Questions To Ask While Hiring Freelance Developers Remotely

Companies are progressively shifting towards hiring freelance developers remotely for the benefits and proficiencies that they bring to the table. 

In the US alone, approximately a third of workers freelance, and the current freelance economy is a staggering $1.2 trillion, which rose 22% from 2019!

While the demand for freelancers is exponentially rising, the number of freelancers is also increasing in response. Therefore, you must implement a robust recruitment process to comprehensively assess and pick the right developer for your job roles. 

The Necessity For Multi-Disciplinary Evaluation Of Developers

An ideal freelance software developer must also possess excellent communication skills. Be proactive enough to foretell issues and bugs, and make independent decisions while operating remotely.

Therefore, you must evaluate the developer’s capability to excel in all these parameters, rather than merely assessing their technical ability. Thus, you need a holistic approach to pick a decent freelance web developer.

Questions for Evaluating Freelance Software Developers Remotely

You must scout for valuable qualities in developers and make the optimum choice for your business needs.

1. Depth & Position Held At Previous Jobs

Questions To Ask

• Do you possess any prior job experience or have you taken up internships? 
• What position did you hold at your previous job, and what was your overall contribution?

Consider asking each developer to fill a profile form that includes a generic description of oneself, their technological proficiencies, as well as their CV.

Review developers according to the years in the field, quality of experience, as well as the complexity of products developed. The responses provided by the developers can help you evaluate their written communication skills.

Select only those developers who portray in-depth experience and have performed on end-to-end projects for the next step, which you can set as an introductory call. 

If the candidate lacks preceding experience with remote work, be very careful and evaluate them thoroughly. Consider giving them a chance if they sound like the ideal choice for the job from various aspects.

2. Decent Communication Skills & Adequate Motivation

Questions To Ask 

• Describe a scenario when you met with a conflict and how you resolved it.
• Tell me your greatest achievement and why you are a competent candidate for this role.
• Can you collaborate with remote team members?

When interviewing on a call, use all the notes created in the previous round to assess the depth of the freelancer’s experience. Ask probing questions about the products they have developed.

This way, you can evaluate their ability to respond to questions comprehensively and articulately. This gesture can help you understand the confidence possessed by the candidates in their abilities. These parameters also assess their verbal communication quality.

These metrics can help you evaluate a candidate’s communication skills –

• Scout for applicants who emphasize communication skills on their resume.
• Your ideal candidate must not take too long to reply to emails. They should respond to your questions straightforwardly without excuses. They must seek meaningful questions to understand the instructions better.
• Consider using other means to connect, such as Google Docs, Trello, Slack, Skype, or Asana. When you demand effective communication, it is also paramount to suggest the tools that support it. 

It can also be a wise choice to leave something out intentionally from the original instructions. This gesture can help you observe how they tend to handle a scenario when they do not have adequate information to perform the task. 

3. Comprehensive Technical Abilities

Questions To Ask

• Describe a project that you have worked upon and how you contribute towards its completion?
• If you encounter a code failure, what are the first steps you undertake to counter the issue?
• Which coding language do you prefer, and how proficient are you with data structures in that language?

After one or more face-to-face interviews, consider comprehensively evaluating the developer’s involvement and their achievement in creating complex software products.

This expression creates the platform to delve deeper into technology-specific discussions where the developer’s knowledge in individual technologies can be adjudged.

A friendly tip that you must bear in mind, according to Forbes, is that you must assess what you can pay. Do not stoop so low on your budget that you hire bad recruits. Maintain a reasonable balance between the rates and technical skills offered by the freelancer.

4. Rigorous Problem Solving & Coding

Questions To Ask

• Did you ever find an opportunity in a problem? How did you react to it?
• Give an instance when you realized that a colleague had committed a serious error. How did you rectify it?
• What has been the biggest work-related problem you encountered so far?

Every business experiences problems, and you must trust your employees to diagnose and solve them. Problems create opportunities for improvement, both for an individual and the company.

A good developer must possess a blend of decent technical experience as well as problem-solving abilities. To evaluate their technical proficiency, you can ask them skill-specific problems. To review their problem-solving ability, carry out a live coding test that involves algorithmic questions.

If a developer claims to have worked on multiple projects, ask them to present their work to you to help you self-evaluate their work. Consider delegating them a dummy project to assess their ability to accomplish the tasks within a restricted time frame.

