Hire a Software Development Team & Grow It With You
December 8th, 2023 — Revature
Building your software development team is one of the most important projects you’ll own, and it’s one that has no end date.
A good software development team combines people with a range of skills and personalities who collaborate to produce results that exceed the sum of their individual contributions. A great software team is planned around a long term strategy that’s designed to support the business’s growth strategy, the future state of your tech stack, and each individual’s growth path.
However, with three out of four IT teams facing critical skills gaps and over half with open positions, finding a strong developer can itself be a challenge, let alone finding one with the right combination of tech and soft skills for your specific team.
In an agile environment, hard skills aren’t enough. If you’re putting together an adaptable, engaged, cross-functional team that runs on communication and feedback, soft skills are just as important as knowing a specific tech stack, if not more so.
Given the current tech skills gap, how can you go about accomplishing this herculean task without an unlimited budget or a magic wand? You need to be as adaptable as the developers you’re seeking. Think beyond traditional job boards and university recruiting events. Here are some ideas to get you started:
Diversify Your Talent Pool
Diversifying your talent pool by looking outside of conventional channels can open up a world of new options for your business, and more importantly, it creates a much more diverse talent pool for you to recruit from. For example, source talent from lesser-known universities, and consider applicants without traditional Computer Science degrees.
Founders who’ve expanded to include employees with creative backgrounds and diversified experiences often reap the rewards by standing out in a crowded field. These employees frequently have excellent communication and critical thinking skills as well. They may have a different perspective and bring fresh ideas to your team. Implementing diversity and inclusion goals into your software development hiring practices isn’t just socially responsible, it’s also one of the best ways to innovate.
Upskill & Reskill
“Hire for attitude, not for skill,” is a popular refrain in the HR industry. Although it’s true that attitude is important, at the end of the day, if you’re trying to ship an application, you need developers with a particular tech stack. Upskilling can bridge the gap between your team‘s current skills and the full range of tech skills you really need. If your current employees are dedicated and eager to learn but lack specific skills, training them might be your best solution.
For upskilling to be successful, you first need to determine the skills your current employees need to develop. Be as specific and individual as possible. Think about each employee’s current strengths and personality and what they’ll need to know to fill a role on your software development team. This specificity will help you fill out your team better than, for example, simply offering company-wide Python training. Once you have an inventory of skills and gaps for each employee, you can work with a company such as Revature to transform your current employees into an agile team.
Hire-Train-Deploy Model
For businesses that need highly capable tech talent faster and with less upfront costs than hiring in house, the hire-train-deploy (HTD) solution may be the answer. Rather than pulling from a generic pool of candidates, the HTD provides you with developers who have been intentionally trained to be the best fit for your business.
Work With an Experienced Talent Partner
If you’re looking to hire and grow a software development team that fits your organization today and into the future, you need an experienced and trusted partner accustomed to supplying tech talent in today’s unique tech talent landscape.
Revature has established training programs and extensive experience moving candidates through them quickly. We’re used to working at scale and have the tools and processes in place to analyze your needs so we can source and train candidates to succeed in your organization.
Final Thoughts
Most IT departments and hiring managers tout the tech skills gap as the reason they’re having trouble growing their teams. The numbers certainly seem to support that idea. However, at Revature, we realize that the gap isn’t in tech skills, it’s in opportunities. Talent abounds but opportunity does not.
By bridging the opportunity gap, we’re able to secure a diverse, scalable pool of job-ready, emerging talent. Our experience as the leading supplier of tech talent for a wide range of industries has shown that, when given the opportunity, the underrepresented will exceed your expectations every time.
Reach out today to find out how we can help you build a software development team that not only suits your immediate needs but will continue to grow with you in the future.