Building a tech start-up is one of the most challenging endeavours an entrepreneur can undertake. It requires an immense amount of dedication, time, and resources to build a market-ready product, let alone a successful one.
The most time-consuming and expensive process for any start-up is recruitment. In first-world countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, tech talent can often command high salaries due to the demand for their skills. There’s already a shortage of tech talent across the globe, making it even harder for early-stage founders to break through with their first product.
2023 research from the recruitment and HR firm Hays found that 94% of employers looking for tech talent have encountered varying skills shortages in tech over the past year. This was a staggering 89% increase from 2022.
Hiring an in-house talent will always be a core component of a sensible resourcing strategy. However, full-time teams are costly, time-consuming to hire and onboard, often include exorbitant recruitment fees, and can be a high risk to the financial runway of a startup. As such, a hybrid approach to building your team in the form of fractional talent integrated into in-house teams, as and when required, is an effective recruitment strategy.
Additional benefits of integrating freelancers and fractional talent into your in-house workforce include:
1. A Diverse & Global Talent Pool:
By outsourcing, start-ups can tap into a vast global talent pool. This enables companies to find talent with specific expertise or niche skills that may be rare or in high demand locally.
2. Cost Effective Sourcing & Recruitment:
Hiring and maintaining an in-house design or development team can be expensive, particularly for early-stage start-ups. Outsourcing allows companies to significantly reduce costs by leveraging the cost advantages of different regions.
3. Scalability and Flexibility:
Outsourcing remote skillsets can provide scalability, allowing start-ups to quickly adjust the size of their teams based on project needs. It offers flexibility to scale up or down as the business evolves, without the hassle of recruiting and training additional in-house employees. However, this requires a longer-term sourcing & management partner to assist with finding the right talent. A partner that provides cultural alignment and is focused on driving meaningful outcomes is essential.
4. Speed to Market:
In a highly competitive tech industry, speed is crucial. Outsourcing done well with your in-house team can accelerate velocity by enabling managers to access a larger talent pool and distribute tasks efficiently. A core team, augmented by high-impact, skill-specific designers, developers or growth marketing specialists, is the future of high-performance teams.
5. Focus, Divide & Conquer:
Top talent is hard to come by. If you’re fortunate enough to have a phenomenal in-house team, their focus should predominantly revolve around workflows which optimise the overarching output of the team. Hiring turnkey freelancers, for product, skill or task-specific functions, is an effective strategy which limits inefficient use of human capital, saving startups time, and money, and empowering employees to focus on what they’re passionate about.
The demand to hire tech talent is expected to increase by 22 per cent between 2020 and 2030, substantially faster than for all other occupations.
An increasing number of companies are hiring engineers far beyond the cities in which they operate and it’s estimated that outsourcing will increase by 70 per cent between 2022 and 2023. Over 27% of UK businesses now look to emerging hubs for talent.
South Africa has one of the fastest-growing populations of skill-specific tech talent, particularly in fields like UI and UX, Frontend Development, and Growth Marketing. Nigeria is fast becoming a hotspot for low-code and automation specialists across platforms like Figma and Weblow. Kenya recently made it mandatory to include coding in primary and tertiary education. Cleary Africa is well-positioned as a solution to the shortage in tech skills and offers an attractive ecosystem for diverse and exceptional fractional talent.
If you’re looking for top freelance design and developer talent, fractional support for your startup, or you’re a freelancer in Africa, we’d love to chat.
Original article here.
