According to StackOverflow, the demand for software developers still outpaces the supply. Research reveals that in the US alone, tech talent shortage is predicted to cost the country USD 435.7 billion.

Unfortunately, businesses in major tech countries such as the US and the UK have long been suffering because of the rapid growth of tech industries and the shortage of talented developers. Hence, several firms across the globe have started to look beyond their local talent pool and hire software developers online or offshore.

Between hiring freelancers online and dedicated development teams offshore, offshoring has long been a popular choice for tech firms. According to Deloitte’s 2016 Global Outsourcing Survey, 59% of the respondents outsource talent because of the affordability factor. Other reasons stated in the survey were:

• It Outsourcing services enables a business to focus on its core functions
• Outsourcing solves capacity issues
• Outsourcing improves the quality of services, and more

In 2016, Tholons released a report—Top 100 Outsourcing Destinations. The list featured popular cities from across the globe where you can find and hire developers.

Most cities in the top 10 were from India. Hence, to give a wider representation of all the popular outsourcing regions, we listed down one city per country according to rank.

With that said, here are the top 10 cities across the globe where you can find and hire developers.

Top 10 cities to hire developers

1. Bangalore, India

Tholons 2016 Top 100 Outsourcing Destinations ranked Bangalore, India as the number one destination to hire software developers/programmers. The city is popularly known for its low-cost developer rates.

According to PayScale, an average software engineer in Bangalore gets paid INR 799.50 per hour. That’s USD 11 per hour, which is quite affordable for businesses, especially early-stage startups.

Bangalore boasts of its large pool of software engineers. In fact, it’s estimated that around 175,000 developers out of 500,000 software engineers in India can be found in Bangalore.

Because of these factors as well as the city’s booming IT industry, global startups and big tech companies flock to Bangalore to set up their businesses or hire developers offshore.

2. Manila, Philippines

Just like Bangalore, Manila is a good place to look for developers, with competitive rates. The low salary rates are due to the low cost of living in the country.

Second to Bangalore, Manila is a popular destination to hire developers. Even though Manila is popularly known as the BPO capital of the world, it also has a thriving IT outsourcing industry.

One of Manila’s main advantages is its English-fluent developers. In fact, 70% of Filipinos are fluent in English, according to the Philippine Board of Investments.

It’s also officially the country’s second language. Hence, many global companies choose to work with Filipino developers owing to the ease of communication in terms of language and culture.

3. Krakow, Poland

Krakow’s rapid growth in producing tech professionals stems from its high number of universities and employment opportunities in the country.

According to The Fight for the Future: How People Defeated Hollywood and Saved the Internet—For Now by Edward Lee, the city has a total estimate of 170,000 students, making it an ideal destination for hiring young developers.

In addition, the 2019 A.T. Kearney Global Services Location Index ranked Poland as one of the best outsourcing locations because of the country’s availability of tech talent and financial attractiveness.

Also, it is one of the nearest locations for European businesses to hire software developers from. Krakow is around 1.5 kilometers away from the UK, making it one of the most accessible and easiest places for remote cooperation for UK firms.

Because of the city’s quality and quantity of tech talent, Krakow has become one of the best IT outsourcing cities in the world.

4. Dublin, Ireland

In addition to Krakow, Dublin has risen to become one of the best cities to hire developers in Eastern Europe.

Besides the affordable developer rates, Dublin takes pride in its repository of tech talent. According to Stack Overflow, out of all the cities in the British Isles, Dublin has the highest number of programmers, totaling more than 60,000 people. The most dominant programming languages in the city are Java, Python, and Ruby.

Major tech brands such as Amazon Web Services, HubSpot, and MongoDB have also set up businesses in Dublin due to the growing tech industry and tech talent pool in the city.

5. San Jose, Costa Rica

The capital city of Costa Rica has emerged to become an attractive destination to hire remote developers, especially for US tech firms.

One of the reasons for its popularity is its central time zone. When offshoring, most countries have an overlapping time of at least 4 business hours. In Costa Rica, the country is 2 hours ahead in the West Coast and 1 hour behind in the East Coast.

