Lots of companies worldwide want to hire offshore development teams as a means of business growth for many years. The reason is that hiring a team of professionals to meet the needs of your future projects is much more convenient than building a team from scratch. In addition, it is cost-effective.

In our new article, we will look at the following questions:

• What is an offshore development team and why is it a trend?
• What types of businesses should consider hiring an offshore development team?
• How can your company save on hiring an offshore development team?
• How not to hire fraudsters and check the quality of the team’s work?
• What are the main members of an offshore development team?
• What are the best places to hire offshore development teams?
• How to get the maximum benefit from the offshore development team?
• How to save time searching and hiring an offshore development team and get a great result?

We will try to describe in as much detail as possible each of the aspects of the topic of how to hire offshore development teams.

What is an Offshore Development Team?

Before we analyze how to hire offshore developers, let’s find out what an offshore development team is. An offshore development team is a group of remote IT specialists that you can hire to complete development projects. They are based abroad, where the cost of living and salary expectations are much lower.

Not only do these people negate development costs, but their diversity gives them the flexibility to take on just about any project.

What distinguishes these teams is that a company may hire a dedicated team to do all the IT product development or a project-based team to do some parts of the development.

Why are Offshore Development Teams So Popular?

Offshoring has become very popular in recent years. And not casually. About 10 years ago, its primary goal was to reduce costs. Therefore, lower salaries, taxes and maintenance costs were the main reasons for going offshoring. Technology companies are currently turning to this strategy to find talented developers abroad, as they feel a shortage of qualified personnel in their country.

For example, this problem is observed in the United States. It has become especially noticeable against the backdrop of a growing number of IT vacancies. According to the Association for Competitive Technology (ACT), more than a quarter of a million technical positions are open in America.

Despite the fact that the country receives more than 62,000 IT graduates annually, this is still not enough to solve the problem with a shortage of developers. Therefore, companies are experiencing serious difficulties hiring developers, even with sufficient funding.

In this case, offshoring comes to the rescue. More and more world-famous corporations are moving to this model by opening their own offices abroad. This business strategy also allows them to fill the internal talent gap by creating offshore teams.

Hire Offshore Development Team or In-house?

Thanks to online collaboration tools and broad internet access, offshoring has become a significantly cheaper option than recruiting the in-house expertise required to compete with larger competitors. Offshoring development work can help you save even more money because it’s often easy to hire qualified developers in other countries for a fraction of the price of local employees.

To hire offshore development teams is also more flexible than employing on a contract basis, whether short-term or long-term. As a result, you may quickly increase or decrease workloads as needed by your projects. In other words, you will only be required to pay for the talent when it is required.

There is also the significant advantage of being able to hire offshore developers from all around the world rather than being limited by regional constraints.

How to Hire Offshore Development Team in 7 Quick Steps

Now let’s move on to practice. Let’s take a look at the basic steps you need to take to hire an offshore development team.

Step 1: Analyze your goals & problems and create a budget & action plan

Before you hire an offshore development team:

• Decide on your ultimate goals.
• Define your main problems.
• Create a budget for each of the processes.
• Build an action plan.

These steps will help you organize the hiring and product development processes right from the start. When you know exactly what you want to get in the end, you will not have any difficulties with your offshore team in the future.

Step 2: Describe your needs and formulate technical requirements

Describe your needs in detail. Describe exactly what your future product should be, what characteristics it should have and what function it should perform.

Formulate technical requirements for your product. Prepare a document that describes the future functionality of the product, its main features, its capabilities, etc.

Step 3: Select key criteria for your candidates (Portfolio, price, skills)

Before starting the hiring process, create a portrait of your ideal team. Decide what you will evaluate during the selection of candidates. We advise first of all to evaluate work experience, portfolio, results of completed projects and soft & hard skills.

Step 4: Write questions for the interview

Next, write a list of interview questions. Here is an example from our team:

• What’s your experience? How long have you been working in the industry?
• What projects have you worked on? What areas were these projects from?
• What challenges did you face in product development, and how did you solve them?
• What were the results of the projects you worked on?
• Have you had failed projects? What were the reasons for the failure?
• Is communication in the team well established?
• How quickly do you solve problems that arise during product development?
• What tech stacks do you prefer to use during the work?
• Do you follow the trends and best practices during product development?
• How are you different from other developers?
• What is the key to your team’s success?

