5 Best Places to Find Verified, Experienced Freelance Developers?

Finding verified, experienced freelance developers is still quite a challenge, especially for founders coming from a non-tech background. In 2024, globally, there will be around 30 million developers and 1.5 million freelance developers. Finding a verified and experienced developer from such an enormous talent pool is easier if you have clarity on what kind of freelance developer you are looking for.

When you search for developers on talent marketplaces like Upwork, Fiverr, or Freelance.com, you have too many choices, leading to overwhelmed and delayed decision-making.

As a CEO and founder of a small business or as a founder from a non-tech background, choosing the right freelance developer who can help you build and maintain your tech product takes time is hard.

Since you don’t have the skills required to evaluate the candidate, you end up trying to judge the book by its cover. Which, unfortunately, turns out to be a wrong decision most of the time, resulting in a waste of time and money.

Platforms for Hiring Verified and Experienced Freelance Developers

Choosing the right platform to hire freelance talent is essential. Since you don’t have the skills required to understand the competence level of the potential freelance candidate, it’s better to choose a platform that helps vet the talent on your behalf.

The risks associated with hiring from the wrong platform or your network include hiring underqualified candidates, hiring more people than required, or leading to potential fraud, where you have paid the cost but haven’t done the necessary work.

1) Upwork

Upwork is today’s world’s most popular talent marketplace to find freelancers in any domain.  The high-level process involves

• You post a job as a customer
• Candidates apply for the job, or you invite them to the job.
• You evaluate the candidates based on their job proposal, profile, and rating on the platform.
• You can pay the freelancer hourly or on a milestone basis.

2) Freelancer.com

Freelance.com is another known talent platform to hire freelancers. The high-level hiring process includes

• Simply post a project or contest.
  • You will get bids from freelancers.
  • You choose the freelancer based on the proposals they submitted.
  • You can pay the freelancer hourly or on a milestone basis.

3) Toptal

Toptal is yet another platform to hire freelancers that help you hire software developers, designers, marketing experts, finance experts, product managers, and project managers worldwide. The overall process includes

• You fill out the form to specify what kind of experienced freelance developers you want to hire.
• The Toptal team works with you to identify your goals and needs. You need to pay $500 to start the hiring process, which gets adjusted in your first invoice.
• The freelancer gets aligned with you.
• You pay the freelancer twice a month based on hours worked.

5) MMT.Work

• You share your product mission to help MMT identify the roles required to build your tech product.
• 2 to 3 candidates are shortlisted from the pool of already vetted product builders
• You select the freelancer, and your product mission starts.
• You pay the freelancer monthly. The payment is incentive-based, where freelancers get 70% of the monthly fee, and the rest, 30% is paid based on achieving the product goals.

MMT’s mission is to empower small and midsize business owners, CXOs, and founders from non-technical backgrounds to bring their tech ideas to market faster than ever before and enable tech product builders to unleash their creative best, deliver their best work, and get paid on time for their work.

Pros and cons of each platform

All these platforms have made a significant impact in bringing positive change in the talent hiring space and enabling small and mid-size businesses to move forward in their businesses by allowing them to get the job done while keeping costs in control.

How to Choose and Verify the Right Freelance Developer

Today, anyone can use AI tools to create a profile matching a job description. Here is a comprehensive guide to help you select the right freelancer developer for your tech product.

Tips on assessing portfolios and the previous work of experienced freelance developers

Looking at the candidate’s experience will not give you the insights required to select the candidate. To evaluate the team member’s profile authenticity, look at the candidate’s LinkedIn profile and match it with the CV you have received. You should start by asking the following open-ended questions to understand the freelance developer’s capabilities.

• How many products have you developed so far? The candidate should have built at least one tech product from scratch.
• What was your role in the product you developed?
• How many hours have you spent coding every week during product development?
• Which major problems did you face while developing the product, and how did you handle them?
• Who were the product users, and how many users used the product? Ignore hiring developers who have developed a product with just a few users.

Another important tip is to only work with an agency where the developer is working directly with you as a customer. Rather than being behind the project manager provided by a digital agency, you cannot communicate directly with them.

The typical pattern here is that the experienced freelance developers and project managers keep jumping from one project to another, and the work to be done and communication details about what needs to be done start falling through the cracks. 

Communication skills and understanding of project requirements are important.

As I stated above, the worst work model is where the project manager is your front face, and someone behind the scenes does the work. That might work in the IT services model, where software is developed or enhanced for big enterprises, where the team has tens or hundreds of developers. However, when building the tech product, you should be able to communicate directly with the freelance developer.

Here, you have to check that the developer can communicate well, understand the requirements, and articulate the challenges so that you can understand them well.  The ideal small tech product team comprises a product manager, one or two full-stack product developers, and a UI/UX designer, who is required during the initial phases of building the product.

Strategies for conducting compelling interviews with developers.