This means that remote teams can almost have a full working day of overlapping times. This allows for a longer and smoother real-time collaboration between businesses and remote teams.

Additionally, the country boasts of a highly educated workforce. According to The Global Competitiveness Report of 2017, Costa Rica was ranked as a leader in quality education in Latin America.

Businesses that are looking to hire tech talent in San Jose can be assured of developers who are experts in their fields and have good English speaking skills.

These factors have made San José a global hub for tech talents.

6. Shanghai, China

Over the past two decades, China’s IT industry has significantly grown and has become an innovative leader in the global IT industry. Among its cities, Shanghai has evolved to become one of the country’s biggest and most popular tech hubs.

Despite the high-level skills of Chinese developers, they are not as expensive. In an article by Nova Software, President of BearingPoint Bryan Huang said that an engineer with a $4,000 per month salary in the US would cost an equivalent of $500 in Shanghai.

The country’s huge population, inexpensive rates, and its booming tech industry have made it an ideal destination for global tech companies for hiring top tech talent.

7. Prague, Czech Republic

Among the cities in Central Europe, Prague has become a center for finding and hiring software developers/programmers, researchers, bookkeepers, and candidates for various other white-collar jobs.

Tech giants such as Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle have invested and outsourced in the country because of its promising tech talent. In fact, according to the World Population Review, businesses across Europe come to the city to establish their headquarters, which now accounts for 25% of the country’s GDP.

Apart from its workforce and location, another advantage of looking for a developer in Central Europe is the region’s knowledge in a variety of languages.

Developers can effectively communicate in English, German, French, and other local languages. Overall, convenience in location, communication, and culture make Prague a good destination to hire tech talent.

8. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Even though Malaysia has a smaller pool of tech talent, businesses flock to the country’s capital to hire offshore dedicated developers because of its political and financial stability and multilingual workforce.

In fact, in 2015, Malaysia was ranked 4th in financial market development globally by the World Economic Forum.In addition, the Government of Malaysia has a number of long-term initiatives for IT products and services such as building fast broadband infrastructure and attracting companies to look at the country as a global information and communications technology (ICT) industry.

According to Electrica Technology, the high level of internet penetration and digital adoption in the country make it an attractive market for Australian FinTech solutions.

Malaysia couldn’t compete with the nearby countries in terms of BPO, so they ventured into offering value-added services such as skills in IT.

9. Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam

Ho Chi Minh has recently emerged as an attractive destination to find and hire developers because of its low-cost rates but quality output.

In addition to attracting western businesses, Vietnam has also piqued the interest of Japanese businesses. In an Asian Review article, one of the things that draws Japanese businesses to the country is that more than 100,000 Vietnamese are learning the Japanese language.

Also, the government supports the country’s IT sector and provides legal and financial incentive packages, making it an ideal destination for global businesses.

10. Johannesburg, South Africa

The Top 100 Outsourcing Destinations report identified three cities from South Africa. Johannesburg ranked at 20, which was one notch above its 2015 ranking.

Johannesburg performed better in ranking than other South African cities due to its quality outsourcing services in areas of IT, CRM, KPO, finance, among others. The region’s cost-competitiveness, neutral accent, and cultural alignment have made it an inviting destination for businesses, especially small startups.

In 2030, the country’s outsourcing outlook is expected to account for 4% of global revenues, according to a report by Deloitte.

When hiring developers, keep this in mind…

When choosing where to hire a software developer from, keep in mind that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. Each destination has its own strengths and weaknesses in services, rates, and cultural and political compatibility.

Fortunately, there are thousands of offshore providers that cater to tech firms and startups across the globe. Partnering and working with an offshore provider allows businesses to source the right talent and to securely work with their offshore team.

If you’re looking for tech talent, you can find and hire developers at Cloud Employee, HackerEarth, People Per Hour, Upwork, among others.

Welcome to the second episode of #NetflixandHire where we learn some great ways on how you can get your recruiting metrics right!

For this, we’ve chosen a TV show we LOVE and we can all learn from—The Crown.

Why? Because Queen Elizabeth sums it right—“In an increasingly complex world, we all need certainty.”