Step 5: Select candidates

Next, select the candidates that you think are the most suitable for your future project. We advise creating a list of about 5-7 candidates. Do not select too many or too few candidates. The main thing is that the candidates you select should be among the best on the market.

Step 6: Select a team and sign the contract

After you choose one candidate, feel free to sign a contract with a team. This is an important part of the hiring process, so take it seriously. The contract is the official confirmation of your cooperation with the team.

Step 7: Or you can contact RewiSoft

Or you can save time and contact our team. We are always glad to have new projects and partners. Our team is ready to listen to your wishes and turn your ideas into working products.

Hire Offshore Development Team with RewiSoft

RewiSoft team provides exceptional digital product design and custom development services. Our team has already built 150+ digital products for companies from 45 countries.

RewiSoft team has extensive expertise in:

• Web development. We are dedicated to providing first-class web development services to ensure the presence of your business on the Web.
• Digital design. RewiSoft digital design services include concept generation, UI and UX design, research, product evaluation, and digital branding.
• Mobile app development. RewiSoft team monitors trends and best practices to create a mobile application that solves specific business tasks.
• Software development. The competence of our software development team allows us to provide our customers with high-quality and reliable services.
• Custom web portals development. RewiSoft team has a wealth of experience creating custom web portals that provide a cohesive digital experience to our clients’ audiences.
• Software consulting. By combining technical knowledge and domain understanding in practically all sectors, we provide our customers with not just amazing software but also the solution their business requires to develop confidently.
• Quality Assurance. With a well-established quality assurance approach, we have assisted worldwide organizations in gaining predictability, increasing performance, drastically lowering overall testing costs, and achieving more significant ROI.

Our team showed great results and made:

Clutch’s Top 20 Product Designers & Developers and The Manifest’s Top 4 Product Design Team

We have worked with such well-known brands as Kickstarter, Careem, Government Of Dubai, AWSM Bank

In case you have any product ideas in mind, contact us!

Our dedicated development team will help you deliver your project on time and in the best possible way. You focus on the core business goals and we take care of the rest.

Who Needs to Hire Offshore Development Team

What types of businesses and companies need to hire offshore development teams? Let’s take a closer look:

Startups Founders

With offshoring, you are much more likely to find someone who matches

exactly what you are looking for for your startup. When you choose to hire offshore developers, you get one specialist or team that is good at a few things, not a whole bunch of things.

Startups often face limited knowledge and expertise in specific stages or areas of development. A good way out of the situation is to use offshoring in order to hire one or more team members to perform certain tasks.

Startups usually have a limited budget, and hiring local specialists is often very expensive. Offshoring in this situation can help hire great talent at lower prices than in the country where the startup is located. When you hire offshore developers, you won’t have to pay monthly salaries or pay vacations. You pay only for work performed or hours worked.

Mid-size companies

Medium-sized companies can get many benefits by hiring an offshoring team. Firstly, by hiring such a team, the company receives exactly those skills and knowledge they need at a specific time for a specific project.

Medium-sized companies can save a lot by choosing to offshore. Typically, mid-sized companies test or update their products a lot. By hiring an offshoring team, you get a good team of specialists or one specialist for a while to get a certain result and progress.

If medium-sized companies already have their own in-house team, but they lack a specific specialist with specific knowledge and skills, offshoring becomes salvation. By choosing offshoring, you get a large number of talents to choose from all over the world.

Few Cases When You Need To Hire an Offshore Development Team

Let’s now look at a few cases where offshoring can be very useful:

Startup development from scratch

If you are a startup and just starting to develop your project, consider offshoring. Now in the world, there are many IT specialists who are ready to take on development from scratch and support you at all stages of project development.

Application modernization

If your company has a working software but needs some changes and improvements, we recommend that you choose offshoring. Improvement of the application most often requires a small amount of time, so you definitely do not need to hire an in-house team. Feel free to delegate the main stages of upgrading your application to specialists from offshore teams.

Cloud migration

Offshore development teams can help you if you need to migrate your product, software or service to the cloud. This is also not a very long process so you will need several specialists for this process for a short period of time. If you want to reduce costs and increase the performance of your product or service, then feel free to contact offshore development teams.

