How to Hire a Dedicated Remote Development Team: Challenges and Checklist

Want to hire a dedicated remote development team? Great idea, as it has been one of the top work trends of the past ten years. With technological advancements and the further proliferation of remote work culture, remote software development teams are on their way to becoming even more commonplace.

But the question remains: is outsourcing development right for you? About 70% of companies choose this approach to cut costs, 40% for more flexibility, and 20% for increased speed to market. So, what’s going to be your reason?

In this post, we’ll weigh the pros and cons of outsourcing web and mobile development to dedicated teams, what to do if you’ve decided to work with a team halfway across the world, and some of our best practices.

As a reliable software development vendor providing numerous clients with top-notch dedicated teams, Softermii can elaborate on this topic. Or we can simply supply you with the experts you need. But let’s get back to the article and learn more about a dedicated team model and how to hire remote developers.

The Difference Between Remote and Dedicated Teams

Regarding software development, the term remote team means that your team works remotely from your central office. Besides, this team works in other offices that may be located in other countries. Here the main difference between the remote dev team and the in-house team is that they work in different office locations.

A dedicated team definition refers to the business model in which the service provider supplies a client with a remote team for long-term cooperation. The remote vendor also chooses the best candidates according to the client’s requirements for workers’ skillsets and experience.

In general, remote refers to any employees working outside of your office. And the dedicated model indicates a remote team that meets your requirements and is ready to work with you as long as possible.

The adoption of remote and dedicated teams in your business changes the way you may boost your digital branding dramatically.

Why Choose a Remote Software Development Team

Hiring a remote software dedicated team has numerous strengths. For most businesses, the decision will come down to increased time to market and the cost savings associated with outstaffing.

Let’s examine some potential benefits of engaging dedicated remote staff in closer detail.

You Can Hire from Less Competitive Markets

The primary reason to consider a dedicated staff, at least if you are putting it together yourself, is that you can build your dev team from less competitive markets than those close to you.

When there are no physical boundaries to your search parameters, you access talent pools of IT outsourcing destinations worldwide. That means you can hire even more skilled employees while paying them less and engage the whole dedicated team much faster.

Your Time-to-Market Will Be Faster

It’s also true that, in many cases, getting your product to market won’t take as long if you use a dedicated team. The hiring time is less, the team productivity is higher, and the development process is faster, resulting in a quick product release.

Again, this speaks to how content your team members are and how easily they can handle the work in the dedicated team model.

You’ll Get Higher Employee Retention

Dedicated team members usually are more satisfied with work as they work in one company longer than the in-house team members. Therefore, you’ll be better able to retain them than employees who work at a brick-and-mortar location. As a result, the company has less turnover and spends less on recruiting costs.

Your IT Costs Will Reduce

It’s also worth mentioning that when you use a dedicated team, it usually means that your IT costs will be less. Usually, you can switch to the less competitive markets, hire a dedicated development team there and spend less for employees’ payoffs.

Again, you don’t need to pay anything for the office rent and maintenance, equipment, and other administrative costs. Even more, by working on a dedicated team model, you can reduce the taxes you pay.

Besides, these are not all the benefits you get from having a dedicated team, but the main ones. Hence, if these advantages seem to be substantial for your company, let’s cover the cases when a remote team is the best fit for your business model.

When a Dedicated Team Works Better, and When It Doesn’t

The first question to ask is whether you feel the need to physically meet with your team members often, occasionally, or never. There are some employers or projects where having face-to-face meetings with team members is critical. If that’s where you find yourself, then a remote dedicated team will probably not be appropriate.

You’ll also need to consider whether the development team members you need for your project are physically close to you. For various reasons, there are parts of the country, and indeed, of the world, where there is a higher concentration of IT talent than others.

If you’re in a hotbed of developers who you think can handle your project, you probably don’t need to go remote. If that talent isn’t physically close to you, or you need a specialist with a rare skill set, then a remote team might be your only choice.

While these were general tips for choosing a remote dedicated collaboration model, let’s look at more specific cases in which you need a dedicated team.

Large, Long-Term Projects

A dedicated team is perfect for long-term projects. You can engage the necessary specialists immediately, and the cooperation model will ensure the loyalty and reliability of their work.

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Limited Budget

As mentioned, you significantly reduce your costs by engaging a dedicated team. If your budget is limited, such cooperation is a great way to get quality services at a reasonable price.

Changes in Your Company

When you feel your company needs to change the vector of development, a dedicated model is your best option for attracting employees. In this way, you can get the necessary team in the shortest possible time and start implementing changes immediately.

Now, look at cases where remote dedicated teams may not be your best fit.

Small, Short-Term Projects

Although you can hire an entire dedicated team for a short-term project, it’s not reasonable. For such cases, freelancers or individual developers who quickly implement your ideas may suit you better.

