This document outlines my process for hiring remote developers for an existing software product and team. The purpose of this document is to help manage expectations with both business people and developers. I want to make my process understandable and communicate not just my actions, but my intent, so that there are more positive suggestions and fewer disappointments on both sides of the table.
I hope my memo also serves as an inspiration for other companies who look to acquire the top developers of the world for remote work.
- Process overview
- Hires for an existing software product
- What is talent and where to find it
- Hiring remote workers and outsourced developers
- Business talk
- Developer talk
- Decision making
- Miscellaneous
Overview of my process:
In the process I lay out here, we are hiring developers for existing product development.
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The current company and its management is well-versed in their product and industry vertical, thus there is no need to shop for a solution, as we are the best people in the world to tell what that solution is
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There is no set end date for the contract, as there would be with a project-based work, as software products live forever
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An existing company has its existing developer culture and workflows
Specifically, I am not
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Looking for solution providers
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Looking to something that comes with added project management or quality controls - as it is with some outsourcing shops that you need to have a local boss to overview employees
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Looking for people who do not directly communicate with me or the team, or have any kind of intermediates, like local bosses
Quality over quantity.
In software development, up to a certain organisation size, it makes sense to get the best developers even if you need to pay a daring premium for it. This is because in software development productivity scales faster than compensation. There exist a myth of 20x performers. In real life, the performance of a senior, enthusiastic expert is 3x - 4x and the compensation 2x-3x, but it is still a good business trade-off to be made.
To get the best developers, you need to make sure
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The best developers know you exist and find you
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Your organisation is seen as exciting and a fun place to work, as better you become more picky you can be with your choices
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Developers get feeling the team is expert in what are doing, as when experts work with other experts, there are high expectations, less friction and high satisfaction of doing challenging deliveries
This memo you are reading is also partially advertisement for points 1. and 2. - I want to set high expectations for myself and people contacting me, so that they will go to an extra effort to create a quality relationship.
I want to make the hiring process as open and wide-reaching as possible, and be able to process high number of candidates efficiently. Partly because you never know where the good talent lurks, partly because I believe into democratising opportunites, partly because it is how I bootstrapped my career and I want to give others the same chances. More about this below.
The fact that anyone who can access a laptop and internet can be a software developer makes it is a rare value proposition. It is very democratic and meritocratic in the sense that as long as you can be online, you can learn it and you can find work. The rest is up to you: how hard you push to learn and work. Well-known software company success stories like Github, Ubuntu and 37 Signals (Basecamp) were built on 100% remote teams.
I also dare to claim that to find the top talent, rock star developers or 20x performers, however you want to call them, it makes sense to go beyond my shoreline. Rockstars might not live next door - to build a good developer organisation we need to be able to board people from anywhere, no matter what is their background.
If you are a talented developer and manager yourself, you are active in the developer community forums. You have audience and followship. This makes it easy to reach out for potential offerors how can provide candidates for the work. You can find and judge potential candidates yourself, you do not need to rely external help. Your incentives to hire are aligned with the business.
When you hiring contractors or employees, you can source developers primarily three ways
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Direct hires, employees or freelancers
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Through an outsourcing agency
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Through a recruitment agency
I do not discriminate how the
The main difference between recruitment and outsourcing agencies is how they are compensated.
The recruitment agency takes a one-time bonus for making the hire. Their specialty is the distribution network, or wide reach for the offer ad. The traditional recruitment agencies usually have little or no insight into the quality of candidates, although there exist nowadays more specialised platforms to cater the hiring of the software development world.
Outsourcing agencies price their margin in the hourly or monthly compensation of the developer. The outsourcing agency maintains the corporate structure for the developer. They do more long term commitments and also can offer usually more than one individual developer. The margin with outsourcing agencies vs. paying direct salary varies between 25% - 50%, so it might be a little bit expensive in the long run.
Freelancers, or individuals, take care of themselves. There is the least overhead working with people directly.
The offerors, business people usually need to understand the scope of the work. There will be frequently asked questions, so it makes sense to have frequently pasted answers, like
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We will shortlist at least five different candidates before making a decision and we expect this to take 2-3 weeks after the first assessments and interviews
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The work is for a live, ongoing product, and there is no final delivery or scoped project
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There is an in-house project management and quality assurance
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Developers would integrate part of the existing team and culture
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Please be able to travel: A bootstrap camp of 2 weeks with other developers in Europe in some point might be nice, so that people get to know each other and build a better understanding of personalities
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The team is 15 people now, of which 10 work directly on the product as developers or managers
I assume all offerors who go to the length to send in resumes also understand in this point that I value industry expertise. I do not expect to get any CVs that do not match role descriptions.
But if this somehow happens I will let the offerors know the reason why the background of the candidate is not suitable.
I will ask the price before engaging to the further discussion. This is because usually you first deal with business people before you can deal with developers themselves. Furthermore, if the expectations of the offerors are unrealistic, it is polite not to waste anyone's time.
As our organisation can work with any developers around the world, it means we can very effectively exploit disparities in the global wealth distribution. Hiring people from low-income countries is naturally cost-efficient, as these people need less money for their everyday life.
However, this does not mean developed countries are automatically excluded. It makes sense to get the initial offer, or price, from anyone. You might find surprises. Scottland is not expensive as London and Lapland is not expensive as Helsinki. Also, if the developer is really really good, I am happy to pay 5x premium for 20x productivity.
