How to Hire the Best Dedicated Development Team: Complete Guide

If you are going to build a software project but do not have enough in-house resources, it’s not a reason to give up your plans. It is just a reason to factor in alternatives in the decision-making flow. Hiring a dedicated software development team in 2023 is one of the most efficient options. This model of outsourcing will allow you to retain full control over your project and to avoid a wide range of administrative issues that are related to the hiring process.

 What’s more, working with dedicated programmers in 2023, you have an awesome chance to reduce your development costs by up to 50%.  Sounds great! Don’t you think so?

At Geomotiv, we have strong expertise in building our cooperation with customers according to the dedicated hiring model. Now we are ready to share our insights that will help you find the best remote developers to work with. Just keep reading and you will learn all the secrets.

Is Dedicated Hiring the Best Option for You?

Before we dive deeper into the peculiarities of this cooperation model, let’s answer the question: when should you hire a dedicated development team? Actually, it’s crucial to understand that there are no solutions that fit everyone. The same thing is with cooperation models.

First of all, you should decide on whether you are ready to work with external specialists. Despite all the difficulties that a company can face while hiring its own programmers, some businesses still prefer to do it. However, given all the benefits that outsourcing and the dedicated team model offer, there is no surprise that the number of companies that prefer this option is growing. 

Secondly, even if you already know for sure that your choice is outsourcing, you still have some variants to choose from. They are:

• Dedicated team model
• Time and resources
• Fixed price.

Let’s have a look at them closely.

Hiring a Dedicated Team of Developers

This model presupposes that you together with an outsourcing company will determine the composition of the team in accordance with the specificity and the complexity of your project. Together you will define how many specialists you need to have and what skills are required. You will have the possibility to manage and control the development process and to offer the necessary changes. In general, the model ensures enough freedom for scaling and changing your team. 

Your outsourcing partner will be responsible for finding and hiring a team of developers based on the stated requirements.

Advantages of this model:

• Hiring a software development team is more feasible than hiring remote specialists independently and assembling a team on your own. The dedicated hiring approach helps you not only to save money but to save your time and efforts as well.
• The newly created team you will hire will be fully focused on your project, ensuring outstanding results.
• The model provides flexibility to reconfigure your team if needed.
• You communicate with your team directly and can manage the entire working process.
• Your remote team will be engaged in the idea of your project from the very beginning.

Disadvantages of this model:

• It is unsuitable for short-term projects. Therefore, it makes sense to apply this model only for long-term ones.
• It can take rather long to create a team that fully corresponds to the project’s goals. Moreover, you, as a client, have to be involved in the selection process.

Time and Materials

That’s another extremely popular model of cooperation with remote developers. In this case, you pay for the actual work performed. It can become a good solution for projects that may have changing requirements.

Benefits of this approach:

• It ensures a very high level of flexibility and scalability. Moreover, working following this approach, you have the possibility to adapt your project to the constantly changing market needs and conditions.
• You can manage the costs.
• You can get involved in the development process and execute the necessary control.
• You can fix the schedule in order to reach better results.

Minuses of the time and materials models:

• It is practically impossible to precisely estimate the number of your investments in the project. It can become a real problem for some businesses, especially for small companies and startups.
• As deadlines and time frames are not set beforehand due to uncertain requirements, it is difficult to control the time needed for the project realization.

Fixed Price Model

As it is clear from its name, this model includes setting all the prices before the work on the project begins. Though this principle may sound rather attractive for customers, the approach itself is associated with numerous risks for developers.

This cooperation model suits only small and medium-sized projects that have a limited scope and clear requirements. Quite often it is applied for developing a minimum viable product (MVP).

Strong sides of the model:

• The prices are set before you sign a contract with a software development company.
• The terms and requirements are clearly stated in the contract and approved by two sides.
• The project is likely to be delivered on time.
• The process of development is coordinated by an outsourcing company, which means that the participation of a client is not required. But while for some clients it is a benefit of this model, some others wish to stay involved.

