5 Easy Ways To Screw Up Hiring Contractors

I feel weirdly passionate about contractors.

I mean, I built an entire agency around the concept that you should be able add high-quality developers to your team, plug and play, on a month-to-month basis.

I love working with contractors and it’s surprisingly easy to screw it up - to hire the wrong person, to contract out the wrong task, or to be the sort of client they’ll never want to work with again (and maybe warn all their contractor peers about.)

So if you’re a startup or a tech company who’s interested in hiring contractors, read on for a list of ways you can screw it up … so you can avoid them!

5 Easy Ways To Screw Up Hiring Contractors

1. Screw it up by trying to learn how to code instead of hiring a contractor or finding a technical founder

Does your startup have a technical co-founder? Someone who can code and build with the best of them? Awesome! Then you can save a significant amount of money by building your minimum viable product yourselves.

But if your co-founder is more of an “ideas person” or a non-technical person - we recommend hiring a contractor or multiple contractors. It’s much faster and more affordable and flexible than hiring someone in-house. On average, the hiring process takes three to six months - that’s time that could have been spent building your product! 

Sidenote: Zero shame if you have non-tech founders! Some of the platforms and apps we use every day were founded by people who didn’t have a tech background!

Non-tech founders who’ve been incredibly successful: 

• Melody McCloskey, founder of StyleSeat

• Micheal Dell, founder of Dell

• Sean Rad (what an incredible name!) co-founder of Tinder

• Brian Chesky, co-founder of AirBnB

2. Screw it up by overspending on in-house hires when money + time is tight

If you have a technical co-founder who can code and build your platform - awesome!

Buuuuut if your co-founder is the only person on the team who can code, the speed at which you can bring your MVP to market (and thus find investors or get money in the door) will be limited by how fast they can code.

And if your co-founder / coder has the audacity to need things like, say, sleep? Well, that will significantly slow down your progress. The simple math is this: three or five people can code faster than one person. A team will be able to bring a product to market faster than one person. 

If you’re nodding along and thinking “Yes, I’d obviously like to have five people working on my product - but our budget is tight” - I’m going to recommend hiring contractors. Again.

Why? In-house hires come with contracts, benefits packages, unemployment, etc. Typically, benefits account for up to 30% of a job’s compensation. Meaning, if you’re paying an in-house hire a salary of $100,000 a year, the cost to you of employing that person is closer to $130,000.

Meanwhile, when you bring in a contractor - particularly one of ours, who are on month-to-month contracts - you pay them the agreed upon pay rate and … that’s it. No paid vacations, no health insurance. Hiring contractors can be significantly cheaper!

Want to know 3 more ways to screw up hiring contractors? Read the whole article here.

I could go on and on about the merits of using contractors to develop your products - and I’d love to chat if you’ve got a project you’d like us to work on!

Just know that if you’ve been trying to build something great but have been hung up by the expense of hiring a big in-house team, there are other options. A great group of contractors could be exactly what you need to bring your dreams to market.