Staff augmentation

Staff augmentation is an offshoring strategy used to staff a project and achieve business goals. The methodology consists of assessing existing staff and then determining the additional skills required. One possible advantage of this approach is that it can use existing resources as well as the services of third parties and contractors.

Solution development

Offshore development teams can help you develop solutions. Offshore teams are usually staffed with all the necessary specialists to carry out each of the stages of solution development. Compared to an in-house team, it will be much cheaper for you to hire an offshore team.

Why Do You Need to Hire an Offshore Development Team?

Let’s now look at the main benefits of working with offshore development teams. What exactly can you get by starting to work with an offshore team?

Save money

Of course, one of the main advantages of working with an offshore development team is saving money. You can find a good offshore team in countries where the standard of living is not very high. However, this does not mean that the team will not be educated or experienced. Many countries in Eastern Europe offer excellent IT specialists every year who can become a pillar for your company or project.

Qualified team

Offshoring offers up hundreds and thousands of talents from all over the world. You can choose specialists with the knowledge, talents, and skills you need. You are absolutely not limited in choice. There are a large number of ambitious IT professionals in Europe, South America and Asia.

Reduction of tax burdens

You don’t have to think about paying taxes by hiring an offshore development team. After all, you hire specialists from another country, so you are not required to pay taxes for using their services. So, it helps save a significant amount of money.

Without a long hiring process

When companies hire in-house specialists, they spend a lot of time on interviews, checking test tasks, formalizing employees in the company, signing various documents, etc. By hiring an offshore development team, you will spend two or more times less on the hiring process. All you will need to do is find a team, conduct interviews and check portfolios, for example.

Closing the full development cycle

The offshore development team can be staffed with all the necessary specialists for the full development cycle. That is, often, you do not have to hire specialists separately. You can immediately hire an offshore development team where there will be specialists responsible for each of the stages of the product development cycle.

Qualified management team

You also get a management team when you hire a good offshore development team. You do not need to worry about how the work in the offshore team will be organized. A qualified management team will handle all organizational issues, planning, control and management.

Flexibility and convenience in work

Offshore development teams are very flexible. You can organize your cooperation as you need. You can arrange regular meetings to discuss progress on projects, for example. The main thing to remember is that you should find a compromise if you are not in the same time zone as your team. Working with an offshore team is very convenient. You give tasks and deadlines, and the offshore team takes care of the rest.

What Do You Need to Know Before Hiring an Offshore Development Team?

Now let’s look at the main things you should be aware of when hiring an offshore development team:

Best regions for hiring an offshore development team

The modern infrastructure allows us to hire highly qualified software developers around the world. According to various sources, Ukraine and Poland in Eastern Europe, Argentina in South America and India in Asia are the main offshoring countries. Let’s analyze them all in more detail:

Argentina

Argentina offers free educational opportunities by investing heavily in school education. Offshore teams in Argentina are experienced in software and mobile development, cloud computing and DevOps.

Argentina’s main advantage over other countries is a reliable telecommunications network, which is great for internet startups.

Every year, about 100,000 technicians graduate from universities in Argentina. Most developers are familiar with C, Java, PHP, JavaScript, .NET Framework and Data Science.

Eastern Europe

In Ukraine, although it offers extensive educational opportunities, a significant part of IT education is focused on extra-curricular courses. Some companies provide free education with further job opportunities. In general, more and more IT professionals graduate from universities and private schools every year. In 2018 alone, there were 40,000 IT graduates. Ukraine is also considered one of the best countries for web development offshoring.

In 2018, the UK Global Outsourcing Association named Ukraine as an offshoring destination. Enterprises from the USA transfer approximately 80% of IT projects to Ukraine; a lot of backend work determines developers’ ability to learn new technologies and frameworks. According to the Crysberry report, Ukraine ranks #1 in C++ and Unity3d, #2 in Magento, JS and Scala and #3 in Ruby, Python, Node.js and ASP.NET by the number of developers in the world.

Information education in Poland is in high demand, attracting students from all over Europe. PHP is the most popular language of programming in this country. Java and .NET are also widely used.

India

Due to historical implications, India offers a western approach to education. Although the literacy rate is relatively low, there is an increasing focus on mathematical research that contributes to the advancement of technology. India is considered a good country for application development initiatives.

