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Top-5-Things-To-Consider-Before-You-Hire-Offshore-Developers

Top 5 Things to Consider while Hiring Offshore Developers

Planning to hire offshore developers? Keep these tips in mind to make it a rewarding experience.

Do you know that 71% of businesses outsource web development projects include some of the most popular Fortune 500 companies like Apple, Microsoft and General Electric? Moreover, most Fortune 500 companies hire dedicated developers and rely on these offshore remote teams for project executions. Let’s look at the Top 5 Things to Consider while Hiring Offshore Developers.

Why Outsource?

The global market value of outsourcing reached US$ 92.5 billion in 2019. Two key factors drive this growth:

  • Cost-Efficiency: Outsourcing web development tasks are considerably less resource-intensive than getting them done in-house. According to a Glassdoor survey, businesses pay $90,000 per year to web developers. They can get the same expertise by hiring offshore developers from India at almost half the cost. 
  • Access to Global Talent: Outsourcing allows ready access to available talent globally, which saves time and resources by cutting out the entire hiring and onboarding process.

5 Key Considerations while Hiring Offshore Developers

1. Geographical Location

Your outsourced development team needs to be located in a country with world-class infrastructure for delivering the services you seek. For instance, the partnership might become difficult if your partner lacks adequate high-performance internet access. 

Choose a country that has an existing and thriving business relationship with yours. That indicates your offshore development partner is likely to have a cultural orientation about the business atmosphere in yours. That’s a huge plus. 

English is pretty much the language of international business dealings. Check the country’s English proficiency before hiring offshore developers there. You wouldn’t want a language barrier in your communications.

India tops the global outsourcing destination list for any kind of IT requirements. Web development included, of course.

India now ranks 63rd among 190 countries in the World Bank report on ease of doing business. In Tholons’ Services Globalization Report 2019, India tops the list of digital nations. The score breakup (on a total of 1) is as follows: 

  • Talent, Skill, and Quality: 0.91
  • Cost and Infrastructure: 0.80
  • Business Catalyst: 0.79
  • Digital Innovation: 0.72

In the A T Kearney Preferred Location list of 2019 also, India ranks first with a total index score of 7.06. 

The following graph represents the global offshoring preferences. The “Already there” legend stands for the surveyed companies that have an existing relationship with a particular country.

India as a Global Outsourcing Destination

Source

Other than the cost benefits, skills and ease of outsourcing are other factors that indicate why you should hire developers in India.

Also read: 5 Best Outsourcing Countries for Web Development: Cost & Time Difference

2. Company Stability and Reliability

Once you’ve zeroed in on the country, you need to check the company’s profile before you make a decision. We recommend partnering with a web development company rather than with an individual freelancer if you need ongoing development support. 

The stability and reliability factors of a company are critical to ensure that your project does not suffer because of issues at your offshore partner’s end. 

Use the following yardsticks to measure an outsourcing company’s stability and reliability:

  • Check the annual financial statements for three consecutive years to check for the company’s growth profile. Investigate both net income and revenue growth.
    • Examine the debt/equity ratio to determine the company’s financial health.
    • Find out how long the company has been in business. 
    • Check the company website carefully.Look for customer reviews.
  • When you begin the initial communications, ask for customer references. Ask for their contacts to be able to speak to some customers directly. 
  • Inquire if the company has experience of working for clients in your country. That will indicate a pre-existing idea about the business culture in your country. That’s an advantage for sure.
  • Investigate the company’s cyber-security commitment and history. You wouldn’t want to risk a security breach.

It is always a better choice to hire dedicated developers from a trusted outsourcing vendor instead of investing your money and efforts on freelancers.

 

hiring dedicated developers

3. Cost Efficiency

This is the other major factor behind your decision to hire offshore developers. Calculations of how much cost-cutting you’ll be able to achieve are definitely important. 

However, it may not be cost-effective in the long run to choose the company offering the least expensive terms. Cost efficiency needs to balance expenses and quality. Compromising quality to cut costs is not good business practice. 

We present two tables below:

The first one reflects the average hourly rates for hiring dedicated developers across popular offshoring destinations. 

hiring offshore developers

Source

The second one presents a more detailed breakdown of the average hourly rates for developers across tiers if you adopt the dedicated team model in offshore outsourcing. Full-time employee in the second table implies an offshore dedicated team employee, not an in-house team member.

hiring offshore developers rates

Source

4. Human Resource and Talent Pool

If access to global talent is one of the main reasons you are hiring offshore developers in the first place. You have to probe the actual human resource and the skill-sets a company can offer. 

