The pandemic or not, nothing has stopped app developers from pushing forward. Mobile app downloads rose by 7 percent from 2019 to 218 billion in 2020, which is a 7 percent increase from 2019. That being said, a mobile app is only good as the development team that created it! I surveyed entrepreneurs to discover the most common challenges they face today with app development. And 37.5% of participants cited establishing the right development team as the biggest challenge they faced.
The objective of this article is to lay out all your options for setting up your mobile development team (in the current market) and the pros and cons of each one. We’ll get started now!
Inhouse
Your team works in your office space, and you have access to them 8 hours a day, five days a week. At first glance, that seems pretty convenient, right? Understanding this ramification and assessing its suitability for you are key to determining whether it is for you.
Is it Time to Go In-House?
- It shows throughout everything you do and everyone you work with that you have a very specific work culture.
- It is imperative for your business to have an in-house team.
- There is a strong employer brand at your large organization, but you would rather have another division.
- There are situations when you operate with highly sensitive information or trade secrets that could harm your business if revealed.
Here’s how it works
Essentially, it consists of three key phases – planning, recruiting, and choosing employees. During planning, you determine how many team members are necessary, as well as what sort of development will be needed, and based on this, what skill sets these new developers will need (yes, this requires intensive research).
In recruiting, your goal is to reach out to every prospective candidate through a variety of recruitment methods, including job postings, advertisements, job referrals, and campus recruitment. Once you have the candidate, the process of interviewing and evaluating them begins.
It is pretty self-explanatory how employees are selected. As part of the evaluation process, you determine which developers will best suit your needs in addition to their abilities. Once you have done those tests and finally had an interview, hopefully you will find the right team to develop mobile apps for you.
How is the recruitment and selecting process?
To give you a better idea of the hiring process, here are a few examples:
Step 1: Apply for jobs
It is possible to increase the number of applicants for your job posting in a variety of ways. Listings can appear on your website, on social media platforms, and even on platforms like LinkedIn and Indeed. You can track their progress and once the applications have been received, it’s time to conduct a talent assessment.
Step 2: track the applications
The process of processing job applications and managing the hiring process is automated by Application Tracking Systems. Many times, talent assessments are conducted prior to the interview.
Step 3: Job Interview
Depending on how precise your selection process is, the candidate may be interviewed more than once. Perform capability testing with the developer. After the candidate is hired, background and reference checks are done.
Step 4: Hire paperwork
The paperwork that follows the selection of your ideal application development team will take a lot of work, not just for the employee-to-be, but for both of you. The company-specific paperwork, tax forms, and other paperwork will all be your responsibility.
The Advantages of Hiring an Inhouse Team
Adaptability to culture
Physically, it’s very likely that someone is coming in from somewhere in the area if they need to be on your office premises. In this case, they won’t be subjected to any cultural shocks. As a result, your company can add more value to the application development team through better team integration & communication.
The availability of on-site personnel
In a seamless virtual environment, the chances of a gap in understanding or consistency in understanding are slightly lower than if it were explained physically.
Drawbacks of Hiring an Inhouse Team
The cost of Inhouse is high
Does the slight advantage that in-house hiring provides over augmenting your app development team justify the cost? No because you underestimate how expensive it is.
It costs on average $103,009 to hire an experienced in-house developer in the US. Besides those costs, you need to pay for infrastructure, payroll, employee benefits, training costs, and other overheads, all of which may be avoided if you hire offshore developers.
Deficiency of talent
A developer with an exceptional caliber would cost some $9k to $10k per month, so don’t bother hiring one in-house unless you are willing to pay that much.
As a starter salary for an app developer, you can expect to earn $7k/month, rather than the $3,500 you can get from an offshore developer with years of experience.
A low retention rate
There is a high employee turnover rate in fields such as design and development. In fact, the rate is quite high. According to a report released in 2019, the software industry experienced one of the highest employee turnover rates (21.7%) of any industry.
If there are so many luring offers out there, imagine the time it would take you to train a new developer, only to lose them to some company that will give them a better salary.
Freelancers
There are many factors to consider when hiring individuals who can independently develop apps. These individuals can be found on websites like Upwork, Fiverr, Freelancer, etc.