Average price

Before you start working with an offshore development team, you should know exactly how much the team’s services cost and what cooperation model they use. We will tell you more about how much it costs to hire an offshore development team a little later.

Basic skills and qualifications

It is also essential to assess team members’ basic skills and qualifications in advance. This is an important part of preparing for hiring an offshore development team. You need to know what specific knowledge and skills you need for your project.

Management process

An important aspect of cooperation with the offshore development team is management. For effective team management, we recommend using agile or scrum methodology.

Scrum is a set of rules for organizing an agile workflow that consists of a team approach, working in iterations, focusing on the goal of each iteration, and non-standard distribution of responsibilities within the team.

Agile is an approach to software development that is often adopted by small teams and large organizations. The agile work process is divided into iterations – short cycles of two to three weeks.

Development process

It is also important for you to know the main stages of the product development cycle. We divided the SDLC into the following stages:

• Product Technical Documentation
• Development
• Testing
• Deployment & Integration
• Maintenance

How It Works in practise When You Hire Offshore Development Team

Hiring an offshore team from strong, dynamically developing IT companies that have successfully completed projects and have proven their competitiveness can be an effective solution for the rapid entry into the market of young enterprises. An experienced offshore development team will help you reach a qualitatively new level and declare yourself ahead of the competition.

How to work with an offshore development team in practice? Here is a list of steps to go through:

• Problem analysis. First of all, you should determine why you need an offshore development team, what problem you want to solve and what result to get.
• Describe requirements and create documentation. Everything that you want to get from an offshore development team should be documented so that there will be no problems and misunderstandings in the future.
• Finding and hiring a team. We will talk about this a bit later.
• Establishing workflow and communication. Teamwork that is well-coordinated is crucial, as is frequent communication, so that you can witness every step of your work’s development.

You can read more about how an offshore development team or dedicated team works in our article How to Hire a Dedicated Software Development Team?

Who are The Members of The Offshore Development Team?

An offshore development team may include the following members:

• Project managers
• UX/UI designers
• DevOps
• Business analysts
• Development team lead
• Front-end engineers
• Back-end engineers
• Quality assurance engineers and others

When you work with an offshore development team, you have a group of IT experts and dedicated team developers that are completely focused on your product. The offshoring vendor is in charge of acquiring new professionals as well as providing administrative assistance to the offshore development team.

Best Places To Hire an Offshore Development Team

Now let’s look at the main places where you can find an excellent and experienced offshore development team:

RewiSoft Team

Our offshore development team will help you deliver your project on time and in the best possible way. You focus on the essential company goals and we take care of the rest.

Our cooperation process is divided into 5 stages:

Obtaining requirements

We begin by listening to your needs, which may include a project description, job descriptions, team size, and preferred process.

Team gathering

We have a developer talent pool that allows us to offer any remote development team in less than a week.

Selection of talent

Our HR staff evaluates candidates to learn about their background, technical capabilities, level of English, and soft skills before selecting the best-fit candidate for a final interview with you.

Team integration

We seamlessly and painlessly incorporate our staff into your ongoing project based on years of experience. You have the option of selecting your chosen management method and tools.

The outcome

Hiring an offshore development team in Ukraine gives you full control over the required professionals, exactly like hiring an in-house team. The only difference is that the team works remotely and we manage all administrative tasks.

Want to know more information? Check here. Or if you have any questions, feel free to contact us!

Recommendation

One of the best ways to find a team of professionals is to ask your friends, colleagues, partners for a recommendation. Perhaps they worked with a good team and got great results. By using the recommendation, you can at least save time searching.

Social Networks

You can find offshore development teams and their representatives on social networks such as LinkedIn. You can chat with them to learn more about their experience and the projects they’ve worked on. In addition, you can evaluate the team members’ profiles and find out where they have worked before and what their main areas of work are.

Freelance WebSites

Freelance websites have a huge number of freelancers from different countries. However, in this case, you will need to spend a sufficient amount of time to find experienced and suitable specialists for your project. After all, there are a lot of newcomers and sometimes even unreliable developers on such sites.

Listings

You can also find a good offshore development team using websites like Clutch.co, GoodFirms, Manifest, etc. These are listing resources where a large number of different offshore development teams are collected. There you can find reviews about the teams, their rating, examples of projects and many other details.