Check whether the company you outsource web development to actually has an in-house staff with the required skills ready to work for you. If their policy is to hire freelancers when they get a project, you should better look elsewhere. 

This is critical. The Mercer-Mettle Report 2019 on India’s state of talent acquisition reflects the following: 

  • 100% of small businesses (1-500 employees) reported talent acquisition to be a challenge
  • 90% of the medium-sized companies (501-1000 employees) said the same.
  • So did 67% of the large companies (more than 1000 employees)
  • Technology, internet, and electronics are among the industries that reported talent acquisition as a challenge.

The PWC CEO survey report 2019 also reflects that 79% of CEOs globally are concerned about the availability of the right kind of digital talent. 

hiring offshore developers talent acquisition problem

How To Check If The Vendor Has The Human Resource That You Need

  • Ask for online interviews with the staff member/s who will be working for your project. 
  • Organize to have their skills tested on-the-job. Get them to work on something while someone from your side oversees that. There are online platforms to facilitate such a process. 
  • If the company has personnel who have worked for clients in your country before, it will be beneficial for you to have such members in your offshore team.

5. Industry Understanding

Just as a prior idea about the business practices of your country is an advantage, so is industry understanding. 

Different industries have different needs. Check if the company and the offshore developers they propose for your development needs have the experience of working in your industry before. 

This is not mandatory. However, if they do have exposure to your industry, that will be of considerable advantage to you. 

Hiring Offshore Developers for Short-term or Long-term?

Just as there are different models of outsourcing, there are varying partnership models in offshoring also. Do you have a short-term need of developers for one particular time-bound project? If yes, a project-based contract with an offshore vendor may be all you need. 

However, if you need long-term development support over a period of time, it is recommended to hire dedicated developers. You can build your own dedicated web development team offshore.

A dedicated remote team is like your own in-house team without the recruitment and onboarding hassles. Also without the heavy overheads. You get a readymade team of your choice. You also get the authority to retain monitoring and oversight control. But you remain free from the need to micromanage. 

You cannot possibly ask for anything better.

Offshore development team

10 Mistakes That Can Demolish Your Offshore Development Team

The restructuring of the global business ecosystem is unfurling novel opportunities for companies. Due to the integration of global markets, the collaborative flow of new technological advancements is being shared. In today’s current market place, the new or growing web companies need to imbibe potential alternatives to scale up the development. Hence, hiring an offshore development team accentuates the optimum use of advanced technological, economical, spatial and cultural domains. The ubiquity of IT tools is hedging the popularity of the dedicated development teams in the web development cycle.

Offshore development team members are distributed geographically and collaborate for common goals through virtual technology tools. But as new dynamically economic spaces are erupting, the current offshore environment also indicates some challenges, complexities, and prerequisites before and after hiring offshore development teams. So it is important to access probabilities of mistakes, which may undermine your development team’s efforts.

Let’s read more which mistakes can demolish your offshore development team:

With the cohesive collision of growing web development companies, it also becomes important to dive in for probably associated risks. Nothing is without trade-offs in the economy, and offshoring is not among exception. So let’s have a comprehensive look over mistakes, which can be avoided while working with a dedicated development team offshore.

1. Inappropriate Offshore Location

The growth of business relies on human capital, financial capital or social capital. Hence, similarly, once you decide to offshore the development, what matters first is the location. Some contributing factors are:

  • In a competitive market, every company needs to revivify the core factors like cost-effectiveness, adroit resources, experienced team, market trust, and quality work.
  • After racking up all necessitous observation,  the decision to choose offshore development company ordains with a perfect offshore location for your web development.
  • The location must not be holding an unconstructive road map for your projects. It must not face undue technological and communication differences.

Now, the question pops out, where to offshore?

best it outsourcing companies location

India is the best location for the offshore development team due to:

  • Economical labour cost
  • Consistent technological advancements
  • Innovations
  • Time zone benefit
  • Evolving IT ecosystem

The latest forecast by Gartner Inc. suggests, that India’s total IT spending will be US$94 billion in the year 2020. Furthermore, It is expected, that the digitally skilled manpower (IT-BPM) in India, would swell up to 150 million by 2020. So, offshoring to India has more salutary results.

