6 Useful Tactics to Consider before Hiring Senior Software Developers

Hiring software developers is not as simple as a walk in the park. The whole process can be difficult and sometimes even daunting. The sheer volume of applications can make you keep rethinking your options when it comes to choosing the right candidate. You don’t want to take weeks or sometimes even months to get through the plethora of resumes. On top of all this, throw in the fact of growing, and all-time high demands for highly skilled and competent senior software engineers. This can be a nightmare for many companies, especially if they’re a startup and don’t have the budget to compete with already established tech giants. This article enumerates some of the best hiring tips to help you win good talent and stay ahead of the game.

How to hire the best senior software developers – Things to know beforehand

When hiring senior software developers, you would want them to measure up to the required skills as well as the company culture. So, before you start your recruiting process, here’s a list of things you should know beforehand – 

1. Define your business requirements and recruiting needs –

The first step toward a successful hiring process is identifying the business requirements and the recruitment necessities, as it streamlines the entire process and ensures a positive outcome. To clearly define and outline the requirement needs, think about:

• Where are the gaps in your current team?
• Where is the increase in workload that needs to be addressed by hiring?
• What are the missing qualities, qualifications, skills, and proficiencies that you want to add to the team?
• Do you need to fill up any vacant positions left due to employees leaving?

When you have answers to these questions, you can successfully craft a recruitment plan that attracts potential employees from a pool of candidates.

2. Evaluate and visualize the software development landscape 

It is always a good idea to first analyze and evaluate the market demands like market salary range, hiring difficulty, and competitive assessment. Such data can give you an insight into the current trends within the industry and what you need to do to compete within it. Furthermore, you can also efficiently uncover the number of available developers that you can target and how difficult it will be to recruit one.

3. Create effective job descriptions

A job description is not just a clear and concise reference to understand what the job entails, but it is also a checklist for supervisors that can be used as an evaluation tool to cross-check if the candidate meets the job requirements. Clearly, job descriptions are an integral part of the hiring process which should be drafted and created with robust yet precise accuracy.

4. Evaluate soft skills and technical competencies

Today companies place increasing importance on soft skills along with technical competencies. It is crucial that the developer is able to work in a team and can interact well with other people. That’s why when you hire software developers, be it junior or senior, always evaluate their hard skills as well as soft skills, after all, technical skills alone are not enough to be truly effective.

5. Compare salaries and feasible time zones

Once you’ve completed the first step of narrowing down the kind of talent you want to onboard onto your team,  it is also crucial to understand their salary expectations. If they’re under your budget, it’s well and good. But if not, you might want to look at other potential candidates from the talent pool. 

It is also necessary to check if the candidate has any counter-offers from your competitors. If the candidate is proposed with better benefits, they most likely will opt for that offer. The only solution is to match the counter-offer, or to look for other potential candidates within your budget.

However, the best solution would be to hire remotely. You can analyze the time zone that you’re comfortable with and can hire developers from that region. The key advantage of remote hiring is that it is highly cost-effective which means you can hire your ideal candidate without burning a hole in your pocket.

6. Offer and onboard

The onboarding process starts the moment you release the offer, and continues till the employee has successfully taken over the role. Each process falling under this time span, including the orientation program, the training plan, setting up performance metrics, and a feedback loop is part of the onboarding process. That’s why it is extremely critical to effectively strategize this phase as well. It is important that the new software developer can easily explore the new organizational territory without a hint of hesitation.

Code assessment for senior software developers

Code assessments is an industry-standard practice for the interview process, which you must ask every developer to participate in. If a particular candidate doesn’t want to take the assessment, then you can eliminate them from the next rounds. 

But companies should also take responsibility for putting together an assignment that is not just another run-of-the-mill task but rather an exciting challenge. Here are some tips that can assist you in doing so:

Keep it relevant – 

When putting together the assessment, make sure you add questions related to the niche of your business. For instance, if your company selling or renting cars then asking the candidates to create a recommendation engine would be the right question. More specifically, you can ask the candidate to build an engine that can recommend cars similar to Ford F-Series.

Don’t add something that needs development from scratch –

Although writing the codebase from scratch can be fun for some developers, it is not at all feasible for assessing a senior developer’s skillset. Here are some of the reasons it can be counter productive for a senior software developer:

• The initial setup of application development is usually trivial so a senior software developer might not be keen to set up.
• A new project can be difficult and time-consuming, and since senior software developers tend to get hired quickly, it is highly likely that you might miss out on a competent developer. 

Be mindful of feedback – 

Make sure your engineers evaluate the assessment to offer constructive and guaranteed feedback. Make sure to analyze the assessment holistically and not remain focused on a single aspect like code coverage or performance. 

How much does it cost to hire a senior software developer?

Whether you’re in need of only one software developer or you need to hire a software development team, there’s always a cost to pay. Let’s have a closer look at the overall cost:

Overall cost breakdown 

Hiring is an upfront investment that can cost you a lot of money. That’s why it is necessary to make sure your investment counts. Here’s a breakdown of what your hiring cost would look like:

• Sourcing cost

The first step you need to take is sourcing the right candidate. Let’s have a look at what this process is going to cost you:

• Through job boards 

Job boards’ costs totally depend on the board where you are posting your job vacancies. For instance, the starting minimum daily budget for promoted job postings on LinkedIn is $10 and the minimum lifetime budget is $100. There are free platforms as well, such as Indeed that allows free job postings for $5 and up to boost and better visibility. Another popular board that is popular to hire software developers is Stack Overflow. The platform offers tailored offers depending on your needs.

• ATS cost

An Application Tracking System (ATS) is a must-have tool to automate, simplify and speed up the entire recruiting process. The minimum cost of ATS can range somewhere between $100-$200 per user each month. You should also expect to spend thousands of dollars as the company grows along with the number of employees.

• Through external recruiters

If you hire software developers through external recruiters the cost can range somewhere between 15-40% of the developer’s first salary. 

• HR/internal recruiters’ cost

As per Indeed, the average salary of an HR manager is $75,202/year. If you have a dedicated team for recruiting and onboarding a new employee, then their salary cost would also be a part of the overall cost.

• Recruitment cost

Once you’ve selected your ideal candidate, you need to accurately evaluate their skill and experience:

• Assessment cost

The assessment cost would depend upon the platform that you’re using to conduct the test. For instance, the starter package for HackerRank is $249/month whereas, CodeSignal it’s $500/month. 

• Interview cost

The interview can usually take 2-2.5 hours and sometimes even less than that. Typically the interview would include an HR manager and a senior developer from your technical team. We can calculate the average cost spent on interviews by taking the HR manager’s and the developer’s salaries into consideration. If you’re taking virtual interviews, the cost of video conferencing tools will also be taken into account. To give you an estimate, a single interview session would cost somewhere between $250 – $499.

• Other miscellaneous costs

Recruiting includes other costs as well, let’s have a look at them:

• Onboarding cost

A good onboarding procedure is the right way to save extra expenditure on onboarding. However, according to Indeed, the average cost of onboarding an employee is $4,100.

• Loss of productivity 

Data suggests that a new employee hire usually only has 25% productivity in the first month. This gradually increases by 50% in the second month and then 75% in the third month. So the productivity cost you spend in the first month is 75% and 50% of the first and second month’s salary of the developer.

• Training cost

As per sources, companies spent $1,111 per employee on training in 2020. However, there’s no specific cost set for training, it can vary depending on the developer’s skill set.

Conclusion

Developing software solutions are a complex process that could be only handled by a talented and skilled senior developer. Therefore, you must make sure that you have followed the right procedure to attract the best talent to your engineering team.