Can't Get Your Development Team Staffed? Your Options When the Roadmap Slips

Why the vacancy stays open

Most companies in this position have already tried the usual route. A recruiter sends candidates who drop out on salary or accept another offer. Searching on LinkedIn yourself takes evenings and produces few replies. Meanwhile the developers you have cover the gap, and work planned for this quarter moves to the next.

What it costs is mostly attention. Every week the seat is open, someone in the company spends part of it on the search instead of on the product, and that is rarely the work they are best at.

What exactly is missing?

The routes below solve different gaps, so it helps to name the gap first:

• Capacity. The team knows what needs to be built and needs more people to build it. Every route below can help here.
• One specific person. A senior architect who takes over the system, or a niche specialist. This is a search for one profile, usually best done through a specialised recruiter or your own network.
• Direction. Nobody in the company can say what needs to be built next, or check whether it is good. Adding developers will not fix this. The first hire is then a tech lead or product owner who reports to you, and the rest follows.

Your options, and what each one leaves with you

• Keep searching locally, with a recruiter. You get an employee who is fully part of your company. The search takes as long as it takes, the candidate usually has a notice period at their current employer, and from the first day the employer side is yours: the contract, absence, and a new search when they leave. A recruiter's fee is usually based on the first-year salary.
• A freelancer, found locally or on a platform. Often the quickest way to get someone working. You vet and contract them yourself, or pay a broker's margin, and when they move on to their next assignment you start over. This works best for a defined piece of work of weeks or months.
• A development agency or offshore team that takes over a piece of work. They deliver an outcome against a specification and decide how the work gets done. Useful for a contained project; less so when the work is your core product and your own team has to keep building on it.
• Remote professionals in your own team, through a staffing partner. The person works in your team, under your direction, while the partner arranges finding and vetting, the contract, absence and replacement. How fast this goes depends on the partner's pool and on how quickly you can interview.

How soon can someone actually start?

Three things set the pace, whichever route you choose:

• The search. How long it takes to find candidates who fit and are available. For a local hire this is often the longest part; a partner with an existing, vetted pool skips most of it.
• Your own availability. Interviews, decisions, and access to your systems. In practice this is often what slows a start down.
• Notice periods. An employee who changes jobs usually has to work out their notice first. A freelancer, or a professional through a partner, can often start sooner.

Through Tunga, you get a shortlist from the existing pool, usually 3 candidates or more, and you decide whom to interview and whom to work with. When you can move fast, the professional is operational within a week.

What helps the first weeks go well

New people speed up the roadmap once they are productive, so the first weeks count. Whichever route you choose, the same things make the difference:

• A briefing that describes the work, the stack and how the team works, not only a job title.
• Someone on your side who knows what needs to be built and reviews the work.
• Accounts, access and hardware ready on the first day.
• Time from someone in the existing team to answer questions in the first weeks.

Through Tunga, a delivery manager with experience in onboarding works alongside you and the professional in the first weeks, and checks in with both sides at least once a month after that.

When adding people won't rescue a deadline

In 1975 Fred Brooks, who led the development of IBM's System/360 operating system, wrote in The Mythical Man-Month that "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later". New people need time to get up to speed, and the existing team spends time bringing them in. That holds most for a fixed deadline a few weeks away.

For a roadmap that runs over months it works out differently: new people cost the team some time in their first weeks and add capacity from then on.