P.S. If you haven’t already gone through our previous episode, here you go! – Episode 1: How to drive inclusive hiring in tech ft. Orange Is the New Black

Source: Pop Culture Times

The show delivers an important message on how, as a leader, you are responsible not only for the well-being of yourself but everyone else around you, and that it never hurts to be informed. Through the seasons, you realize that as a constitutional monarch, Queen Elizabeth, though not having any political power, is always in a position to advise the Government. You can also see how she strives to be informed—by hiring a private tutor and staying on top of official documents—just so she can keep things in check.

Now, being a tech recruiter is no less than being a monarch. You’re tasked with connecting with the right developers, bringing in the right talent, and making sure your kingdom, (ahem) organization, flourishes. But can you be so sure of doing these things without the right metrics? We think not! In fact, the Recruitment Operations benchmark report by Yello vouches for the same.

The key takeaway—Recruitment operations is all about streamlining hiring processes, cutting costs, and driving greater efficiency.

Source: Yello

Now, let’s look at how you can measure and tackle each of the above metrics, ‘The Crown’ style:

1) Reducing your time-to-hire

“There is one thing I’ve learned in 52 years of public service is that there is no problem so complex, nor crisis so grave that it cannot be satisfactorily resolved within 20 minutes.” —Winston Churchill

Source: Pinterest

Did you know that 52% of the recruiters take more than 3 hours to actually make a hire! Hence time-to-hire is the first recruiting metric that we will cover.

Honestly, if Churchill could solve political emergencies in a matter of minutes, we could surely solve the time-to-hire problem with a little help.

The 2 biggest pitfalls that recruiters face when it comes to closing positions are:

• Screening candidates
• Scheduling interviews

How can you screen developers and schedule interviews better?

Use personality tests

From Minna’s 16 developer profiles to Hackernoon’s 9, developers exhibit a myriad of profiles. Different projects need different behaviors and value profiles apart from skills. Hence, it’s important to get to know prospective employees and their work ethic to understand if they would be the right fit for your organization.Here are some questions from Alistair Doulin’s programmer personality test that you could use.

Use skill-based assessments

Using skill-based assessments to test technical competencies is a great way of making sure that you only have the right candidates in the interview stage. It gives both recruiters and hiring managers enough bandwidth to concentrate better on testing candidates in the later stages of the interview. It is no wonder that skill-assessments can bring down your time-to-hire by 50%.

Create a take-home coding test for free

Use live video interviews

An easy and time-tested method for scheduling interviews better is to use a live video interview tool. Some cool benefits of using such a tool:

• Scheduling interviews gets a lot simpler when assessing remote developers.
• You can watch candidates as they code and evaluate them for job readiness.
• With access to interview history, you always have data on hand to make the right hiring decision.

Did you know that by adding a live video interview tool in your hiring process, you can bring down your average time to hire to 10 days!

2) Decreasing your cost-per-hire

Season 3 sees Prince Charles’s investiture as the Prince of Wales and the demands of the royal family for the deployment of 15,000 troops, 21 gun salutes, and a battery of Royal Field Artillery among other things. However, the then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, understands that a penny saved is a penny earned and he advises Charles to “Go and study there and address the country in Native Welsh” to make a more meaningful impact on the people of Wales.

Source: The Digital Weekly

It’s time we took a leaf out of Wilson’s book and saved some money by cutting down unnecessary hiring costs.

How can you reduce your hiring cost?

Did you know that recruiters spend 35% of their annual recruiting budget on external agencies to hire 10 technologists! No wonder this recruiting metric is really important to recruiters. Here are some ways on how you can reduce your hiring costs by minimizing your dependency on external agencies:

Leverage social media to build a developer brand

Prospective employees would like to know all the cool things that your company has been up to and see the kind of work culture in store for them. Setting up live Q&A sessions, building a talent pipeline using your company’s Linkedin profile and attracting Gen Z developers through Instagram, Snapchat and Pinterest could be some ways in which you can gauge their interest.