Secondary Projects

If you have lower-priority projects to implement, a dedicated team is unlikely to be suitable for such a task. These specialists need constant feedback and supervision, which may distract you from more critical business operations.

Which Countries are the Best for Hiring Remote Software Developers?

Depending on your project and the BPO provider you choose, you may or may not have the ability to interview the team you’ll be working with. If you want to build your own managed dedicated software development team, you’ve come to the right place.

At Softermii, we encourage our clients to work with developers directly and stay involved in the hiring process to ensure the right candidate fills each role. We’ll offer candidates we think are good fits, and the client approves them after an interview. It allows you to bypass the most time-consuming and likely-to-fail stages of hiring developers.

Focus on the technical questions immediately — you need to ensure the person you’re interviewing has the necessary skills to get the job done. Ask about similar projects they’ve worked on, what pitfalls they encountered and how they dealt with them. Make sure you ask about what process they follow, whether they consider their work creative, and if they have any ideas about the project at hand right away. It’ll help you judge whether they can be a good team member.

How to Manage a Remote Software Dedicated Team Effectively

In our experience, there is no correct way to manage a software-dedicated team remotely. Yet, there are a few best practices to follow while managing remote development teams that ensure the project stays on track. As with all managerial solutions, the key to success is proper communication.

Trust the People You Hire

It would help if you were selective about those you hire. For example, you can ask for recommendations, check their working profiles, and ask to do test tasks to choose the best candidates. But once you do, you need to trust them to get the job done.

Set Up Communication Protocols

It’s prudent to set up rules for communicating within the project. Depending on how much of the managerial role you delegate to the vendor’s PM, this can be either your job or theirs. In any case, determining the tech stack and related responsibilities will ensure you hit the ground running and stay on track until work on the project is finished.

• Pick the communication and project management tools you’ll be using. Slack, Zoom, Jira, and Google Drive are our personal preferences.
• Work around the time zone difference by communicating what time frames both sides use as working hours.
• Set up weekly and daily calls for the whole team to join and report on their work.

Make Your Calls Engaging

If you’ve ever been on a Zoom call with ten people or more, you know it can be a snooze-fest. People stay quiet unless they hear their name, keep their webcams off, and are most likely just waiting for the call to end so they can go back to doing their job with no intrusions. This situation should be a huge red flag for any manager.

Here’s what you do if you want to manage dedicated software developers remotely:

• Say hello to people individually as they enter the call, if possible.
• Spend a few minutes chatting about a work-related topic, like a news item that may be interesting to the team. Ask what they think about it, and don’t just wait for people to take the initiative to respond — call on names and be sure to listen and respond in earnest.
• Start the business part of the call by summing up what has been going on since the team last connected and give shout-outs to individual team members for doing a good job.
• Prepare visual aids to help guide everyone through what you’re saying.
• Ask questions proactively throughout the process. You may be doing this already, but make sure you’re calling on people’s names to answer them unless you like hearing a loud noise after the question.
• Make sure you listen and be empathetic to your team. Nothing demotivates like having your request fall on deaf ears.

Motivate Your Team and Keep Them Focused

When you hire dedicated remote developers, it’s a good idea to screen your future teammates for self-organization. That’s just one of the ways you can ensure they don’t lose focus or motivation to provide their best at work. Here’s what else you can do:

• Use time-tracking software. It ensures everyone is aware that work time is separate from personal time. At Softermii, we prefer Hubstaff for its ability to connect to Atlassian products we use in our work and Slack.
• Always provide feedback. Everyone wants to know if they’re doing well at work, even though not everyone has the guts to ask. Make sure your teammates know where they stand.
• Encourage mission focus by emphasizing this team’s role in the larger project. It will empower them to make decisions in service of the common goal and keep them accountable for their contributions.

Adopt Known Project Management Methodologies

Choose the right software development methodology for your team, depending on the project requirement. But we recommend looking at an Agile approach that will probably make the most sense for your remote team.

Applying, for example, Scrum helps you build transparent communication and enough flexible work that boosts the flexibility and productivity of teams. Stick to building Agile teams with each member’s roles and the entire process accordingly.

Make Relevant Information System

Set up your team’s informational system with GitHub or Redmine. You can add all needed documentation on projects, integrate it with CMS, plugins, and stream activities like commit messages, and pull requests from Git.

Encourage a United Development Philosophy

Work at building a united development culture. That means communicating decisions to all team members and minimizing friction during onboarding. Have a clear vision of the goal that everyone understands, and create guidelines for filing effective bug reports.

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Organize Team-Building Events Whenever Possible

Determine what remote team-building activity makes the most sense based on your project and goals. Some remote team icebreakers might include getting-to-know-you games at the start of the project.

Challenges to Managing Remote Dedicated Teams

Of course, you may experience issues when managing remote dedicated software development teams. Learn about potential challenges beforehand to avoid them in the future.

