How to Hire an Offshore Development Team for Your Start-Up: Seven Tips to Follow?

If you have a start-up and want to hire offshore development team members to help you launch, start with this article! We’ll look at how to hire an offshore development team from start to finish.

How to Hire an Offshore Development Team?

When you hire offshore developers, you have to take a few key steps to find the right team.

1. Start with your Goals

Before you dive into how to hire offshore developers, make sure you understand your requirements and goals. Ask yourself:

• Which problem do I want to solve with my MVP?
• What is the goal of my product that should be fulfilled?
• What are the milestones I want to set, and how will I measure them?
• What are my deadlines for each milestone?

Once you can answer those questions, you can focus on how to hire offshore developers for a start-up.

2. Evaluate the Skills You Will Need

Start by deciding which technology stacks you will use for the project and then map the expertise you will need. Will you only require developers, or do you need a Quality Assurance engineer, a project manager, and business analysts as well?

3. Plan The Budget

One of the main reasons companies choose to hire offshore teams is because they don’t have the budget for an in-house team. Don’t go for the cheapest agency, though. Pick the best team for your budget by matching your requirements, their skills, and the budget.

4. Do Your Research

Find information about the offshore locations that match your time zone and culture requirements. Ukraine and other Eastern European countries have some of the best developers in the world for eCommerce languages, with high technical skills. If you are based on the East Coast of America, your team in Europe will be having lunch when you wake up and will have completed a chunk of work. If you hire a team in India, they’ll be asleep when you start your working day. Make sure you pick a time zone team with some overlaps to overcome these challenges.

5. Start Looking

You can look for an offshore agency via a number of sources:

• Recommendations and referrals from others;
• Networking via hackathons and meetups
• Searching for teams at freelance portals
• LinkedIn
• Google Search

It doesn’t really matter where you find your agency. Just make sure that they match your requirements and will work with you in a consultative, proactive way. If possible, we recommend that you hire offshore developers whose culture is closer to yours. As a result, you will not have to spend extra time understanding the new culture and getting used to it. You may also hire a few dedicated software developers from the same country or region, creating fast workflow and eases communication. Your focus on how to hire offshore developers should be based on quality rather than anything else.

6. Evaluate the Agency

Find out if the developers on their teams have proven track records and a portfolio of past projects or testimonials. Make sure that they work with you collaboratively and that you remain the owner or admin of all your accounts and code.

Ask the agency about their workflow and flexibility.

Can you scale up and down throughout the process?

Are they able to meet some or all of your requirements?

Do they fully understand your project?

Agencies that insist they can meet all your requirements without even knowing what they are should raise a red flag. They should at least spend some time getting to know you and your project before assigning developers! It’s also great if the agency has some experience working with start-ups and can provide some guidance from now on.

7. Get Started on the Right Foot

Start by providing a detailed Service Level Agreement, an NDA to keep your confidentiality, and a Scope of Work. All parties have to be clear on what needs to be delivered and when. Make you use good project management software and insist on frequent deployment so that you can keep an eye on your project as it progresses.

Now you know how to hire an offshore development team and can get started! It may take a lot of work and trial and error in the beginning, but it will pay off in the long term!