Are you in search for IT professionals (software, database, web, game developers etc.)? Read the article to make sure that you know about all mentioned ways of filling your open IT positions. You will find pros and cons of the each way and some useful links that may probably help you to find the required developers faster.

1. Full time position to join your office. The most widespread purpose to receive developers. Employers search for developers to augment their local software development teams.  You can find the right developers either in your location with the help of your HR department (job ads, networking, databases etc.), staffing agencies and recruitment firms or invite a person to move to your city/country. It works well if you need developers for permanent employment. Problems may occur if you don’t have tasks for your developers but still are to pay salaries and taxes monthly. When reducing staff, you are to bear all the expenses during the stated period by local labor legislation. Relocation expenses may be very significant, so they are reasonable if this developer will be a part of your team during several years or more. So, make sure, that he/she will sign a working agreement with you.

2. Part time employment. You can hire a developer for a part-time job. In this case you can encounter problems with searching the right candidates, as demand is much higher than supply. So, software geeks will choose among tens of job offers. And, it is not a secret, that in most cases people prefer full-time employment.

3. Freelancers. There are a quite a lot of advantages of cooperating with freelancers. First of all, you are to pay them only for made work and worked hours. And you can find experienced developers with huge experience in different industries. If speaking about disadvantages of cooperating with freelancers, you are to take into account that really good freelancers are busy. And sometimes you are to wait during several months before they can start working under your project.  If speaking about costs, usually freelancers charge for worked hours. Their rates are higher than if you had paid money for a full-time employee. However, if you need their help just for several months it could be a solution for you and your business. Cooperation with freelancers in long-range prospective is not so beneficial, as you can hire a developer on a full-time basis and will pay him less than freelancers. Another thing to consider is the level of your readiness to pass some part of work to the third-party, as you will have less control under software development, so the risks of failure are rising.

There are special websites that connect freelancers with their clients. The most popular are: ODesk, Elance, Vworker, Freelancer.com, Guru

4. Outsourcing.  If you want to save money or just are not able to find the required IT professional in your location, you may think about IT Outsourcing.  In a few words, you will come to outsourcing company and tell what job you need to be done. They will give you an approximate estimate depending on a scope of work. Every month you will receive a bill with some sum of money that will depend on time worked by your outsourcing partner’s developers. These sums may vary from month to month, so it is not so easy to plan your IT budget.  Another issue for small and medium business that they won’t receive so much attention as large clients, so you may receive answers to your questions up to 2 weeks. It may be the right decision to work with outsourcing vendor if you are not good at Project management or not IT person, as you won’t even know the developers that will fulfill your project. On the other hand, the real problems may occur because you won’t be able to control the software development.

You can find the list of IT outsourcing companies with full info in ITO list.

5.  Remote developers. Dedicated staff. It is a quite new way to fill in an open position for IT personnel. This business model combines the benefits of IT Outsourcing (cost savings) and reserving of full managerial control under your developers. Your partner will search for you the right developers and place them in its office. These remote developers will be dedicated to you and work only under your project. So, you will know your remote developers and will manage them like yours in house staff. But, this model won’t be a good for you if you are not IT person and don’t have someone in your company to manage your remote employees. Another thing to consider is that this model works only for long-term projects (from 6 months), as you will receive developers on a full-time basis that will be located in some of IT outsourcing locations.