Pitfalls:

• You may suffer from a lack of communication with your development team.
• There is a lack of flexibility and no possibility to introduce changes to the project within the development process.
• Long preparations are needed to set and document all requirements and deadlines.

As you see, as everything in this world, all these models have their advantages and disadvantages. However, namely dedicated hiring has become one of the most popular variants for long-term projects that requires flexibility.

What Can Your Team of Dedicated Programmers Look Like?

Actually, speaking about the composition of such a team, we can say that it will look just as you need. If you want to hire a development team that will work in accordance with a dedicated model, you should understand that this team is a separate entity, it will have its own management and frameworks.

Such a team usually contains:

• dedicated programmers;
• QA specialist;
• a project manager.

The structure of a team depends on the peculiarities of the project. It is obvious that when you are building a web portal, you need to hire dedicated web developers. But for a mobile app, you do not need to include specialists with these skills in your team.

The number of members included can significantly differ in accordance with your needs. It can be just a small team of 2-3 experts, but we have experience managing teams of up to 50 members. So, everything depends. But the key priority for an outsourcing company in such a case should be creating a perfect team for your project.

How to Manage a Team of Dedicated Specialists?

There are several approaches to managing remote software experts: an extended team, a managed team, or an outsourced team. Which one will suit you better? 

• The extended team model presupposes that being a client you are fully responsible for the team management and software development process. You have to conduct interviews with candidates, make decisions on all questions, set up your rules and approaches. However, administration issues are out of the scope of your responsibilities. Your outsourcing company is in charge of them. This model is usually chosen when a client already has a development team and now needs to hire additional specialists to extend its resources. With the extended team approach, you have maximum control over the development process.
• The managed team allows a client to share responsibilities with a software services provider. In this case, namely, an outsourcing company will hire a team of developers for you. Though you will not execute full team management, you will make all critical decisions related to your project. This model provides the possibility to control a development team but also not to shift focus from your core business activities.
• The outsourced team option is for those who are ready to entrust all decisions and management to a software services vendor. Your IT partner will fully build a team for your needs and control all the processes. After that, you will just get a developed solution.

How to Find a Trusted Software Development Partner?

When you decide that you want to hire a team of developers, it’s time to start looking for the company that will provide you with such specialists. Of course, it means that you need to find a reliable IT partner. The good news is that there is no lack of such companies on the market. The bad news is that the market is overcrowded and it is difficult to find the right company.

However, we’ve prepared a to-do list for you that will help you in your search.

1. Define your goals and tasks for a potential software partner. If you do not clearly know what you want, it is impossible to find a good vendor.
2. Make research and define the companies that can potentially suit you as a services provider. 
3. Check testimonials and analyze use cases. If there are no real reviews and portfolio, probably, it’s not the best partner for you.
4. Communicate with the team. Ask as many questions as you can. Try to find out how they build their working process, how they communicate with customers, how they look for their experts. There are no unimportant details. However, do not hesitate to ask for clarifications if something stays unclear. It’s vital to find a company that not only offers good rates but also ensures a high level of services. Communication with your partner should be comfortable for you from all perspectives.

How to Hire Dedicated Programmers?

So, let’s suppose that the software partner is chosen and all administrative questions have been discussed. Now we can start building your remote software team.

Probably, it is one of the essential stages in your project realization. The success of your project greatly depends on the team and now you should be highly attentive. When you are looking for remote specialists there is always a number of criteria that you should take into account before making up your mind.

While your outsourcing partner has to provide you with access to the best developers, you need to prepare a certain list of your needs. You have to clearly know the number of specialists you want to hire and the skills that they should have.

However, if you know that your project will expand in the future, it doesn’t mean that you should create a huge team at once.

The model of dedicated hiring allows adding new members to the team within the development process. So, what do you need to bear in mind at this stage?

The key points are:

• the required skill stack
• the necessary roles and number of team members
• hourly rate
• connected background and previous background of specialists
• language skills (if needed).