Attend local meetups

Look for local developer meetups and conferences. You can find a lot of free events in your locality on Meetup. Shortlist for events that align with your recruiting goals. You could make some connections a couple of days before the event so you know whom to spend time with on the day of the event.

Make your tech team your brand advocate

Your tech team is first-hand proof of what you stand for as a developer brand. Hence, it is very important that your developers are your strongest advocates. Try incorporating a referral program and encourage developers to share their experiences working with you to ensure a greater recall.

3) Boosting your retention rate

“Keep one eye on the future. The distant future” – King George VI

The series portrays King George VI as the monarch who rose to the occasion at the expense of his physical and mental health. You can clearly see his preparedness when he urges Churchill to let Elizabeth undertake the commonwealth tour to ease her into her future role as Queen in order to keep the monarchy standing in the case of his demise.

Source: Business Insider

It’s time we channeled our inner King George and thought about the future of our workforce. Is all that sweat and blood that went into recruiting your dream tech team going to waste? This brings us to our 3rd recruiting metric: retention. Taking some steps to retain your tech team for the long run is the only way forward.

How to increase retention in your tech team?

We had recently written this detailed article on how to ensure your tech talent pool is poaching proof. Here’s the gist:

1. Provide autonomy and purpose to your developers
2. Develop a community internally
3. Provide perks and privileges your developers can’t say no to
4. Have an open discussion with your employees in the incentive process
5. Provide creative freedom and growth opportunities

There you have it—our royal advice on how to get your tech recruiting metrics right this year. Let us know if any of these have solutions have helped better your hiring process in the comments below. See you soon in the next episode! Until then, #NetflixandHire 😎

There are a lot of elements to a successful onboarding strategy, but here we’ll talk about one very easy yet effective step that’s necessary for all organizations: a welcome email or letter to the new employee.

You’ll want to write an authentic, engaging, yet clear and straightforward email or letter, and that’s surprisingly not as hard to do as you might think. While there’s some room for flexibility and creativity, especially when it comes to the details of the organization, we’ve prepared a handy template that will help guide you through the process.

The Basics

The welcome letter is crucial because it’s the first real concrete welcome to the organization message for a new hire. It’s a way to verbalize how excited the company is to work with this person, gives them an overview of what they need to know and the next steps, and is also a good way to remember their start in the company later on.

Roberta Young, an HR manager at Paper Fellows, explains that “the welcome letter must be written by the manager and not by another employee. This is a way to start the relationship between manager and employee on a positive note from the first day, and by writing a genuine and friendly letter, you’re creating employee engagement and trust from the get go.”

Conduct accurate coding assessments to hire the right developers. Find out more.

The Breakdown

The first thing your welcome letter should have is the welcome to the employee. Then, you should introduce yourself and explain in a couple of short points how you came to be in this position in the organization, even sharing your own experience as a new employee if relevant. This will build trust between you, the manager, and the new hire. Don’t overshare, as a lot of this can be discussed in person also.

The next part of the letter should cover the logistics of their first day, like where and when to go, what to look forward to, what to prepare in advance, and even share the dress code if there is one.

Finally, give a brief overview of the onboarding journey and what the steps to becoming a full employee look like. This is a good place to mention the positives about the employee that got them hired and how you see them fitting into the organization long term.

It’s important that your welcome letter or email is written professionally and without mistakes to give a good first impression of the company. Here are some tools that can help you craft the perfect email:

• Via Writing and Let’s Go and Learn are writing guides to get you started if you’re drawing a blank.
• Essayroo and Do My Assignment Online are two excellent editing tools that will look at your email and identify errors in flow or consistency. These tools are recommended by Best Assignment Services.
• Academized and State of Writing are grammar resources that will double check your welcome letter for any mistakes or typos.
• Boom Essays and UK Writings are online proofreading tools to get a second opinion on any spelling mistakes. They are well reviewed at UK Top Writers and for good reason.
• Beamfox and Talmundo are candidates preboarding software that personalizes candidate preboarding from the day candidate sign the contract to the onboarding. They have an intensive list of all possible templates required for great onboarding.
• Academadvisor and My Writing Way are writing blogs that can help walk you through the process from start to finish and give you some good inspiration.