In the age of generative AI and resume services that many people provide, evaluating a software developer’s skills by just looking at their resume is quite tricky.  Here is how to assess the software developer who can develop and enhance a tech product during the interview

1. Start by understanding which product they have developed and their role in creating it. Did they play a critical role in the team? Did they solve complex problems? In every team, 20% of people do 80% of the work. The goal is to understand if the member is part of the 20% club. 
2. Give them a small programming problem to solve during the interview itself. Change the problem scenario, and ask questions about how they will approach enhancing the code.
3. Can they write code to process large data files or devise strategies to enhance the product when its load increases?
4. Understand their product sense, which includes UI/UX fundamentals and product management fundamentals.
5. Give them a problem and ask them to create a work breakdown structure; this will help you to understand their planning, problem-solving, and communication skills.
6. Evaluating someone from a cultural fit perspective is tricky during the one-to-two-hour interview. However, there are a couple of ways to assess the person from an accountability quotient perspective.
7. Give them a programming problem to solve or something to write, and ask them to send it before the interview date. Now check whether they completed the task; if they haven’t, did they inform you that they need more time?
8. Match their CVs and LinkedIn profiles to check for gaps between their resumes. This will help you determine whether a candidate is lying about their credentials.

Give the candidate a rating on each of these questions, and after interviewing all the candidates, decide based on the data. And when you work with an agency, insist on talking to the developer who will work on the project directly.

The importance of skill verification

Without the proper skill verification and assessment, you may make decisions emotionally. Evaluating people’s skills and ranking them against their proficiency level in each skill is an excellent approach to help you decide which candidate to hire. Here are the proficiency levels we use at MMT to evaluate experienced freelancer developers:

• Level 1: I am learning the basics of this skill and can perform simple tasks with guidance. We humbly reject the candidates at level 1 and ask them to reply after six months.
• Level 2: I am developing my skills and can independently complete most routine tasks.
• Level 3: I am proficient in this skill and can confidently tackle most tasks, including adapting to unexpected situations.
• Level 4: I am an expert in this skill and can consistently deliver exceptional results, even in unforeseen circumstances. I can also mentor others and contribute to improving processes related to this skill.

Skill-based verification has taken center stage in today’s world when evaluating experienced freelance developers for a job. Above-average talent makes a real difference to your business by making the right decisions and producing the work, which makes a real difference in generating revenue and digitalizing your customers.

Legal and Administrative Considerations when Hiring Freelance Developers

After you have hired a tech freelance developer, signing a contract with them is essential to safeguard intellectual property rights, provide details about the payment, and balance the interests of both parties.

Overview of contract essentials to protect both parties.

The essential parts of a contract when hiring a product developer are:

• Intellectual Property Rights should clearly state that the code, design, and documents produced during the project belong to you as the customer.
• The payment terms should provide details of the payment, its frequency, and how you will handle it in case of conflict.
• When hiring an agency for the work, the clause regarding the developer working on your project should only be removed/rotated if you have approved it as a customer. Also, make sure to include a clause that only the developer you have interviewed will work on your project and that the agency will not subcontract.
• A non-disclosure clause should clearly state that the user cannot disclose the details of the product to anyone and will protect the confidential information(CI) as they would their own CI.
• Data Protection clauses should include details of how customer personal identifiable information(PII) will be secured and protected, and should not be shared with anyone else. When the contract expires, the data will be returned to you and deleted from the developer’s devices.
• Trial and Termination clauses should state the notice period for the termination, and the customer can terminate the period during the trial period.
• A non-solicitation clause should state that the customer should not solicit employment or other direct cooperation with the contracted engineers for any other work assignment during the contract duration and for one year after it ends.
• There should not be any minimum contract duration or penalties for you as the customer in case of termination.
• Clauses around tax payment. This is especially important if you are hiring a freelancer or agency. You should state that you, as the customer, will not be liable to file any tax return, and the developer/agency should file the tax returns themselves.

Getting the contract signed is essential and imperative. It signals to the developer that, as a customer, you are sincere about these clauses and their work.

How to Successfully Collaborate & Manage Experienced Freelance Developers

Managing freelancers and collaborating with them comes with challenges, especially when you need help understanding the tech world. I keep hearing from the CEO and founders the concerns around

• whether their tech team is working on the right thing or not,
• How can they increase the speed of execution
• How can they get the status of the execution?

Building and managing a tech product is an investment that can quickly become a cost center if not managed well. To manage it well, you must invest in building relationships with team members, setting clear expectations, and adopting the best tools, processes, products, and project management practices.

Here are a few best practices and processes to work with freelance developers

1. Always hire a full-stack developer.
2. Divide your product-building processes into a 30—or 45-day release cycle. In this cycle, development and testing should be done on selected feature ideas(aka user stories), system issues, and technical issues related to managing and scaling servers.
3. Before the cycle starts, you must decide what should be developed based on the developer’s bandwidth and capacity.
4. Before the work is given to the developer to develop the code, it should be documented in a way that provides clarity to the developer about what the expectations are. A good user story should cover the following aspects.
   1. Why are we developing this feature?
   2. Which personas are impacted
   3. Which system workflows will be impacted
   4. How the system will behave after this feature is developed
5. Ask the developer to demo the system on the testing server towards the end of the release cycle. Making the developer accountable for the working system improves the quality of your tech product.
6. When your developer works remotely, schedule a status call at least twice weekly. When the developer works full-time, schedule it at least four times a week, but keep the meetings short.
7. Use a product management tool, not just a project management tool.
8. Above all, win your developer’s trust, and always pay them well and on time.
9. Schedule a 15-minute one-on-one meeting with your developer at least once a month. Refrain from discussing work in this meeting.
10. Always align a developer with the product manager.

Managing freelancer developers is an art and a science. The balance has to be there between getting work done and building a relationship with the freelancer by enabling this person to grow as a professional.

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