.NET is an extremely popular framework and IT professionals who mastered it are in incredibly high-demand despite an ever-growing number of them. Recruiting a .NET developer for your project can be a difficult task for anyone. In this post, we will talk about the best ways to hire software engineers for developing an app on .NET without going over budget or searching for viable candidates for months.
About .NET developers
.NET framework was designed by Microsoft in 2004 and is supported by it to this day. During this period only in the United States, more than 160 thousand software developers began to create multi-platform apps using .NET tools, and experts predict that this number will only grow. By 2025 the number of .NET developers is expected to increase at least by thirty percent. Despite this fact, hiring an IT professional in this niche is not an easy task.
.NET provides a great number of advantages to the development process, like increased scalability, or data security, so, naturally, more and more business owners choose to build their new applications using this Microsoft framework. Because of the great variety of tasks you can complete using .NET tools, you will need to know precisely what kind of developer you are looking for (full-stack, back, or front-end) and which skills they must possess. With the number of senior developers with extensive knowledge of all sides of the development process being limited, you will need to think long and hard about the future team’s structure and what types of tech talent you will need for specific roles.
Hiring options
Posting job offers on sites like Linkedin is not the best way to hire .NET developers. Because of the high demand IT professionals in this market niche rarely actively search for employment. But this doesn’t mean that you and your team can neglect composing clear and engaging job descriptions. First of all, posting them won’t hurt you and can even somehow better your chances, but the main reason is that writing those descriptions will help you to more clearly see team roles, and skills required for every position, and save you some time down the road.
Going to sites for freelancers such as Upwork or Fiverr isn’t really an option either. Of course, if you have an agile team structure and look for a cheap workforce to do some short-term work on small portions of code, you can risk hiring a beginner freelance developer to save a little budget, but building long-term working relationships in these conditions is almost impossible. As we mentioned earlier, .NET software engineers with some real experience and expertise rarely have problems with finding projects, so you probably won’t find any real professionals in places like that.
One of the best ways to find .NET-framework experts for hire is by searching in different professional online communities on sites like Reddit, GitHub, or StackOverflow. There, software engineers discuss all the newest additions to Microsoft technology, tools used in the development process, and other tech stuff. You can even find some examples of their code and links to social media. Contact candidates, you find viable and chances are pretty high that some of them will have time for work on your project.
If you tried to find .NET developers on your own without any real success, maybe it is better to seek professional help. IT staffing agencies have extensive databases with vetted software engineers working with all programming languages and frameworks, so you will probably be able to find members for your development team. The only real downside would be the cost. .NET developers even with six months of experience won’t come cheap and combined with recruiters’ wages it may come pretty costly.
Another popular option is an outsourcing company. They will also charge you for their services, but IT talent in their databases usually comes from abroad and most of the countries in Eastern Europe, South Asia, and Latin America have considerably lower salaries for .NET developers because of lower costs of living and differences in currency exchange rates. You can save a lot on the wage budget and still have expert .NET developers on your team.
Interviewing process
Even if you have a dedicated HR department or use the services of staffing or outsourcing companies, we still recommend taking part in the interviewing process. If you interview candidates from professional databases, their hard skills have already been tested and proven, but you still can ask some short technical questions just to be sure. To be consistent try to ask all candidates the same set of questions. If you already have a tech lead in your team, bring him in with you for interviews to confirm the candidate's hard skills. If candidates weren’t vetted, don’t be shy to ask them to complete some sort of test task.
Pay close attention to soft skills during interviews. All kinds of developers need to possess basic skills, like being good at communicating and having a good work ethic, but with .NET developers, you need to be even more thorough. Because of the incredible amount of goals you can achieve with this framework and its tools, candidates need to have great imagination and be creative to utilize almost infinite opportunities. Communicating with other team members and the ability to always learn new things is also of utmost importance because of the specific nature of the .NET framework. You don’t need to determine if a candidate is a good fit based on the interview only, do some online research and scroll through their social media if you have any doubts.
Final thoughts
Recruiting expert .NET developers for your project can be exhausting. Despite the huge talent pool, finding IT professionals with the required set of skills without going over budget sometimes seems impossible. But just remember that you are not limited by your local tech talent and there are dozens and dozens of companies ready to help you with your search.