4 Ways to Make Hiring and Onboarding a Developer Easier

Hiring a developer is rarely easy. Traditional recruiting channels are overcrowded; there’s a huge market demand for software devs and a shortage of talent to meet that demand, making it difficult for companies to fill their vacancies.

And that’s not even the half of it. If you do manage to find an eligible candidate, the onboarding process presents another set of challenges. All in all, finding and getting a developer to the project stage can take up to 6 months - can you really afford to wait that long?

If not, don’t worry - there are some things you can do to speed up the process. Here are 4 tips to make onboarding/hiring a developer easier, simpler, and a whole lot quicker.

1. Take advantage of your employee networks

Fun fact: On average, it only takes 29 days to hire a referred candidate versus 39 days through job postings, and 55 days through career sites (per a study by JobVite).

Not only that, but referred candidates are also cheaper to hire (you avoid traditional recruiting costs like agency fees and job board ad costs) and will onboard faster than traditional hires as the employee who referred them will likely help them to integrate into the team and answer their questions.

The upshot of this is clear: if you want to save yourself time, money, and hassle, take advantage of referrals.

A great way to do this is to build a referral chain and encourage your employees to get the message out there that your company is a great place to work using employee advocacy tools like LinkedIn Elevate

2. Don’t rely on resumes

One of the biggest challenges to the hiring process is finding the right candidate. You don’t want to waste time and money onboarding someone only to realize later that they weren’t right for the job after all.

And one of the main things that can catch employers out is a misleading CV. Resumes are great for initially narrowing down the pool of applicants, but they’ll only take you so far - they’re not a foolproof way to assess a candidate’s ability to do their job.

A candidate might sound great on paper but lack the context-dependent skills and passion needed to fit in. Similarly, someone without an impressive-sounding IT degree can be easily overlooked, but they might be super talented.

Instead of asking for CVs, try asking job-specific work sample questions (but keep them short and sweet). It’ll allow you to vet candidates on what really matters more quickly and save you time in the long run.

3. Test their skills in the interview

Noone likes recruitment processes that drag out over weeks. Try to get a feel for how your candidates work and communicate at the interview stage.

This doesn’t mean putting them through a lengthy assault course of complex coding tasks, but it might mean talking through a real project with them, as well as your team, or having them work with another team member for a short pair programming task to test their ability to solve a real-world problem

4. Use NerdCloud

Of course, you can cut all of the above out completely by using NerdCloud instead. NerdCloud offers a flexible, scalable outsourcing solution for CTOs that need immediate access to developers to help them to work through a backlog, but don’t want the headaches that come with hiring and onboarding new developers.

With us, you don’t need to spend months hiring a developer. You can just sign up and delegate tasks to us. We have direct access to a pool of dozens of top developers that can get the job done and deliver the code to you in days.

No need to draw up contracts. No need to take on new employees. And no need to miss deadlines. If you’re interested, you can sign up- it only takes 15 minutes.

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