How to Check Offshore Development Team Quality

Now let’s learn how to check the quality of an offshore development team. Pay attention to the following aspects:

Portfolio

First of all, evaluate the team’s portfolio. Take a look at what projects the team has worked on, what industry these projects are from, what results the team has achieved, etc.

Reviews

Find testimonials from previous clients. The best way to read reviews is to go to the rating site Clutch.co, where companies post their projects and where their clients can post reviews of their work.

Recommendations

Heed the recommendations. If you have chosen a team that your friends or partners advised you on, then ask them about the strengths and weaknesses of the team, the quality of the work performed, the fulfillment of deadlines, in general, everything that is important to you in the team.

The complexity of the project

Pay attention to the level and complexity of the projects that the team has previously completed. How successful were these projects? Did the clients get the expected results? How complex were the projects the team worked on? By answering these questions, you will get even closer to a more accurate assessment of your team’s effectiveness.

Team composition

Pay attention to the composition of the team. The team should include all the specialists needed to complete the project. All specialists should have all the necessary knowledge and skills, each in their field.

Workflow

Evaluate how well and correctly built the team workflow. It depends on how successful the project will be. Also, the workflow should include the correctly built SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle). Earlier, we described what processes should be in it.

How to Manage Offshore Developers

How to manage an offshore development team? Our team has put together some tips:

One place for communication

Choose one tool to communicate with the team. Thus, you can always control all your team’s actions and quickly resolve any issues related to the project.

Use task management tools

To plan project tasks and monitor their progress, use convenient task management tools. We also recommend using either one tool for all tasks, or several separately, for example, to perform the design stage, the development stage and other individual stages of product creation.

Set priorities and KPIs

Prioritize all tasks in your project and also set KPIs for your employees. Determine the main goals that should be achieved at certain stages of product development and motivate the team to achieve them.

There should be a clear team structure

You should build a clear team structure. Firstly, it is necessary to determine what responsibilities each team member has. Secondly, it is necessary to define the team hierarchy. Third, team members should work together.

How to Hire Offshore Developers and Overcome Typical Problems

During any process, we encounter certain problems. If you know in advance what are the main problems when hiring offshore development teams, you can avoid them or at least prepare. Let’s take a look at them:

Time zones

The first difficulty you may encounter when you want to hire offshore developers is the time difference. If, let’s say, your team is located in another hemisphere, most likely, you will encounter a communication problem. In order to deal with this problem, we recommend that you arrange in advance with your team about regular meetings and workshops to discuss tasks, progress, etc.

Cultural difference

You may also encounter cultural differences. Therefore, we recommend that you hire offshore developers from Eastern Europe. In European culture, there are no strong distinguishing features from the culture of the United States, for example, or most countries.

Lack of personal contact

Lack of personal contact can have a negative impact on understanding each other, and subsequently, you will not get the result you want. In order to avoid this problem, go on video calls with your team more often and keep in touch frequently.

How Much Does it Cost to Hire Offshore Development Team?

Rough project costs

Let’s now look at the prices for hiring an offshore development team in different parts of the world:

Eastern Europe

• Project Manager – $20-40/hr
• Designer – $35-60/hr
• Frontend Developer – $30-80/hr
• Backend Developer – $40-90/hr

Asia

• Project Manager – <35/hr
• Designer – <$40/hr
• Frontend Developer – <$45/hr
• Backend Developer – <$55/hr

South America

• Project Manager – <$40/hr
• Designer – <$45/hr
• Frontend Developer – $25-55/hr
• Backend Developer – $35-65/hr

Hire Offshore Development Team: Summary

We have covered the main things you should know to hire offshore developers. We hope our article will be a kind of useful instruction for you. In order for the process of hiring an offshore development team to be successful, remember the following things:

• The best places to find an offshore development team are RewiSoft, Social Networks, Freelance Websites, Rating websites and Listings.
• First, analyze your goals and problems. Decide on a project budget and an action plan.
• Formulate your requirements for the future product.
• Make up the main criteria for your candidates.
• Write questions for the interview.
• Choose a candidate and sign a contract.
• Evaluate the performance of your team.
• Take care of team management.

If you have any other questions on this topic, we will be happy to answer them. To do this, contact our team!