When you are extremely risk-averse, hiring freelancers is attractive. Spending less money will make you think that you’ll take fewer risks. Unfortunately, what you don’t realize is that the chances of losing that money instead increase.
We hear about how often our clients are burned by freelancers every day as an app development company. I don’t mean to be rude, but if you think it’s something insignificant, then you may as well hire a freelance developer.
How Do You Know When to Go Freelance?
What You Need
You could go with a freelance developer if you just want to tweak some fonts and placements on a Native Android app. Choosing a bunch of strangers on the internet for an app development team is a lot more dangerous when the requirement is large.
Small Budget
You might not want to burn a hole in your pocket, so hiring a freelance mobile app developer sounds more appealing. There are places that sell them for as low as $500 if you try your luck, but you have to be really careful not to get scammed.
Freelancer Developers Offer a variety of Benefits
There are many options
Find tons of developers on Upwork who are willing to build your mobile app by searching for “mobile app developer” right now. Considering that you may as well hire multiple developers if you want to hire a dedicated team to work on your app.
Efficient Budgeting
There will be no doubt that the pricing will be very competitive when you have so many options to choose from. There is a wide range of mobile app technologies you can choose from including React Native, Xamarin, Swift, and many more. You’ll find mobile app developers to design and build your mobile application from scratch at an affordable cost.
Disadvantages of Hiring Freelancers
Poor reliability
Upwork, for instance, allows anyone to set up a profile and produce work samples.While you might have some knowledge about app development, you may give them a test task and they might show you something that you’re not sure they worked on.
No Commitment
Freelancers are just individuals at the end of the day. Organizations worked hard to become what they are, which explains how they grew and became an entity. The stakes aren’t as high for freelancers as they are for app development companies. If you need something done right away then you need people who are dedicated, but freelancers unlike companies lack this commitment this usually means that they’re not committed to the task at hand.
Security and Law Enforcement
You need to hire more than one freelancer when you’re looking for an app development team. It will be difficult for a bunch of strangers to coordinate if one of them is not proficient or consistent enough. Furthermore, if the freelance developers you’ve hired are from a different country, there may be obvious time zone differences and questions of work compliance.
Augmentation of staff
Essentially, Staff Augmentation means augmenting your staff, if you’re hearing it for the first time. By hiring your own virtual staff of developers, instead of outsourcing to a company, you will be able to choose the exact number of developers you need.
It is possible to work with this virtual staff on an on-going basis, just as you would with your own employees. Plus, if you have a development team already, you can supplement that with an extension or replacement of the rest of the team.
The benefits of augmentation of staff
A huge pool of talent
A staff augmentation company often has hundreds of experienced developers and designers who have worked for the company for many years. These developers and designers have worked together on scores of projects during that period of time. Therefore, there is a high probability of finding developers who are highly skilled and have a synergistic ability to work together as a team.
Cost reductions
Staff augmentation companies (like Resourcifi, for example) provide dedicated app development teams that slash payroll costs significantly. In addition, you won’t incur overhead expenses, payroll costs, employee benefits, or training costs.
Stay on top of deadlines
Project managers are employed by staff augmentation companies to manage the entire development process. As well as meeting your deadlines, you can rest assured that they will ensure you are communicated with at every step and that your needs will be met within the given deadlines.
Achieving exceptional results
In contrast to a staff augmentation firm that has invested years to build itself specifically with the intention of growing and generating brand value, freelancers do not have to coordinate with anyone, meaning they are not required to be punctual. If they had been able to execute really well, they could’ve thrived all those years.
Adaptability
You could never scale your team up if you hired developers in-house or even as freelancers. With staff augmentation companies, you have access to a pool of highly-qualified candidates whom you can integrate into your remote team. By doing so, you can immediately scale up or scale down your team.
Now it’s up to you!
There are pros and cons to every option mentioned above. With more than a decade of experience in the staffing industry, we recommend reaching out to us to learn more about how we can collaborate to develop your application.
As a leading staff augmentation company, we’ve won several awards. UI/UX Designers and mobile app developers on a full-time, part-time, and an hourly basis are available from our staff. Were you wondering how much money you could save if you hired Resourcifi’s developers and designers for your mobile apps? Use this calculator to determine your savings.