Do’s and Don’ts of Welcome Emails

Here are some tips that will help you create great emails for your new employees:

• • Do make it personal
  • Don’t forget to send additional materials
  • Do send them a prepared schedule
  • Do make sure you include your company culture and spirit into your email
  • Don’t drown them in new information
  • Do set goals right away

Welcome email Template#1

Dear <Name>,

Welcome to <company name>! We’re so excited to have you join our expanding team. I know that your hard work and great sense of humor will fit in well with the rest of the group here.

We spoke a bit during the interview process, but I’m looking forward to getting to know you better. I’ve been with this company for <how many years>, and every day I continue to learn more. As your manager, I’m excited to see how you’ll grow with the team and the company and what you can bring to the table.

I’ll see you on <date and time> at <exact location>. We’ll grab some coffee and have an informal tour of the office to meet the rest of the team, then we’ll get all your paperwork sorted and get you started on your training journey. No need to bring anything – just yourself!

I’m excited to see you tackle this amazing journey, learn from the team, and eventually make your mark in the <industry or role>.

Looking forward to <date>,

<Your name and title>

Conduct remote interviews effortlessly with FaceCode. Find out more.

Welcome email Template#2

Dear [Employee’s name],

We are all really excited to welcome you to our team! As agreed, your start date is [date.] We expect you to be in our offices by [time] and our dress code is [casual/ business casual.]

[If necessary, remind your employee that they need to bring their ID/ paperwork.]

At [Company name], we care about giving our employees everything they need to perform their best. As you will soon see, we have prepared your workstation with all necessary equipment. Our team will help you setup your computer, software and online accounts on your first day. [Plus, if applicable, mention any extra things you’ve prepared for your new hire, like a parking spot, a coffee mug with their name or a company t-shirt.]

We’ve planned your first days to help you settle in properly. You can find more details in the enclosed agenda. As you will see, you’ll have plenty of time to read and complete your employment paperwork (HR will be there to help you during this process!) You will also meet with your hiring manager to discuss your first steps. For your first week, we have also planned a few training sessions to give you a better understanding of our company and operations.

Our team is excited to meet you and look forward to introducing themselves to you during [planned event/ lunchtime].

If you have any questions prior to your arrival, please feel free to email or call me and I’ll be more than happy to help you.

We are looking forward to working with you and seeing you achieve great things!

Best regards,

[Your name]

[Your signature]

Now that you’ve learned all the basics and seen an example, it’s time to start writing your own welcome letter. Good luck!

Popular posts like this:

1. 1. What Recruiters Can Learn from Job Seekers
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   3. 6 steps to create a detailed recruiting budget

This blog is a guest contribution from Algodaily.com

The way most people study/prepare for technical interviews with coding problems isn’t conducive. An average person will go on a site like HackerEarth or AlgoDaily and will only spend a few minutes actually trying to solve a problem.

Often, they’ll then jump to the solution after getting stuck. Then they’ll read the solution, try to memorize it, and call it a day.

A better way to prepare

Here’s a more effective way, and it’s why the AlgoDaily system was designed the way it was:

• First, choose a cadence
• One interview problem a day seems to be the ideal amount. If you do 2 or 3 a day in the manner described, you’ll be spending 3-4 hours doing it, which is quite ambitious unless you are preparing full time.
• It’s also mentally tiring, and you are unlikely to derive a whole lot of marginal benefits from the 3rd or 4th problem. At a certain point, you’ll probably begin to eagerly jump toward obvious solutions, which will not help you understand where your strengths and weaknesses lie.
• The below suggestions nudge your thought process toward retaining the patterns and eventually help you solve problems you’ve never solved prior.
• Commit some time and try to solve the problem by yourself
• Before jumping to the solution, dedicate about 20-30 minutes to a problem and try to solve it all by yourself. Try to get some semblance of a correct output.
• Brute force it if you have to—try to reason about any working solution, no matter how slow it is. It will help you understand the necessities to optimize it later.
• Don’t fret if you get stuck
• If you’re stuck at a problem, restart by looking for hints and then keep trying to solve it. Repeat until there are no more hints.
• When you run out of hints, start going through the problem statement or solution very slowly. As soon as you are unstuck, STOP READING. Use the bit of insight to start coding again.
• Anytime you get stuck again, repeat from the beginningEven though you’ve read a part of the solution, the vast majority of learning comes from the struggle of thinking it through yourself. That is what will help you retain it for the next time.Here are some additional steps that really made the difference in my prep:
  • Write the solution again in another programming language. This will let you think through the abstractions again and help with retention
  • Save the problem and revisit it in increasingly long spurts. This is called spaced repetition, a technique employed in the AlgoDaily technical interview course. For example, you may want to try to solve a problem today, again in 2 days, then revisit in a week, then a month.
  Some questions to ask at each step:
  • What have I learned so far? Is there anything I should know for solving the problem the next time?
  • What pattern or technique was the solution derived from?
  • What hint did I need? How far was I from solving it myself?
  • If asked the same question tomorrow, can I readily solve it without any assistance?

Before we jump into the importance of mock interviews, here are some things you must cover.

Without a solid understanding of the following concepts, you may struggle during mock interviews:

1. Hash Tables: This is arguably the most critical data structure. Make sure you can implement one from scratch.
2. Stacks/Queues: It is important that you know these data structures such as FILO and FIFO
3. Linked Lists: Know about singly linked lists, doubly linked lists, and circular.
4. Trees: Get to know basic tree/node construction, traversal, and manipulation algorithms. Learn about the subsets—binary trees, n-ary trees, and trie-trees. Lower-level or senior programmers should know about balanced binary trees and their implementation.
5. Graphs: Learn about implementations (objects and pointers, matrix, and adjacency list) and their pros and cons.
6. Algorithms:
   1. Sorting: Get to know the details of at least two n*log(n) sorting algorithm. I recommend Quicksort and Mergesort
   2. Binary Search: Binary search is the most popular search algorithm. It is efficient and also one of the most commonly used techniques that is used to solve problems
   3. Tree/Graph traversal algorithms: Breadth-first Search and Depth-first Search are musts. Also know inorder, postorder, preorder.
   4. Basic discrete math (logic, set theory, etc.)

For this knowledge, the best way to study might be the flash-card style. There are tons of flash-card applications online, and there are many guides and quizzes at AlgoDaily. You could also pull in a friend to conduct a mock interview, speaking of which—

Mock interviews are key.

You must practice some mock interviews before attending an actual interview. Ideally, this would simulate as much of the real interview as possible.

If it’s a whiteboard interview, grab a whiteboard and a knowledgeable friend, and force yourself to answer random algorithm/data structure questions from them.

Here are a few things to keep in mind while practicing mock interviews:

1. First, ensure that your friend or pairing partner is also a software engineer, preferably of the same level as you. He/she should be comfortable breaking down a problem into hints for you.
2. Have a timer available. Limit it to 30 minutes as most companies’ interviews last around 45-60 minutes. This additional time will help boost your confidence for the actual interview day.
3. Your mock interviewer should not be looking for the correct answer immediately. Have them evaluate your approach: did you ask the right questions to understand scope? Did you have a brute-force solution within the first 5 minutes? Did you write pseudocode to get your thoughts down? Are your test cases adequate and covering all edge cases?
4. Ensure that the challenges being covered are among the more common ones to ensure you’re being efficient with study time. AlgoDaily’s free challenges can be useful for this.
5. Write down all feedback and try to improve in the next mock interview.
6. Also, take turns interviewing. Being in the interviewer’s seat will help you understand what companies are looking for when evaluating a candidate. It will also help you realize how difficult it is to be an interviewer, and ease some of the nerves when you realize they are working hard to help you solve the problem.

Check out HackerEarth for some fantastic resources that I’ve used when preparing for mock coding interviews. The competitions really help with time management and on-your-feet thinking that you’ll need.

Best of luck and happy coding!

AlgoDaily provides a visual technical interview course. HackerEarth members can email team@algodaily.com for a discount.