How to Hire Developers for a Startup: Hiring Models, Required Talents, Hiring Process, and Costs

How to Hire a Developer for a Startup: A Summary

ScienceSoft is ready to provide all the necessary talents for hire under both team augmentation and dedicated team outsourcing cooperation agreements. We assist with onboarding and team building of our experts as well as help startups optimize the costs.

Hiring Models

One of the key steps in hiring software developers is choosing the right model. The models differ in costs as well as in the way employment and management responsibilities are distributed.

In-house employment

You provide long-term employment to a team of developers, fully take care of their onboarding and training, and make sure that each of them has necessary hardware and software to perform their job (either in your office or remotely).

• Employment and related legal paperwork responsibility – your company.
• Management – your PM or a team lead.
• Payment – developers’ salaries, which include payroll taxes and sick leave payments.

Outsourcing

You partner up with either freelancing programmers or an IT company that lends you its resources under a team augmentation or a dedicated team arrangement.

Among startup-friendly outsourcing options, you can choose between team augmentation and a dedicated team.

If you still don’t know which model to choose, feel free to consult ScienceSoft's article on in-house and outsourcing pros and cons.

Talents ScienceSoft Usually Employs in Software Development

Your team’s composition is usually defined by the scale and type of software your startup creates – a web app, a mobile app, SaaS/XaaS, etc. Below, ScienceSoft gives a list of common developer roles for a startup with a mid-scale software project of any type.

Consider ScienceSoft as Your Outsourcing Partner

With over 34 years in outsourced software development and cooperation with startups, ScienceSoft offers reliable team augmentation and dedicated team services.

Why Partner Up with ScienceSoft

• Full-service software development company since 1989.

• 750+ IT experts on board.
• Over 3,600 success stories (including projects for Viber, eBay, MTV).
• For the second straight year, ScienceSoft USA Corporation is listed among The Americas’ Fastest-Growing Companies by the Financial Times.
• 4.8 rating on Clutch.com.
• HIPAA, FDA, PCI DSS compliance.

ScienceSoft's experience in agile development ensured smooth project implementation and iterative development of Enonic XP. This enabled us to adjust to the changing market requirements and incorporate features that made us stand out from competition. ScienceSoft's team has become an integrated part of Enonic, and we appreciate their efforts and passion for the product.

Morten Øien Eriksen, CEO at Enonic, a provider of an innovative CMS platform

How to Hire Developers for a Startup in 6 Steps

Step 1. Define requirements for candidates

ScienceSoft’s first tip on how to find developers for a startup is to make sure you understand who you are looking for. Your requirements to future candidates should describe both the work approach you expect (proactivity, leadership, time-management, etc.) and technical competencies based on your software’s technical stack from a software requirements specification (SRS).

Step 2. Conduct screening and interviewing

The table below shows the scope of your screening and interviewing responsibilities for both in-house and outsourcing hiring models.

Step 3. Formalize the employment

In case of in-house hiring, you’ll need to allocate a significant amount of HR and legal efforts to enroll each developer you decide to take on board.

Vendor cooperation is based on a Service Level Agreement, which stipulates that the vendor remains the legal employer of all developers while you leverage their skills in your project. In other words, SLA is the only major paper you need to take care of regardless of how many talents you will need to join your team in the long run.

Step 4. Carry out onboarding and training

For startups, in-house onboarding includes instilling company values and sharing motivations behind the software idea in new hires. It implies significant newcomer training efforts that can come at a high cost for the productivity of your in-house resources.

Cooperation with a vendor - even with an offshore one - is a sure way to speed up onboarding as a vendor’s developer pool consists of experts for whom quick adjustment to new requirements and onboarding in 1-2 weeks are parts of the job description. Regular communication between your startup and a vendor’s developers will streamline your collaboration from the get-go and accelerate the ramp-up even further.

Step 5. Build a team

To build a real team, you need to teach developers to feel and show respect for each other’s skills and duties, communicate in a friendly manner in any situation, and be always ready to request and provide help. In in-house employment, ScienceSoft usually achieves with the help of long-term HR training or during a small, carefully managed test project.

However, spending so much time and effort on training can be considered a luxury for most startups. A dedicated team cooperation model may be a good alternative since it allows you to enjoy the results of cohesive teamwork without investing in team-building and fully entrusting it to a vendor instead.

Step 6. Scale a team for software evolution

After an MVP release to the market, you can face new challenging needs during software evolution: implementation of advanced features (e.g., AI, blockchain, AR), CI/CD setup, continuous software maintenance and support, etc. For an in-house team, this implies a number of new roles and a months-long wait for the recruiters to fill the openings with the fitting candidates, which can hold back your software growth.

With outsourced cooperation, your needs can be addressed within a few days after signing a ‘team scale up’ addendum to the SLA. When cooperating with ScienceSoft, you get access to the vendor’s pool of experts in cutting-edge tech, DevOps, L1-L3 support, or other fields and can welcome new necessary talents in your augmented or dedicated team in 1-2 days.

Benefits of Cooperation with ScienceSoft

Costs of Hiring Software Developers for a Startup

Hiring costs depend on multiple factors:

Assemble Your Team for an Accurate Project Cost Estimation

If you already know exactly who you need, just select the required talents below, and we’ll be quick to provide their rates. If not, please briefly describe your challenge, and we’ll get back to you with the right experts and their rates.