The competition for talent is not so fierce when you expand the talent pool to the entire world.
January 6, 2019 5 min read
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As an entrepreneur you need to find the right team to help you make amazing products that your customers will love. Finding the right team is hard. It’s especially hard if you restrict your search to the city your company is based out of. In the San Francisco Bay area, hiring top tech talent is costly and can take months. Retention is another huge challenge given the constant competition for talent.
Turing CEO Jonathan Siddharth started his new company aiming to fix this problem and help entrepreneurs. Jonathan and his Turing co-founder Vijay Krishnan successfully sold their last company (TechCrunch) by using remote distributed teams to develop an amazing product which was featured in the app store and reached millions of users.
The world is moving from full-time employed teams in fixed offices to remote teams working wherever they want in the world. This trend works for team members as well as the company. As an entrepreneur you should embrace this trend and work with talented remote workers around the world. The benefits are plenty.
Jonathan Siddharth said “Turing lets customers push a button and instantly hire an elite, pre-vetted remote engineer. You can rapidly scale up on demand. It’s like scaling computing on AWS. Turing is also empowering exceptional developers all over the world, by offering them an opportunity to work with US companies without having to live there.”
The key reasons for working this way are:
1. Quality
The top 1 percent of talent produce the best results. They are also the most sought after and if you just look locally they will be hard to hire. This will take time and cost a lot of money. They will also be headhunted hard by others so they may only stay for a short time. The average software engineer in Silicon Valley moves every 13 months. If you are worried about screening, Turing prescreens all its candidates extensively with coding tests, real world projects, fit-for-remote-work tests and monitors quality on an ongoing basis.
2. Affordability
By accessing a global talent pool, you can hire the best talent without competing with every other company that’s also fishing for limited talent in a small local pool. Did you know there will be more software developers outside the US than within the US very soon? Hiring an elite software engineer who has not won the Green Card lottery and works remotely will get you an amazingly talented individual for a faction of the cost of someone working in the US. Since headcount is the biggest line item for most startups, this could mean more than doubling your company’s runway.
Related: Would a Remote Tech Team Work Out for Your Startup?
3. Managed by AI
You might be asking yourself how you are going to manage all these people. New tools such as Trello, Slack and Asana make it much easier to work with remote teams. Turing uses AI to intelligently match the right people with the right companies and then constantly monitors their work to make sure you get the best results. This also means that if you like someone’s work they can find similar people, making your team rapidly scalable.
Turing CTO and co-founder, Vijay said “We are working hard on creating the workplace of tomorrow using AI, automation and design thinking to make working with remote engineers as productive and fun as working with someone in the same room as you.”
Related: 5 Tactics for Startups to Get the Most Out of Remote Developers
4. Get freedom and flexibility
If your team is not fixed in one location, then neither are you! You can also work from anywhere if your team is a remote and distributed one. Why be stuck on highway 101 in traffic, when you could be working instead, from a beach in Bali?
5. Position your company for the future.
Github, Buffer and several well known companies have fully embraced Remote work. Starting your company with a remote-first mindset lets you design the right communication architecture and management practices for your organization from day one which can give you an edge over the competition as you scale. Working with a blended workforce of local and remote talent can also help you adapt faster to changing market conditions and needs.
Entrepreneurs have a lot of things to get right to build a successful business. You need to identify the right market, build the right minimum viable product, improve the product rapidly based on customer feedback and so on. Having the right team at the right time can make or break your business. So it’s important to have a strategy that ensures you can hire and retain high quality talent in a scalable and affordable way. Services like Turing offer an easy way to test the waters to check whether your team could benefit from remote engineering talent that complements your local, inhouse team.
This article is from Entrepreneur.com