Best Regions for Dedicated Hiring

In one of our previously published blog posts, we explained the peculiarities of hiring remote developers from different regions.

The most popular locations for sourcing dedicated programmers include Eastern and Western Europe, LATAM countries, and a selected pool of Central Asian countries (e.g. Kazakhstan, Armenia, and Georgia).

Today the most popular location for looking for dedicated programmers is Eastern Europe and Asia.

The reasons for that are the following ones:

• Specialists in these countries stand out from the crowd for their high level of expertise;
• There is a vast pool of developers with different types of skills;
• Though English is not a native language in any of the countries in this area, many programmers have a good command of English;
• Despite the highest quality of work guaranteed, the rates are pretty affordable.

Tips to Handle a Dedicated Development Team

If you have never worked with dedicated specialists before, it will be a little bit challenging to begin. But do not worry! We have a detailed guide for you and below you can find just a few tips.

• Prioritize tasks and set deadlines.
• Define clear goals and requirements.
• Approve the procedures.
• Do not hesitate to voice your vision.
• Organize communication efficiently (below you can find our tips on how to do it).

Tools for Communication with Your Remote Specialists

As more and more companies are starting to use small or hybrid work models, the demand for online communication and management tools has drastically increased. However, the market has a lot to offer you today.

For example, for communication, there are such tools as:

• Slack;
• Skype;
• Microsoft Teams;
• Flowdock.

At Geomotiv, we prefer to use the first two apps from this list.

For video conferencing, there are:

• Google Meet;
• Zoom;
• GoToMeeting;
• WhereBy.

For team and project management, we recommend considering:

• Jira;
• Trello;
• Asana;
• Basecamp;
• Fibery.

You can find a full list of tools that can be useful for working with a remote team in our blog following the link.

When we provide dedicated teams to our customers, we always apply all the above-mentioned principles. But, in addition, we try to be as flexible as possible and approach clients’ requirements with the highest level of responsibility. That’s our main secret of success.

Our Case Study

One of the great examples from our practice that shows how the dedicated team model can work is the video streaming platform case. When we started working with this US-based company, the dedicated team created by us consisted just of 3 specialists. However, in a year, their number was increased to 10 and now more than 50 experts are involved in the project.

At the time there are a couple of sub-teams. While some of them are mixed which means that they include not only our developers but also our client’s employees, there is a team fully created on our side.

As the project is expanded, the client creates new teams to work on different aspects and parts of their OTT service and hires our developers and testing engineers to benefit from their skills.

Depending on various circumstances, we can hire specialists based either on our requirements or on the requirements provided by our clients. But what is really important to mention, the final interview is always conducted by the representatives of the client. Therefore, it is very convenient for candidates as they can ask any questions regarding their future work directly to managers.

Quite often due to multiple stages included in it the hiring process may take longer than specialists from Eastern Europe are accustomed to. However, that’s the desire of our US partner. And we respect and highly appreciate this approach as we see that managers from the client's side really want to find the best experts to work on their project.

We are extremely proud of this partnership. For us that’s an example of how cooperation based on the dedicated team principle can evolve over the years.

Why Geomotiv if You are Looking for Dedicated Programmers: Top 5 Reasons

• We have access to 5000+ of the best software experts in Eastern and Western Europe, LATAM, Central Asia.
• We offer reasonable rates that reflect a fair price-quality ratio.
• We began our business journey in 2010 and since then we’ve managed to accumulate rich experience.
• We have already provided hundreds of dedicated specialists. It means that now we know how to hire the best remote developers for projects of different scales and complexity.
• We have expertise in building teams that consist of over 50 members. And these teams show excellent results in their work.

Of course, it is just a small part of all the arguments that can prove that we have all chances to become your reliable IT partner and help you in launching your successful software projects. We are very flexible and attentive to our customers’ needs. We do our best to find the specialists with the exact set of competencies set by our clients.