When to Hire and When to Let the Experts Do It For You

Here at Bixly we offer what we call Staff Augmentation. This is when we supply the talent you need for your software project. There are a couple of advantages to letting us source the talent. We have a strict testing and interview process in place. We’ve interviewed a lot of candidates, so it’s clear when a candidate shines and when they might need to take some time to brush up their skills.

On the other hand, hiring for a programmer internally can be a great option if you intend to develop software for two or more years. But if you’re not experienced in it, finding a quality programmer can be challenging. It’s a bit like finding someone to work on your car — sometimes it’s hard to tell their level of expertise if you are not also an expert in that domain.

Additionally, with Staff Augmentation you can add and remove skill sets as you go. Usually toward the beginning of a project, you may need a lot more design work as the style and pages or screens get finalized, but that work drops off as the development team take over. Then as you reach major milestones and deployments, you will need devops and systems administration to make sure everything goes smoothly. You also will need testing and quality assurance throughout to make sure each feature works as expected. There’s just no way around it: making an internal hire limits this flexibility of skill sets.

However, if you want to find a great programmer to join your team internally, here are a few suggestions of things that have worked really well for us:

1. In the interview process, candidates are interviewed more than once and with staff at different levels to ensure cultural fit, expertise, and to understand their experience. Our HR team have a great sense of the right soft skills to look for: diligence, being a team player, having a growth mindset. Our lead devs have a great sense of someone’s technical skills. Our COO knows who will succeed with which clients.
2. Test your candidates. We have written several tests and iterated them through our ten years in business. You need a test that is robust enough to give you results that give great candidates the opportunity to shine while eliminating those who simply aren’t skilled enough. And we have tests for several different tech stacks and areas of expertise. This has proven invaluable. Some candidates who were nervous in initial interviews have proven their metal on the test. Some candidates who really impressed us with their talk, fumbled when it came to coding.
3. Our interviews also include several logic based questions, not because we enjoy making candidates sweat over seemingly pointless questions, but because it gives a clear insight into their problem-solving abilities and their character. Having them talk through it and verbalize their thought process is more important that coming up with the right answer. Watching them push through mistakes or challenges helps us understand their grit.

If by the end of this process, you feel staff augmentation is right for you, give us a call or email us at info@bixly.com. We are ready to add development firepower to your project now!