entry-level, it is
the team leader and project manager who interview the candidate., Still, for senior
resources, the interviews are conducted by the head of the department, CTO, and CEO.
How to Interview Programmers for Hire?
When interviewing a programmer, one must evaluate their knowledge, technical skills,
learning curve, and attitude toward their work.
To do so, you must create an extensive interview questionnaire and an answer sheet to
help the interviewer navigate the interaction in the right direction.
Samples Questions To Evaluate Technical Skills
● How do you find duplicate characters in a string?
● What programming languages do you know? How were your experiences using
these languages—which one do you prefer?
● What to you is an unforgivable programming mistake?
● Describe the structure of your last project.
Sample Questions To Evaluate the Attitude
● What inspired you to pursue programming professionally?
● What are your career goals?
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Asking these questions will give you a fair assessment of the knowledge and skills that
the candidate possesses. But these are not the only aspects to be considered when
finding the right programmer for your project.
Step 6: Finding The Right Fit
To hire a programmer who is the best fit for your project, you must consider the soft
skills they possess. Are they able to communicate their ideas well? Can they work with
teams? Do they have a collaborative approach toward work? All these aspects must be
evaluated before finalizing the programmer.
● How to Check the Soft Skills of Programmers?
● You should include the following questions in your interview to evaluate soft
skills.
● Tell us about a time when you lead a project. What was your plan of action?
What were your learnings?
● Give an example of a high-pressure situation you faced at work. How did you
approach it?
● When was the last time you worked as part of a team? What was your role? How
was the team collaboration? What would you change about this experience, and
why?
● What’s your ideal work environment?
● Can you easily explain your work’s technical elements to non-technical
employees? Give us an example.
Once you have selected the final candidates you wish to hire as a programmer for your
project, it is time to extend the offer.
Step 7: Make an Offer
Financial offer is one of the most critical aspects of hiring a programmer. A good offer
can make the deal, and a bad one can break it. So, when you extend it to your selected
candidates, you must keep these things in mind:
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Does it Match Market Standards?
You should know what the market pricing for hiring a programmer of the caliber that
you are looking for to match it is. A lack of research can backfire as you may end up
extending a lower package, which would chase away the candidates, or a higher
package that may increase your development cost.
Does it Match your Candidate’s Expectations?
You must have a clear idea on what are the expectations of your candidate before you
even start interviewing them. This can be confirmed at the verification stage, where
the HR team can confirm this with candidates. If the expectation is higher than the
offer, it is better to drop the application.
Consider your ROI
Hiring a resource is a cost you your organization. It is the investment that you make
towards the project development. So, calculating the output of the resource against
the cost of hiring is important. If the investment is higher than the return, it is better to
drop the applicant.
Calculating these three factors will help you make the right offer to your candidates.
Step 8: Hire & Train
Once the selected candidates have accepted your offer, it’s time for their induction into
the project. Before you deploy the hired programmers on your project, you must give
them a complete download of what the project is. In this phase, it is currently, what are
their deliverables and timelines, and the working methodology being followed.
A well-planned induction program that includes an introduction to the in-house
stakeholders, training on the ongoing project, and complete project download will
ensure smooth functioning and hassle-free communication in the future.
So by following these steps, you can hire programmers quickly and easily. But the task
doesn’t end here. When you hire remote programmers, you should also understand
the nitty-gritty of managing remote teams.
So here are some tips that can help you manage your remote programmers.
Post-Hiring Tips for Hiring Programmers
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Here are some small tips for managing your team of programmers to ensure the
success of your collaboration
Tip 1: Take Regular Feedback
Feedback from your team is essential to stay on top of the ongoing work. By doing so,
you can ensure that the work is being delivered on time and it also helps boost the
morale of the remote team as they feel their project inputs are valued.
Tip 2: Mentoring
When a resource decides to connect with your company, they seek opportunities to
improve their skills to grow in their career. Hence mentoring resources are critical if
you want to ensure they stay with your brand. Besides, through mentoring, you can
train the programmers per your project requirement, enabling them to perform better,
faster, and more accurately.
8 Mistakes to Avoid while Hiring Programmers
1. Lack of awareness of project requirements
Lack of clarity on requirements and what kind of resources your project needs can
create confusion, hiring errors, and unnecessary delays.
2. Considering only rates of programmers
This is one of the fatal mistakes and should be avoided at all costs. By relying only on
cost comparison and not evaluating factors like experience, knowledge, and learning
curve, you will end up with an incompetent programmer, which can affect your output
quality and turnaround time.
3. Not Evaluating Work Portfolio–
A work portfolio is a guide to assessing the knowledge and skill of a programmer. It
reflects the industries they have worked with, the complexity of the projects that they
have delivered, and their experience in the industry. So, to ensure that you hire
programmers that are the best fit for your project, evaluating the past experience of
the programmer is a must.
4. Ignoring Soft Skills
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When working with a remote team, soft skills become as important as technical skills
as the majority of the interaction with the team is through VC and Chats. And
programmer’s inability to communicate the ongoing work, plan of action, and
bottlenecks can lead to underperformance.
5. Failing to provide project downloads
You have hired programmers to help you achieve your objectives. If you don’t
communicate these to the programmers, they cannot perform to their full potential.
Having clarity on what the project is, why it’s being built, and what is expected of
programmers keeps them motivated to perform well. Besides, programmers can give
more relevant suggestions on the project once they understand the purpose of the
same.
6. Not asking for feedback and inputs
A team actively working on the project is in a much better position to make valid and
valuable suggestions as they understand the nitty-gritty of the work. If you ignore the
inputs shared by hired programmers, you may miss out on some great upgrades on
your project.
7. Lack of appreciation
Every individual likes to hear appreciation for their performance; your remote team is
the same. Not appreciating their efforts can demotivate the team and may result in
them leaving the team.
8. Only relying on local talent
When hiring a programmer, if you only consider local talent, you will be stuck with
similar challenges as faced while hiring in-house resources. So, if faced with problems
like a shortage of resources, long hiring cycles, and higher per-hour costs, hiring
programmers from local geography will have similar problems.
YTII – Your Reliable Offshore Partner for Hiring Programmers in 2023
A pioneer of offshore development services, Your Team in India is a reputed brand that
has delivered over 1000+ projects and catered to over 150 companies across the USA,
Canada, the UK, Germany, Australia, Japan, and many other nations.
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With a bank of 200+programmers and developers across different technologies, YTII
offers
● Dedicated resources for your project
● Quick scaling of the team
● Tech-lead and Project manager on every project
● Extensive NDAs for complete IP and Data protection
● Well-defined frameworks and processes
● Resource backup and quick resource replacement.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
How much does it cost to hire programmers?
The cost of hiring programmers can vary significantly depending on factors such as
location, experience level, and specific skill sets required. On average, it can range
from $20 to $75 or more per hour.
Where can I find programmers to hire?
Programmers can be found through various channels, including online job platforms
like LinkedIn and Indeed, professional networking sites, tech conferences, developer
communities, and outsourcing agencies specializing in software development.
Should I consider remote programmers for my team?
Remote programmers can offer various benefits like a wider talent pool,
cost-effectiveness, and flexibility. However, ensure effective communication and
collaboration tools are in place to support remote teamwork.
How can I retain talented programmers in a competitive market?
Foster a positive work culture, provide opportunities for growth and learning, offer
competitive compensation and benefits, recognize and reward achievements, and
maintain open lines of communication with your programmers.
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