Also, there are very motivated, very talented people, who are still making their way to the working life. I started my freelancer career as doing remote hours for a London based education company from Finland, only for few thousands dollars per month, which was very competitive rate. Regardless, I was young, but still world class developers and the arrangement suited for my life situation - local companies could pay me little bit more, but I would have needed to work with Nokia's software supplier and code C++ for Symbian platform, a horror with frustrations and motivation.
Besides price and skill, there are other factors that may affect the recruitment process. Even if one does not think about them, they should be made explicit so that they are quantified when talking with offerors.
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Common history - You have worked with some people before and you share the scars of the same war
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Existing trust relationship - a personal recommendation from a party you trust
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Access to wider knowledge pool - often outsourcing agencies tout that they can give you access to expertise beyond the individual being hired
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Transactional cost - when you open new business relationships, there is always a transaction cost with an introduction call, sharing information, making yourself available
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Ability to travel - I want to meet all people I work with face-to-face some point. Potentially, I want to organise at least one week-long sprint every quarter where most of the team gathers to the same place. Spending face time always increases productivity and makes people feel better about themselves.
If the offers are not outrageous, then it comes down to judge how good people's skills are and how to pick.
Some factors to consider
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Domain specific knowledge: Even though a good developer can learn any new technology, for a startup companies time-to-market is important. The HR resources that can be invested to training are scarce. Thus, it makes sense to prefer developers with knowledge of the existing development stack.
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Expressing yourself Basic communication skills are must. Vocal English is less important than written English. Besides be able to understand English as a language, one need to be able to express themselves. This means having the clarity in pull request comments, able to ask help in Slack, and so on. Sometimes this is connected to cultural issues, but I myself am a believer of global software development elite culture, where anyone who is excited to explore and interact with other projects in Github picks this up fast.
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Honesty This one is a big bummer for me, as I come from one of the most trustful and transparent nations in the world. In a global business, do not take people's word granted. They will oversell, they can be desperate and they may not have moral qualms about lying. Trust, but verify.
To scale my hiring process, be open and reach as many good candidates as possible, I will make all candidates undergo small exercises that reflect the actual domain specific work they do.
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I respect people's time and make the exercises so small that if you are a domain expert you should be able to complete it in 5 - 15 minutes
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This is not code-golf. I prefer practical skills over theoretical computer research. I am hiring for building applications, not infrastructure like databases. All programming languages we work will include
sort()function, so you do not need to write it. -
I want to people comment their code, use Github, make a pull request and see how their communication skills are.
Example of individual assessment:
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Frontend: I noticed the sign-up page has some extra scroll on mobile. Can you fix it? Also, the signup page looks like dog shit, as it was quickly gobbled together. Can you make it little bit prettier while you are poking around the stylesheets?...
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Frontend: Looks like the signup form email input is case sensitive. Users are having issues when they try to sign in
Dog@example.comanddog@example.com. Can you fix this and write browser automated functional test to see that this does not happen in the future?... -
Backend: The rest API gives HTTP 500 when you submit a signup with an underscore in the email. Can you fix this? Also please let me know if there are other problems in the signup, as I gobbled it together last-minute before the launch and it has not received enough love.
..Here is the Github repository with README. Please install the local development environment as stated in README and submit the pull request. add them to the pull request - if you are smarter than me you get some extra point. Also if you have any other suggestions, please
I expect that people who do not possess enough domain expertise drop in this step. I do not expect low quality submissions, but people who push their luck despite having no expertise should be easily spot due to funny coding style, improper code formatting and such lack of basic software development best practices.
I will have a video call with every candidate who passes the basic assessment. I hope to have assessment before the call, as reviewing the assessment takes probably only 1-5 minutes of my time, versus having a call I need to book a slot of 30 minutes in my calendar.
In the interview, I try to gouge not only the basic communication skills, but also the passion the person shares with the fellow developers.
Coming from the open source consultancy background, I know I can value the following merits
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Participated in open source projects, through issues, pull request or even maintaining one. This means that you are passionate about the technology you work with. It is also a public track record and easy to verify.
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Helped others on Stackoverflow or similar forum by posting questions and answers. It shows that one is helpful and can behave. Also, this is easy to verify.
Also. I want to try to verify if the candidate is suitable for remote working
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Need to be able to pull overlapping working hours with the team - usually with e.g. Indians this happens by people in India shifting their working hours to match the Western business hours
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Need to be able to work independently - do not stop if you encounter an issue, but make sure you proactively ask for help and report you cannot continue
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Need to be motivated - even if there are people not watching you or socialising you, you can focus on work and do not wander off to social media
Based on the business talk and developer talk funnel, I can stop the hiring process when I have 5 - 10 candidates. I expect this to take 2-3 weeks. I could take the shortcut and just hire the first candidate with reasonable price available, but it does not make sense to be in such a hurry - after all quality over quantity and you might come across somebody special who you are keen to work with.
It is a team decision to hire. Though my voice is very decisive, I also need to hear the voices of business management and others. Some complications may surface in this point, e.g. someone having a bad experience with a particular outsourcing agency in the past.
After the decision has been might, we will engage to the contract signing process.
Other candidates and offerors who were not picked are let to know what led to this decision. Always keep the business relationship good and warm, as sometimes incidents do happen post decision making and you need to take steps backwards and go back to the shortlist.
Also, I want always to collect feedback. Even if the offerors did not like the process, I want to hear them out. I am not perfect, my process is not perfect, I am not an HR expert but a mere hacker with Masters in management. There are people smarter than me out there and if they offer me feedback, I will appreciate and see if I can do something in return.
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