You may still be undecided about the benefits of hiring overseas mobile app developers for your next app project or wonder why you still should not opt for hiring an in-house development team. Well, the decision on either side has its own set of challenges and positive factors. Naturally, without going deep into the respective elements, it would be too early and premature to make a decision.
Several pros run amok in favor of offshore hiring. There are multitudes of pro factors, from accessing a widespread talent pool across the skills well beyond the geographical boundaries to lucrative cost savings options in some countries. You can hire mobile app developers in India with a proven track record of delivering consumer-oriented mobile apps in time with maintaining top-notch coding standards.
But all things are not rosy and sweet with the offshore hiring of app developers. If you are unaware of the underlying challenges, offshore teams can ruin your project.
This is why explaining all the key pros and cons of hiring app developers from offshore locations is important. Let’s begin this comparative analysis now.
Pros of Offshore Hiring
Offshore hiring for skill-intensive app development projects has found huge traction all over the globe for app projects. It is not just because you always get a lower price quote by going overseas. But also because you do not get access to the right talents at the time of need by fixing your gaze within a particular region.
On the other hand, some countries emerged as preferred destinations for outsourcing app development projects because of an extensive IT market full of skilled professionals as well as competitive average pricing. This is where application developers in India always enjoy an edge over competitors from other outsourcing destinations.
Let’s now explain the key pro factors for hiring offshore developers.
Exposure to a Large Talent Pool
When you need to hire offshore developers, you have a world fool of talents at your disposal. From the countries in South Asia to East Europe to Latin America to even some African countries. You can get access to skilled skills around the world.
You can pick up some offshore locations depending upon the availability of specialty skills, IT market depth, cost competitiveness, time zone, cultural barrier, and other factors.
Zero Stress for Getting Onboard Experts
A major benefit of offshore hiring of mobile application developers is that you can get relief from the stressful process of searching for a tiny population of experts in a specific skill. You can reach out to the most reputed offshore companies and, after comparing several teams, get the right one per your requirement and budget.
It is found that a considerable portion of the in-house hiring positions does not yield many results against the enormous investments that businesses often make for them. This is exactly where hiring experts from offshore destinations can help.
Save Time You Spend on In-house Team Management
There can be hardly any doubt about the fact that managing an in-house team of developers requires continuous in-house micromanagement and controls. This consumes a hell lot of crucial business time that can be spent on more productive and result-driven causes.
This is another area where hiring offshore developers from reputed development companies can do wonders. You get on board highly qualified and skilled project managers as part of the development team who can effectively manage the app development project, team, and quality assurance.
Get Access to Robust & Well-equipped Infrastructure
When trying to extend their digital presence with a mobile app. It becomes extremely difficult and challenging for many startups and small businesses to build a well-equipped IT infrastructure from scratch just for the app project.
Now in some countries where big development companies are very limited. Such businesses can only look forward to offshore or near-shore hiring to mitigate the infrastructure and skill gap. After all, by hiring a remote development team from a reputed IT company, a business app can quickly get the mileage of a well-equipped development lab.
A Cultural Mix to Materialize Your Global Footprint
How can a company become ambitious of having a global footprint when it has its gaze fixed only on the developer talents available within a fixed geographical boundary? Well, to make your company look global and extend its business reach across the globe, offshore development can help tremendously.
Hiring an offshore development team for your app project can easily bring in different cultures and backgrounds and integrate them with the company culture and development focus. The cultural exchange ultimately helps bring different perspectives to solve problems resulting in better company culture.
Cons of Offshore Hiring
We need to agree on the point that everything is not golden and shining for offshore hiring. It has its darker and murky sides as well. Several natural challenges prevent many regional companies from opting for offshore hiring of developers. Some of these challenges can be fully meted out by befitting approaches or solutions. While there are still others that you need to avoid.
Since you need to manage an app development team from thousands of miles away by only relying on the established communication channels and the project manager, your concerns regarding offshore hiring are quite understandable. But as per the experience of most successful offshore app projects, these challenges and shortcomings can be handled if you take them into consideration from the beginning.
Let’s now explain the disadvantages or cons factors of offshore hiring one by one.
Compromising Service Quality
Just because you cannot exercise full control over an offshore team like your in-house employees. You are likely to have concerns over the development quality. The concerns get bigger when you have not hired the developers through rigorous hiring and quality testing process.
This is why it is always advisable to give due diligence when hiring an offshore development team. As a safeguard, you must sign a concrete agreement mentioning all the project deliverables and timelines before starting the project.
Spending More Instead of Savings
Many app projects primarily running after offshore development for the sake of making cost savings ultimately end up spending more just because they did not figure out the development hours and did not include provisions in the agreement.
