How do Fintech Companies Hire and Manage Remote Development Teams?

Just when you are simply unable to get onboard the right resources from your area or just when you want to hire skilled resources without paying a premium, you may decide to go remote hiring. There are two challenges involved in this. First of all, hiring a skilled team of offshore developers is not always easy and secondly, managing a remote developer team can prove to be a great hurdle.

But despite these challenges, remote hiring is popular. A report by Buffer regarding remote working in 2021 tells us that 73% of businesses responding to the survey work in different time zones and are benefiting from the flexible working schedule resulting in 24x7 development output. The IT companies in India with app development processes registered around 11.37% year-on-year growth in five years between 2013 to 2018. This growth story is largely possible because India emerges as an outsourcing hub.

Fintech companies, particularly digital operations of banks and financial firms in recent years particularly focused on remote hiring for getting the best of innovative technologies. When it comes to fintech, there are not too many experts versed in cutting edge data technologies like Blockchain and hence remote hiring often enjoys an edge over in-house teams.

Remote hiring and work from home jobs will be the driving force for human capital in the years to come. As per Talent Works survey in the U.S. based human talent-hiring managers, a whopping 90% of top-level executives now feel convenient to work from home. Let us explain here how businesses irrespective of whether they belong to fintech or other niches, can deal with remote hiring and management.

Hiring Options for Remote Developers

As a business, you are likely to have one of the 3 available ways to hire remote developers for your app project. You can either hire freelancers or you can just partner with an offshore outstaffing development company offering a dedicated team of developers to collaborate with your in-house team or you can simply give the entire project to an outsourcing company that will build the app from start to finish.

Now the question is, how can you know what is the best option for your app project. Well, your choice of option depends upon several considerations such as the size of the project, the required technology stack, required team size and any other specific niche expertise required by the project.

You can find freelance developers on several social media platforms and job boards such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and others. For skilled resources, you can also hit platforms like Upwork, freelancer.com, Toptal, Guru, PeoplePerHour, etc.

To find a reputed outsourcing company with skilled resources a fintech company can search B2B directories such as Clutch, GoodFirms, etc. Whether you build and design a simple mobile app for your financial business or develop a feature-rich fintech app, these repository sites such as GitHub and StackOverflow are great to get in touch with the most skilled resources from reputed outsourcing firms.

When getting onboard an outsourcing company you must look for the tech skill and expertise, exposure, experience and proven track record, achievements and recognitions and collaborative skills to work alongside the in-house team.

Managing Remote Development Team

Now after hiring a remote development team, you have just completed the very crucial first step and the real journey is yet to begin. Managing the remote team offers a bigger challenge. Here we provide a few time-tested tips for managing the remote development team.

Offer a Great Onboarding Experience

When you finish hiring the remote development company, you should ensure that the new developers undergo an effective onboarding process to become fully integrated members of the team. Here are some tips to make this onboarding smooth and seamless.

• Include them in a corporate e-mail list and set up live meetings for both remote and in-house teams to communicate.
• Set precise working hours and a schedule keeping the convenience of your remote employees in mind. Make sure they agree conveniently to the new schedule.
• Facilitate knowledge sharing for everybody including both remote employees and the onsite developers through webinars and other resources.
• Always open up scope for cozy interpersonal communication among the on-site and remote developers. Facilitate virtual coffee breaks if needed.
• For better collaboration, always create task-based Skype groups where remote and on-site developers can communicate and keep in touch.
• Offer remote developers access to different company resources such as databases, bug-trackers, GitHub or StackOverflow accounts, Google Drive, Dropbox, online tools, etc.

Develop and Nurture Strong Bonding

It is often common for remote projects to suffer from communication gaps due to time zone differences or due to the impossibility of one-on-one interactions. In a highly connected world where remote communication and collaboration remains no longer a challenge, these gaps can be breached by scheduling daily meetings and determining convenient hours for both the remote and in-house teams to communicate.

These days you have a whole array of tools to make things easier and streamlined for remote communication and collaboration. Use tools like Google Meet, Skype, Trello, Slack, TeamViewer, etc to stay in lively communication with the remote team.

Managing Performance Remotely

Lastly, all onboarding and communication are taken care of the right way, you need to ensure productivity from the remote team. There are tested and tried measures like tracking the attendance and monitoring the active hours so that you can have a near comprehensive idea of what’s going on the other side.

There are several great task-tracking tools to help you monitor and track the development process and they are particularly helpful when working with a remote development team. You need to choose from the tools that provide a variety of reports. The tools must be intuitive and easy to use and in case the tool helps you with project management and bug tracking, it can be doubly beneficial.

Some of the most commonly recommended and acclaimed productivity tracker and team management tools that are used across remote development projects include Youtrack, Trello, JIRA, Redmine and a few others.

Conclusion
Remote hiring of developers is going to receive more momentum in the years to come simply because of the cost competitiveness, demand for exceptional skills and fast-paced development output.