2. No In-house Technological Expert

The uncertainties keep mounting up with an offshore remote team not having in-house technological experts. It becomes more colliding and less efficacious if you are not tech-savvy.

Lee-Parry

Hence, a technical expert is a fundamental monitoring factor for your entire web development cycle. They will be committed to organizing necessary communication with the offshore remote team and documentation of technical requirements. You need to ensure the availability of a dedicated in-house technical expert before executing the project.

3. Undervaluing Project Budget

Undoubtedly, a Fixed-price Contract is a preferential option for small projects with pre-determined purposes. If, there will be no further additional budgeting, no need to explore, Rate Card, Time and Material, and Cost contracts.

But with instantaneous market strategy and requirements propels to increase the budget of contract. The company accompanies several creative phases in the entire web development cycle. Hence, it is quite suggestive to keep a substantial margin while determining the final cost.

McKinsey-&-Company

4. No Long Term Goals

It is among the popular principle of the business, to constitute a road map for long term goals. So, if you lack it in the case of the offshore development team, you are stacking up more problems. Hence, you need to prepare long term plans about collaborating resources, its utilization, future competitive needs, customized solutions, etc. It gears them up for a strategic course of action for successful projects. And hiring a dedicated development team turns out a better option.

Also Read: Is Your Dedicated Web Development Team Making These Common Mistakes?

5. Look Away The Similar Project In The Bucket

Similar projects sprout more ideas and give a thorough insight into the team’s skills.

One size never fits everyone: No web guarantees the exact replica of the business requirements unless they are made customized. The expectation of the stakeholders necessitates the managers for taking proper insights for similar prior projects.

Bloatware is dangerous: Working over the old frameworks always leave the company in midstream. Therefore changing the frameworks and finding the compatibility with the existing system is necessary. Around 44 percent of businesses are raising their IT budgets for customization, which was a little lazy effort a few years back.

 

hiring dedicated developers

6. Communication Gap and Undecided Goals

Better communication flow hedges the efficient development of the project. If communication is deteriorated due to the unwanted communication gap, the project development would be more wretched. Bridging the communication gaps through potent mediums is a must. Furthermore, there must be predetermined goals and objectives for managing offshore teams efficiently. It is to be jotted down while planning future decisions with an offshore development team.

7. Disregarding Cultural Differences

Higher cost does not guarantee upper hand on skills: Most prominent psychological blunder outsourcer make is to give blindfold trust to tier1 resources. Always check the correlation between financial attraction, skills and business environments.

offshore development_graph

Play wisely with geographical diversity of web development: Web development industry is too wide and covers almost every civilized community in the world. The way of settling the conflicts always differs from culture to culture. High context people are way harder to deal whereas low context people prefer to discuss conflicts better.

8. Inefficient Management and Coordination

The managerial efficiency leads, yielding road maps with viable options for additional developments. You need to ensure that there would be a Project manager in the dedicated development team. It makes them responsible for planning budget, team resources, time management, quality assurance, reporting, and documentation. Furthermore, you need to establish better coordinated and planned meetings for managing offshore remote teams. There may be an issue with a time zone difference while scheduling a call or meetings, so a better mutual decision would end it.

9. Lack of Detailed Documentation Before Hiring

The lack of proper and detailed documentation may lead to unwary future consequences. You will not be yet confirmed about the credentials of the dedicated remote team. It is better to have detailed documentation of all relevant details before hiring. Around 39 percent of the project fails due to the unclear or bad requirement gathering.

  • Your product specification document must be engaging and effective.
  • PRD communicates the necessary capabilities, that need to be included before release to the testing and development team.
  • For channelizing every effort into the forwarding step, you should be in contact with the offshore development team
  • Also, quality assurance becomes easy.

10. Overemphasize On Cost

Every business decision is ultimately motivated by cost. Good research can let you get the premium services at a much lower cost than other available options.

Less focus on cost-effectiveness: Spending a few bucks more can never purchase you the better efficiency. The secret of the good web lies in the development process and models. The European and US developers prefer Agile/DevOps model (leaving great scope for improvement), whereas few countries still work with the Waterfall method.

So where do you draw the line?

The key here is to do your research and figure out what the ‘average’ fees are from different offshoring companies. Ideally, you’d be able to discuss specific case studies and real numbers.

Focus over good SRS: A perfect SRS saves time, reduces cost, increases transparency, and leverage the understanding with the development team.