While cost overruns or spending more than the budget is always a serious concern for any app project. It can be seriously dealt with by meticulously planning and reaching an agreement on the final estimation of development hours with the offshore development firm.
Intellectual Property Rights Protection
Since you are the product owner, you own your app idea and the source code. But when hiring offshore developers without taking many concerns regarding the legally binding agreement, this ownership of the source code can be a serious issue.
This is why you need to make sure that before the project gets started, you must sign a Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA) along with material possession (IP) agreement to protect both the app idea and all its source code and other critical development data.
Time Zone Gap
One key problem that prevents many companies from hiring offshore developers from a remote geographical zone is the time zone gap. The opposite time zones or considerable time gaps make companies concerned about project collaboration with the in-house team and senior management.
But the truth is, a big number of US companies reach out to offshore teams in India, Singapore, China, or other Eastern countries just because they know how to utilize project management skills and support to achieve optimum development output. At times, you can also utilize time zone gaps positively to ensure round-the-clock support for your customers.
The Linguistic Barrier
There are still too many companies in anglophone countries that cannot think of hiring a development team located in a francophone country. Similarly, Chinese developers are often not given priority over Indian app developers because of their lack of fluency in the English language.
The linguistic barrier is something like an organic roadblock, and you can only address it by looking for a development team proficient in English instead of other languages. Hiring from some offshore locations where most IT graduates are English educated can solve this problem.
Gaps in Meeting Expectations
Ultimately, as a business, you need to build an Ap product that instantly finds traction in the market or adds value to your business process. But what happens when an offshore team builds up something that doesn’t even meet your expectations? Who will be responsible for this?
The gap in meeting expectations particularly occurs when you have not resolved the gap of understanding at the beginning of the project. Secondly, app projects that still do not adhere to the agile guidelines involving frequent testing, evaluation, and iterations, are less capable of meeting user expectations with the outcome.
A Short Checklist on Hiring Offshore Developers
You have now understood all the key pros and cons of offshore hiring. And how the challenges can be meted out by prior steps, measures, and keen attention. But most importantly, the hiring process for the offshore development teams should be perfected to get the best outcome.
Here is a short but effective checklist for hiring offshore developers for an app project.
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Check portfolio & track record:
First of all, check all the apps they built in all these years and find out their skills, strengths, and weaknesses through these products. Now, discuss with some of their previous clients and understand the potential strengths and shortcomings these developers are known for. Check the GitHub, StackOverflow, and LinkedIn profiles to assess their activities and output.
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Know about their workflow:
It is extremely important to ask the offshore development company for their workflow. And It is essential to know the way they allow customer interactions during the project and make allocations for the app projects. It is also essential to understand their flexibility in managing the project.
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Don’t priories cheap pricing:
When hiring offshore developers, cost-competitive pricing can be a lucrative option. But that alone should not be a key consideration for choosing one development vendor over the other. By going for the cheapest price quote. You can get a compromising quality that requires a lot of course corrections and results in big cost overload.
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Don’t opt for fixed-rate models:
Another important thing that you need to ensure is staying away from the fixed-rate payment model. Since, in most cases, it makes a business pay at least one-fourth or more of the original cost because of covering the project risks. This is why it is always advisable to opt for a time & material model when hiring an offshore development team.
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A quality project management tool:
There can hardly be a doubt that email exchange is no longer considered a valid method for project management. The use of advanced, feature-rich, and smart project management tools has become obvious for app development projects all over the world. These tools ensure optimum collaboration, quality management, and monitoring. Some of the leading project management tools include Slack, Trello, Asana, Zoho, Jira, and several others. Make sure the remote offshore developers are versed with these tools.
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Ensure several rounds of standardization and deployment:
Those days are gone when an app used to be developed once and for all just before hitting the market. Now every app goes through several rounds of standardization, such as alpha and beta releases and MVP versions. If your project follows the most advanced agile scrum methodology. You can easily ensure frequent evaluation at the end of every sprint.
Summing It Up
From the above discussion, it is clear that offshore development can be tremendously effective and success-ensuring. If you know the actual checks and balances and the ways to implement them. Offshore development is already the future for the majority of app development projects all over the globe since, in a connected globe. It is natural for digital footprints to transgress geographical boundaries. But how well you handle offshore hiring ultimately becomes a decisive factor for your app project.
Author Bio:
Juned Ghachi is the CEO of IndianAppDevelopers, a professional mobile app development company in India for full-cycle mobility solutions. Having 10+ years of experience in the digital marketing field, he excels at offering the best technical advice to clients.
