How to Find and Hire a Developer
At Silicon Beach Fest Hollywood 2012 Kevin Winston organized a panel called “How to Find and Hire a Developer”. Below are some take away tips… and the video of the of the panel.
- Always have a developer do a test project before hiring them to make sure they deliver quality work.
- One method to negotiate a lower rate or no cost to have a developer work with you > Pre sell your product. This means selling at least 5-10 customers in advance, before it is even built. This will prove your product is worth building to you and to the developer. You can do this by really understanding your target market and creating them a PDF outlining the solution you will be creating for them. Offer the customers a discount for buying in advance. Then when hiring a developer to build the project, show the developer you already have sales and offer them a percentage of passive income if they work at a lower or no charge rate.
- Understand that people are motivated to be a part of a larger vision and to work with someone they believe in. So, when hiring, focus more on being that leader, rather than the project itself. A good company like this employment reporting services can help you in employment screening to provide full employment and background history information, as well as background investigations for reference checking, education verification, driving records, drug screening, credit reports, and many more.
- Ask for code samples. Not just URLs that the developer created, but snippets of their source code that show how they write (comments, formatting, etc).
○ Even if you can’t read the code, if it looks organized, and you see a mix of English words (comments) around code that looks like it has structure, then you can get an idea of how they organize things
- Try to identify developers that are flexible in their design. If all their sites look the same, or without even hearing your full project requirements they say things like, “Your website has to be created in Ruby on Rails (or any language) or it won’t be viable”, then they will not be that flexible in how they address your needs.
- A developer should be asking you questions trying to identify how users interact with a site or application. If they’re not asking you lots of questions, maybe they are not trying to dig into the project enough to understand it
web & mobile development resources to find and hire a developer
cleverua.com – outsourced web & mobile app development based in the Ukraine, Ask for Pavlo
arcticempire.ca – mobile app development & code review based in Canada, Ask for Josh
datatv.com – web & interactive mobile web development based in Los Angeles, Ask for Adam
hirolabs.com – web & sortware development with dynamic design based in San Francisco, Ask for Tyler
biznessapps.com – easy mobile app creation for businesses
proveit.com – resource to test code, recommended by Janine at Fetch Recruiting
brainbench.com – automated tool to test code, recommended by Janine at Fetch Recruiting
Here’s Adam Bell on building a mobile friendly website…
Here’s the video of the “How to Find and Hire a Developer Panel”
moderator, Espree Devora of SaveBusinessTime – panelists include Janine Davis, founder of Fetch Recruiting, Matthew Pierce VP of Product innovation for Originate, Scott Lee, founder of Smilu and John Shiple, founder of Freelance CTO – in background Start Up Attorney Damion Robinson