Time-Zone Differences

The first challenge with the dedicated team model is having your workers in a different time zone. While this will probably allow the project to proceed faster, it’ll also be hard to have real-time meetings with all team members. You’ll have to figure out some strategies for getting around this issue, like finding the best time in the morning or evening or staggered meeting times.

Collaboration Issues

Effective remote team collaboration means building one consistent workflow and a system of rapport among the members. The longer your team works together, the more used to each other’s methodologies and expectations they will become. However, a new team working on your project will have to get used to each other.

Dedicated Team Collaboration Tools Choice

You’ll need to figure out whatever support platform, technology stacks, etc., will be the most useful based on your project goals. It would help if you ensured that the entire team is on board with whatever framework, programming languages, and tools you choose.

If they aren’t comfortable or familiar with them, substituting team members or using a different team might prove necessary. Make sure you choose the one with all the features you need.

Cultural Differences

If you’re thinking about how to build a culture in a remote team, try to get creative with it. Besides, if your team works remotely, you need to set up the workflow, policies, and rules in a way that should be clear for everyone. Try to build a friendly environment within your team.

Define the Roles and Responsibilities in Your Dedicated Team

When people ask how to build a remote software dedicated staff, they typically think of a team of coders working side by side, producing code that magically turns into a usable application by the end.

That’s not far from the truth, but the reality is a bit more complex, and the traditional structure of a development team is rather rigid. Look at the professionals you must engage for sure.

Product Owner

It’s a senior person on any given project. In the context of building a remote software dedicated team, this is typically the client or a representative of the client.

The product owner is responsible for conveying and maintaining the vision for the product under development to team members and communicating with all stakeholders.

The product owner is typically endowed with the power to make decisions on the project to align processes with business goals. Not having such a professional on board can result in miscommunication, directionless developers, and unnecessary overwork.

Project Manager

The PM’s job is to stay on top of every project task and ensure that every action taken by the team is within scope, including budgetary requirements. They are responsible for communications within the team, taking care of any motivation issues, filling roles if any are vacated during the project, and answering everyone’s questions.

Software Architect / Tech Lead

The architect is typically the most experienced developer on the team. They make high-level choices, like deciding what tech stack to use, separating the project into its parts, and ensuring developers’ adherence to high code standards.

According to the grand view research, the global IT outsourcing market size was estimated at $245.91 billion in 2022 and is expected to reach $261.9 billion in 2023.

Developers

Coders are the “boots on the ground” of the software development process. They typically follow a clear set of directions from the PM, architect, and TL and submit work in batches called commits.

Developers are separated by coding functions and programming languages. Front-end developers are responsible for the user-facing part of the product, back-end developers create the server-side frameworks that facilitate the product’s functionality, and so-called full-stack developers can perform either function, sometimes both.

If you need custom services for your business, especially with the use of CRM systems remotely on your mobile, you should consult enterprise mobile app development companies to get the wider picture regarding what to consider when implementing this type of technology in your everyday business.

QA Engineer

The QA engineer is responsible for finding the bugs in each new iteration of the product during and after the development phase. Depending on the project’s scope, the team can have a single QA specialist reporting to the project manager and product owner or multiple QA engineers reporting to the QA lead.

UI/UX Designers

The designer has the task of creating the look and feel of the application under development. Again, just like with the QA role, the number of designers on a project can grow with its scope.

Cost to Hire Remote Developers

Here are all the steps you need to follow to build a remote software dedicated team for any project you may have in mind.

Interview Questions’ Examples for Remote Developers

We have prepared a list of possible interview questions that you can use to hire dedicated remote staff.

• What is your background in the tech industry?
• What types of projects have you been able to work on?
• What industries have you typically created software for?
• Which technology stacks are you best at?
• Were there any difficulties during product development? If so, which ones and how did you deal with them?
• What are the outcomes of your recent software development projects?
• Which of your projects do you consider the most successful and why?
• Which of your projects do you consider the least successful and why?
• How would you describe the communication in your team?
• How does your team go about solving problems during product development?
• Do you think your team is successful? If so, why?
• What sets you apart from other candidates?

Use these questions to conduct thorough interviews with potential candidates.

Why Build a Remote Dedicated Software Team with Softermii?

Simply put: we’ve been around for long enough to know what to do and what not to do under any circumstances, but we are still a young and hungry company. Our clients get the best of both worlds. We’re still at the point where we’re earning our laurels rather than resting on them.

Conclusion

A dedicated team brings numerous benefits to your business that can certainly make it worth the resources and efforts you put in first.

From our Softermii experience, we can say that a well-established workflow, transparent communication, and mutual feedback exchange are the keys to effective dedicated team management.

Besides, review our development services if you still have questions or want to switch to a dedicated team model. For that, we can set up a dedicated dev team for your needs, and feel free to contact us to ask any questions.

With technological advancements and the further proliferation of remote work culture, dedicated software teams are becoming even more handy.