Hiring Top Developers as a Startup Even Without Venture Funding

In the startup world, it’s no secret that hiring top developers is one of the hardest challenges for founders. Whether you are a new startup or you’re a well-established company with a small development team, finding great software engineers will be difficult. Even if you have built your product and are looking to hire someone to develop it further, your main challenge comes from finding great software engineers who can do justice to your idea. If you are thinking of launching your startup with limited funds but need strong developers to build your product from scratch, here is how you can find top developers as a startup without venture funding:

Decide between Native or Web Development

Before you even start looking for developers, you need to decide if you need native or web developers. Native development is used to build applications for a specific operating system or device. For example, you could build an app for iPhone or Android. A web app, on the other hand, is more for a generic platform that can be accessed on different devices. In the early days of your startup, you may only have a few features that need to be built. If you only need one specific platform, hiring the right developers will help you ship faster. If you have a product that requires building both a web app and a native app, you need to hire a hybrid engineer who can do both. This is also a lot more expensive as you may often need to hire two engineers instead of one.

Hiring remote developers

If you decide to hire remote developers, you don’t necessarily have to hire people who live in your country. You can hire remote developers today from anywhere in the world. If you are looking to hire people in other countries, you increase your pool of choice talents. However, there are a few things you should be careful of. First, would be ensuring that whoever you hire is reliable and responsive. You don’t want to hire someone that shows up for a couple of days and disappears afterward. Secondly would be hiring for effectiveness and speed. To do this, you would typically want someone dedicated to your product. It might be tempting to hire from a number of online sources on a gig basis to save for cost. That might just be a recipe of penny wise, pound foolish. Thirdly, you want to hire with data privacy and protection of intellectual property in mind.

Be transparent with your hiring decisions

When hiring software engineers, you want to make sure you are as transparent as possible with your hiring decisions. Don’t just hire the person with the most experience or the highest salary. You want the best fit for your product and the team. You don’t want to hire someone who is not a good fit and is not going to help your product grow. A mistake many startups make when hiring is only hiring people who have worked at big companies like Google and Facebook. While that is certainly a good thing, you may be missing out on other talented engineers who don’t have the same kind of work experience. Let your hiring process be transparent for both remote and on-site candidates. This will help you find the best fit for your product.

Use referral programs to find developers

Are you familiar with referral programs? They are used by a lot of companies to get new users and hire great employees. If you are having a hard time finding developers, why not offer a referral program to other startuppers? There are many online communities and forums where you can find startuppers looking for work. You can offer them a referral fee or a percentage of your salary in exchange for finding you great candidates. You can also look for engineers through online forums. Make sure to post in the right channels and forums to find the right candidates.

Crowdsource your recruitment process

Crowdsourcing is a big thing these days. You can use it to find anything from development to marketing. You can use a tool like Muster to find remote engineers for your product. This platform allows you to post a project and have other developers build your product for you. They get to decide how much they charge based on the project. This is helpful if you only have one or two features to build. As your product grows, you can use this tool to get occasional help from the community to build the product faster. However, you would always require dedicated engineers for the long run.

Hiring from bootcamps and training institutions

Bootcamps and training institutions have become more common for tech-related careers. While it can be difficult to hire engineers fresh out of a bootcamp, you may be able to find someone who is looking for a job. You can also hire people who are close to finishing their studies and need some experience before getting hired by another company. There are many online training programs that teach web or app development. You can check if they also have a hiring program where they help you find candidates at the end of the course. You can also look for specific bootcamps that are focused on the type of engineering you want your product to have.

Hiring through BorderlessHR

If you are extremely challenged by the hassle of hiring engineers yourself, you can hire through BorderlessHR Inc. (BorderlessHR). This company helps you find remote engineers that fit your budget. With BorderlessHR, you can hire a team of mid to senior-level engineers who are focused on your product. This can be very helpful if you are looking to build a minimum viable product (MVP) as a startup, have a set of features that need to be built and are not sure where to start, or have an existing product that needs further development. BorderlessHR would help you assemble a team of dedicated engineers that can start working on your product from day one, from their pool of thousands of pre-vetted talents sourced across over 100 countries. BorderlessHR also works to ensure the integrity of your data and its privacy, as well as the protection of your intellectual property. This is a particularly great platform to hire engineers that work remotely - be they global or local.

Conclusion

Finding great engineers for your product is one of the hardest challenges for a startup, especially without the luxury of slush venture funding. It doesn’t matter if you have built your product or are hiring someone to build it, finding engineers who can do justice to your idea is difficult, and more so with lean resources. There are many ways to find engineers as a startup, but you need to decide early if you need native or web developers and if you want to consider hiring remote engineers. You could do this by yourself by using referral programs, crowdsourcing, or accelerate your hiring process by working with BorderlessHR to find dedicated engineers that would work within your means.