How To Verify Tech Skills When Hiring Offshore Software Engineer

With talent shortages preventing many businesses from scaling at the speed they want, alternative ways of building software teams have risen in recent times. However, whether you’re hiring developers locally or building a team overseas, you’ll need to verify tech skills early on in the recruitment process. But before we look into that, let’s explore two of the ways CTOs and other tech leaders are building or extending their teams abroad to combat local talent shortages.

Key hiring differences between outsourcing and offshoring

With outsourcing the engineers you work with are hired by a third-party vendor. While this lessens time spent on recruitment it also means you can’t verify tech skills or the cultural fit of your potential new recruits.

• Outsourcing is where you work with an external vendor, often known as a software house and is ideal for short-term projects and to temporarily solve a pipeline bulge or sudden capacity decrease. These engineers do not work for you alone. Their focus is split between multiple projects for various clients.
• Offshoring is where you build a dedicated team of engineers that are integrated into your wider engineering setup. Essentially, you work with them in the same way you do with your developers locally, and they’re full-time colleagues fully invested into your business’ mission and values.

When working with an offshore partner, they handle initial candidate sourcing, technical testing, personality assessments, and first-stage interviews. This makes it easier to verify tech skills and ensure that the new engineers slide seamlessly into your existing setup.

How to verify tech skills of new engineers

Technical skills typically fall into different categories, so it’s important to have all the areas covered when hiring developers.

• Programming languages
• Problem-solving skills
• Data and algorithms
• Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
• Databases
• Source control

To test for these skills, there are a multitude of ways to go about it. Obviously you can interview and ask relevant questions, and prior to that have a look at their online portfolio of work. Often, they’ll also have an account on Github — which is almost like a car showroom of code.

Additionally, you need to ensure the developers you hire have a competent suite of soft skills! These include things like working well in a team, possessing great communication skills, time management, and a considered approach to decision making. Most importantly, that they match the values and mission of your organisation. This is something that separates in-house teams — which includes offshore centres — and outsourcing. Outsourced engineers are external support whereas in-house engineers are full-time, value-adding colleagues.

Read the full article at:https://thescalers.com/how-to-verify-tech-skills-when-hiring-offshore-software-engineers/