Offshoring reduces the cost by 50 percent, eliminate the defect by 25 percent and reduce the time to launch by 40 percent; only and only if the above factors are given significant concern.

The global IT outsourcing market was $62bn in 2018 and rising with CAGR of 6% annually. [Beroe Inc.]

Wrapping up

The embellished role of the offshore development team can offer you a more economical product development process. But you need to avoid these mistakes for preventing unprecedented managerial and financial problems. Whether you opt for MVP or directly launching the product, the time-to-market is a significant factor to look for, which is considerably reduced with 37% difference, while choosing a dedicated development team. Apart from the above, the development team must have business-specific skills. It is always not possible for offshore developers to advance the specific skill, whereas the dedicated team model leverages the specific needs, therefore considered successful.

Dedicated Wordpresss Development

Why Agencies Prefer to Hire a Dedicated Development Team for WordPress

WordPress, the most popular CMS powers over 35% of the entire websites on the internet and holds over 61.4% of the CMS market share. However, the popularity of WordPress CMS has also increased the average cost businesses pay for the right WordPress skills. Hiring cost of WordPress developers in-house in tier 1 countries like the US, UK and Europe is close to $70 – $80 per hour. And this fosters a need for outsourcing. The average cost of hiring expert WordPress developers in India is about $20 to $30, which is lower as compared to some tier 1 and tier 2 countries.

Today, outsourcing is a major part of every business strategy. The global outsourcing industry amounted to $92.5 billion in 2019. Businesses have started utilizing different kinds of outsourcing. Agencies today prefer to build their dedicated development teams to meet long-term outsourcing goals and have better control over their projects. One of the most popular categories of the dedicated team model is WordPress development teams.

The global outsourcing industry amounted to $92.5 billion in 2019

Source

The question is why agencies prefer a dedicated WordPress development team over project-based outsourcing?

1. Building Smartly Managed Websites

Unlike project-based outsourcing where agencies have less to no control over the development process, the dedicated team model allows them to manage their offshore team as transparently as the in-house team. Businesses can train their dedicated development teams to build WordPress websites that have a guided backend. This helps website owners to manage their websites intuitively. The guided backend includes instructions like the maximum size of the image file, the number of characters fitting right in the display, and the minimum image resolution required.

2. Quality-focussed and Secure Websites

One of the main concerns with outsourcing web development is the quality and security of outsourced web solutions. Amidst the alarming security threats, 64% of businesses have experienced some sort of web-based attacks. Website security is important! Agencies find it more convenient to hire a dedicated development team that could follow reliable security standards. Secure authorization, form validation and spam protection are some standard parameters that need to be checked for a secure website.

hiring dedicated developers

3. Building Standards for SEO-smart Websites

With a dedicated remote team, an agency can introduce agency-wide quality standards to make SEO-smart WordPress websites. This includes important SEO implementations like metadata, heading tags, etc. Moreover, some pages like Thank You page and Cart pages should not be crawled by search engines and need to be marked as ‘noindex’ in the backend.

4. Offering Low-maintenance Websites to Clients

Having a dedicated development team that works as an extension to your in-house team helps agencies follow the best web development practices. These include low-maintenance web solutions that follow standard customization ethics and are not crowded with plugins.

 5. Building User-focussed Website Solutions

Working in precise coordination with the dedicated remote team helps businesses to mitigate the cross-cultural gap up to a certain extent. Businesses can easily share their goals and vision with their dedicated remote team. Associating a sense of accountability and ownership to a web development project motivates the offshore team to work devotedly and offer qualitative, user-focussed website solutions. Use of interactive elements and simpler user interface help developers make more user-friendly web solutions.

 Other Key Benefits of Hiring a Dedicated Team:

  • No overhead costs of the dedicated resources as they are on the payroll of the outsourcing agency.
  • You can train your dedicated team to follow your work processes and agency-wide standards.
  • You can manage the team structure and make additions on-demand.
  • You have access to the global pool of talent.
  • You can save on the resource cost if you hire an offshore dedicated team from tier 2 and tier 3 countries.
  • You have a high-level control over your team and can also manage your team yourself.
  • You can scale easily as compared to the inhouse team model.

Summing Up

The WordPress web development interface is changing each day with the rising competition in the web sector. From the introduction of augmented reality to the expressive typography and Parallax web design, web agencies are focussing on delivering the best of solutions to their clients. This fades the reliability over project-based outsourcing and wondrously creates a need for the dedicated team model.