How does an offshore development company work?
As a reputed tech leader, you’ve likely read many guides on how offshore development companies work.
Most echo clichés and dive into the debate about whether offshore development sacrifices quality for cost savings.
However, these assumptions no longer apply when you find the right offshore company. One that allows you to build a dedicated development team with elite talent in a renowned tech hub like Bangalore, India.
In today’s article, we’ll help you with what comes after partnering with an offshore company that gives you the flexibility and scalability you need. What can you expect from such a collaboration?
Or, put simply, how does an offshore development company work?
To make your life easier, we’ll briefly introduce the critical role of these organisations in building dedicated development teams and delve into the smartest way to go offshore.
After that, we’ll provide a step-by-step guide on how offshore companies set up engineering teams and collaborate with businesses like yours.
What is the smartest way to go offshore?
An outsourced development team can step in for short-term projects, like building a new app.
These developers are sourced using a third party, meaning you don’t get to choose your team. Plus, they work on multiple projects for different firms, with yours being just one of many.
But what if you need a long-term dedicated team that works just for you? In that case, you need a company that builds high-quality teams culturally aligned with your business mission and vision.
When you partner with the right offshore development company, you work with engineers who operate as a value-adding extension of your existing workforce. Just like your in-house development team!
Apart from building top dev teams, the ideal offshore company handles HR, administrative, legal, and other operational tasks so that you can focus on your core business.
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DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe offshore development company work process (6 steps)
These are the six steps followed by The Scalers — one of the best offshore development companies — when collaborating with organisations and building elite tech teams.
Note: While the following steps represent our process at The Scalers and have been found efficient by our partners, we can’t guarantee they mirror practices at other offshore companies. Additionally, we refer to the organisations we work with as ‘partners’ (and not ‘clients’) to reflect our long-term collaborative partnership approach.
1. The Initial Meeting
The first step in building your software development team is to meet your potential offshore company and grasp the dynamics of your collaboration.
This initial meeting helps the offshore company analyse your needs and goals and provides insight into the team you want to assemble.
For instance, at The Scalers, we meet new partners in person or virtually for several days to understand the finer details of their business. We assess their specific requirements, carefully consider their motivations for establishing a team in Bangalore, and map out the most effective course of action for the future.
These conversations are essential to developing a personal connection with each other, ensuring a successful partnership.
2. The Evaluation Phase
If the initial meeting is successful, and you agree on the shape of your future development team, your offshore partner will have all the necessary information to build your dream team.
During the evaluation phase, the partner success and recruitment teams brainstorm and assess the next steps. For us, this phase involves planning the entire recruitment process from end to end.
We consider aspects such as:
- What technical and soft skills are absolute must-haves?
- Are there any skills that are ‘good to have’?
- What will the technical test look like?
Then, we document all the requirements from the initial meeting with our partner, ready to use in our seven-step recruitment process. Although we generally follow a standardised approach, the process can be tailored to specific needs depending on the partner’s preferences.
The evaluation phase also involves other tasks like taking care of legal procedures, administrative duties or buying new technology.
3. The Proposal
Once your offshore development company puts together a proposal for the recruitment process, it’s decision time.
The proposal phase may involve some back and forth until all the questions and concerns are resolved. At The Scalers, we encourage partners to ask questions and tweak the proposal according to their unique requirements.
Partnering with us means getting 100% dedicated developers who work just for you, not outsourced engineers. While our team are experts in the talent market in Bangalore, you play a key role in building a world-class team. By telling us exactly what you need before we start searching, we can ensure we find and hire the right talent for your business.
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LEARN MORE4. The Recruitment Process
Once both parties — the offshore company and your business — align with their requirements and expectations, it’s time to kick off the recruitment process.
Please note that this process may differ depending on your needs and the offshore development company you partner with.
As for us, our recruitment team uses job descriptions — created based on the programming skills our partners need — to look for talent on job portals and social media.
Did you know that over 94% of recruiters use social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn to advertise their job openings and communicate with potential employees? By leveraging social media and job portals, our team promotes the openings, shares information about the company, posts updates, and positively engages with potential hires.
Our recruitment team also uses non-traditional recruiting channels such as Slack and WhatsApp to build a deeper personal connection with talent. But that’s not all. To ensure we find qualified candidates for every role, we set up a dedicated geo-restricted website for each partner, incorporating their branding and exclusively open to applications from Indian engineers.
An Indian developer who visits a partner’s site will find information about the position, the organisation, and the product they’ll be working on. It’s an excellent space for US and European partners to promote their brand, mission, and values to elite Indian talent.
From that elite Indian talent, just the top 1% makes the cut.
During our recruitment process, candidates complete technical and soft skills tests, with only the most qualified moving forward to collaborate with organisations. Our partners get the final say on every hire: they only see the best candidates while we eliminate the rest.
The best part? Partners have unlimited access to a shared platform with real-time insights into the recruitment process: they get to know exactly the candidates we have in our pipeline and the stage they are all in.
5. The Operational Setup
While your offshore company builds your engineering team, its operations division will start working on the operational set-up. This process involves organising the office space for your new team and buying equipment, among other tasks.
At The Scalers, we handle all the legal and operational hurdles, creating a fantastic workspace for our partners’ future team in Bangalore, India. We organise hardware and design a smooth onboarding process so developers can start working with organisations immediately when the team is built.
During onboarding, engineers get instilled into the partner’s culture and essential training to prepare them to collaborate seamlessly with organisations from day one.
Besides getting brand-new laptops and access to fast internet connectivity, they’re gifted with special welcome kits and goodies.
6. Ready, Set, Code
Now that your team and operations are set up, it’s time to onboard engineers into the office to start working on their first projects. Ready, set, code!
Collaborating with happy and motivated developers is more important than it may seem, especially when building a long-term team. That’s why, at The Scalers, we ensure our partners’ new team is always engaged and satisfied with their work through a Chief Happiness Officer (CHO).
Thanks to our CHOs, our engineer retention rate spans over four years, while other offshore companies hold an average rate of two years.
But our long-term value partnership goes beyond numbers. Our partners have access to an internal platform to visualise their team, recruitment, candidates, expenses, and more — a bird’s eye view of their operations!
We also issue weekly recruitment updates (offers released, number of new starts, etc.) and executive monthly reports on key events. Additionally, partners enjoy a weekly call with their Partner Success manager, a great chance to discuss the team’s progress and future plans.
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DOWNLOAD CASE STUDYLet’s talk about your new team!
If you’re looking to go offshore and build your own distributed team, feel free to reach out to us by filling out the contact form. One of our senior executives will get back to you shortly.
In the meantime, if you want to know more about offshoring and how it works, you can download our ebook guide to offshore software development. It’s a concise report to understand if offshoring is a good fit for your business and how to build an offshore team in India.
In summary
If you’ve read this far, you’re more than prepared to start collaborating with an offshore development company.
The six-step process outlined in this guide is an overview of how offshore companies work and how they help businesses like yours find top tech talent.
But remember: you have the final say. Always. Your input is crucial to assembling a top-notch team, so don’t hesitate to ask questions and communicate your requirements as clearly as possible.
We look forward to seeing you in the next article. Good luck building your offshore dev team!