5. Outstanding Reviews When Conducting A Background Check

Questions To Ask

• What relevant work experience makes you fit for this position?
• Can you walk me through your resume?
• What did you like/dislike the most about your previous job?

Client references are an excellent approach to obtain valuable insights into how a developer performs in real-life situations.

Consider obtaining inputs on distinctive qualitative factors such as reliability, communication, punctuality, and responsiveness. This step is valuable because such inputs are otherwise tedious to assess via a 1-on-1 screening.

Background checks prevent you from recruiting any incompetent or unsavoury individuals. Your company can cut insurance costs and avert troublesome lawsuits by only recruiting people who pass a pre-employment screening. 

6. Consistency In Performance

Questions To Ask

• What primary factors influence the success of an organization?
• How can employees and leaders continue to deliver consistent performance?
• What steps should the employer take to establish proper expectations?

While the evaluation process for hiring freelance developers remotely is exceedingly comprehensive, the candidate must deliver consistent performance at each engagement.

You must expect your developers to sustain flexible standards across all engagements with your clients. Be regular with appraisals to ensure that employee performance remains consistent and admirable.

You can perform this continuous evaluation by accounting for a host of factors. For instance, the quality of code delivered, the ability to ramp up, documentation practices followed, as well as softer aspects of reliability, responsiveness, and more factors.

Relevant Questions to Ask for Hiring Freelance Developers Remotely

For you to evaluate freelance developers, here are listed some relevant questions to ask them.

The questions get classified into the following sections –

• Technical skills
• Soft skills
• Aptitude skills

1. Technical Skills Questions

These questions can help you analyze a developer’s technical knowledge as well as hands-on experience –

1. How many production-level applications have you developed in the stated technology? Kindly share links for the same.
2. Kindly describe one of the most demanding projects that had you working day and night. Also, please elaborate on your contribution to them.
3. What kind of challenges did you encounter while working on it, and how did you surmount them?
4. Describe your contribution to a particular project, and explain its functioning.
5. Kindly share the highlights of your overall experience with freelancing. What type of clients have you collaborated with?

2. Soft Skills Questions

Consider asking these questions to evaluate the soft skills of a developer –

1. What motivated you to take up freelancing?
2. Why did you prefer freelancing as a career? What acted as the motivation?
3. What kind of challenges do you encounter while working remotely? How do you deal with them?
4. Show us your remote work setup and describe how you sustain productivity?
5. Have you ever been a part of teams before? Could you please share some instances of teamwork?

3. Aptitude or DS/Algo Questions

You can ask the following question on Data Structures/algorithm to evaluate the developer’s aptitude and proficiency in problem-solving –

Question. Provided a string that contains just the characters ‘(‘, ‘)’, ‘{‘, ‘}’, ‘[‘and ‘]’, verify if the input string is valid. 

An input string is considered valid if – Open brackets are closed by the same category of brackets. Open brackets must be closed in the correct order. An empty string is also considered valid.

Factors That Should Not Influence Your Decision Entirely

While it is paramount to keep the skills stated above in mind, you should certainly not let the ones mentioned below influence your recruitment process decision in any fashion:

1. Aptitude Tests

The developer’s performance in coding aptitude tests acts as a measure of their interview preparation rather than their actual smarts. Freelancers must be judged based on their work and their portfolio rather than their preparedness for interviews while hiring freelance developers remotely.

Taking aptitude tests too seriously will lead you to create a false negative in your head, and you might even unknowingly rule out the better deserving candidates.

2. College Credentials

While several recruiters look at the college’s name to land upon the hiring decision, a freelancer’s college degree will not signify if they are competent enough to execute the tasks delegated to them.

Therefore, it is pivotal that you base your decision on the skill sets of a freelancer rather than relying blindly on the name of your alma mater.

Final Words

The aftermath of recruiting an unsuitable candidate is too pronounced, such as delays in product development courses or lost opportunity costs. Supersourcing can be the best platform to look for the right talent while hiring freelance developers remotely.

It is a wise choice to hop on board the freelance train, considering that the freelance workforce is expected to grow to 43% in the next couple of years. Be sure that you do so in the appropriate fashion and leverage the principles mentioned above to carry out the correct hiring decision. 

It might often tempt you to conserve effort and time by dashing through the evaluation process, especially if you have received hundreds of applicants. However, you must consider following this guide to evaluate your candidates thoroughly and make the best possible hire.