“Hire slow, fire fast” is well-known and accepted advice for building a successful team. However, it doesn’t apply in the future of work with more outsourcing and contract work, greater employee churn, and a need to respond quickly to new technology.
While employing “hire slow, fire fast” can save your business from catastrophic hires your company would regret, the model is no longer the most intelligent way to build a development team. Today, hiring slow just means your company will be too slow to capitalize on emerging opportunities. Then, when the need for an AI development team or blockchain developer has passed, your organization is forced to undergo massive layoffs.
The rate at which technological developments are entering the market means that companies must be positioned to act quickly to take advantage of emerging opportunities. Delays in hiring the right talent cause delays that could mean the opportunity passes by.
ChatGPT first hit the market six months ago, and that already feels like an eternity. If your company is in the process of hiring slowly and then building a solution to take advantage of the surge in AI surrounding ChatGPT, you’re already well behind the curve.
This isn’t an isolated example. Technology cycles are shortening as the pace of innovation increases, giving companies less time to respond to emerging technologies.
To avoid the risk of being left behind, companies that want to maintain a sustainable competitive advantage must take action immediately by updating their staffing strategies. Instead of relying on the slow and pricey traditional hiring methods to build in-house development teams, the better way is to outsource to highly qualified distributed teams providing cost-effective solutions for software development projects.
It was standard practice for companies hiring slowly to bide their time carefully, weigh their business goals, and expect to keep an employee for the long term. However, a shift in the job landscape has seen many companies struggling to change how they hire and fire workers. Technology supporting the future of work has made the modern workforce more distributed and flexible as companies embrace alternative work models.
While old-school employers stuck with the “hire slow, fire fast” mindset are still holding on to the view that candidates will be queuing to join their ranks, the truth is that we’re now in a candidates market where top talent has plenty of options. Moreover, managed networks that combine different outsourcing types to ensure a project owner can access a pool of talented individuals and teams tailor-made for a specific project are gaining traction.
Managed talent networks like Gigster can assemble on-demand teams with particular competencies, ensuring they can immediately produce output that aligns with the company’s goals. These talent networks can keep up with tech demands like non-full-time equivalent (non-FTE) workers without necessarily expanding their in-house workforce.
Changing employee attitudes among tech workers mean that the controversial days of computer punch cards are behind us, and contractor roles are now in vogue. While some companies still cherish a tremendous employee retention rate, being an independent contractor who enjoys full autonomy is no longer frowned upon and a high level of employee churn is no longer viewed with suspicion. Employee turnover is now primarily a matter of choice and seeking career advancements via new fields or job titles.
The ongoing technological developments that have facilitated the advancement of distributed teams mean that today’s tech employees are choosing when, where, why, and with whom to work. Highly knowledgeable tech workers exert more control over their work dynamic by prioritizing exciting and challenging work over salary needs.
With tech talent in so much demand, fired tech workers don’t find it difficult to land new positions with companies that haven’t evolved to consider using contract workers, freelancers, and distributed teams, finding it challenging to complete their projects on time. There’s every indication that this new trend that embodies the future of work will continue into the coming days.
Read More: The Future of Work: Top 5 Trends
Businesses still using the “hire slow, fire fast” model to try and attract top digital talent are washing millions of dollars down the drain. Research shows that the traditional fixed staffing models waste time and money when they attempt to lock up employees in single long-term projects when they could instead leverage on-demand teams that quickly provide the competencies and bandwidth need to complete a specific project.
Moreover, the best tech talent is never static, and they constantly increase their learning curve, meaning they thrive in variety, challenges, and opportunities to build new skills. Working hard to acquire such workers permanently is an exercise in futility as they’re likely to leave even before you consider firing them.
As the future of work gathers pace, elastic staffing models such as distributed teams and the use of artificial intelligence is the solution that will render the “hire slow, fire fast” concept obsolete among tech companies. As the pace of technology increases, there’s less need for companies to continually bear the burdens associated with in-house tech staff as they can find the needed expertise from organizations like Gigster.
Companies no longer need to go through the travails and expenses related to hiring new staff when all they need to do is outsource to fully managed, globally distributed teams of expert developers and leverage cloud technologies to innovate at scale.
As globalization grows and the 9-to-5 work model begins seeing its sunset days, distributed teams will become the best way to edge over the competition. Moreover, advances in emerging technologies, blockchain, and AI mean that Gigster can parade a network of experts to undertake any tech or software development project quickly and easily since they have teams and tools to build any innovative product on demand.
As AI reaches mainstream and enterprises look for ways to adopt the technology, outsourcing projects to distributed teams using asynchronous technology can deliver at up to 3x the speed of traditional development.
As companies move away from the traditional fixed staffing model towards elastic models like distributed teams, great leaders realize they can no longer depend on an outdated staffing model and still expect to remain competitive.
Hiring slowly and firing fast may have worked in the past when every employee believed in permanent and pensionable terms and companies had years to take a product to market, but that isn’t a reality anymore. Instead, outsourcing software development is the key to innovation.
