Developers – iView Labs

How and Where to find the most suitable tech talent for your business

A competent tech team plays a vital role in keeping the gears of any organization running smoothly. From system design to creating system architectures, code and workflows to troubleshooting issues with operating systems, networks, databases, hardware and software, tech talent or their lack can make or break a business.

So the question most of us face as entrepreneurs is how do we as business tackle challenges related to talent shortages.

In a maze of job portals, social media, and online forums, where do you start?

Read on for tips and tricks to help founders and entrepreneurs find suitable tech talent.

1. Understand the Position You Need to Fill

The first step towards finding the right talent is understanding your own need for talent.

Long term vs short term Need, Specialised or Just getting the work done, Part time or full time, On Premise or Remote. Having a better clarity on the nature of the job and a working style for this role which is mutually beneficial for you and your business can really help to fill the position and get the necessary work done.

If you have a long-term need for an expert with specialization, it can be worth going through a rigorous recruitment process. But if you have a specific short term need for project-based work, it can be worth looking into hiring an agency or a Gig Worker. Small agencies and Gig workers can often help with out-of-the-ordinary situations:

Short-term projects or development “sprints.”
Projects requiring a limited number of hours
Cybersecurity emergency
Troubleshooting apps or software

However, suppose you need specialists who understand your business and can provide consistent support for your tech development, processes, apps, and products. In that case, it’s far better to have a full-time tech team, whether that’s in-house staff or a hired consulting firm.

2. Know the Ideal Candidate

When looking to find talent and build a tech team, it’s important to first understand what you’re looking for. Who is your ideal candidate? What kind of skills and experience are you hoping for? Knowing the particular skill sets and experience required for the position will help you rapidly sift out unqualified applications, allowing you to focus on those who are worth your time.

Once you have a clear idea of your ideal candidate, you can start to craft your candidate persona. Consider market demographics when doing this. For example, if you want to find tech talent, remember that almost half of all tech candidates are under 35. This information can help you adapt your candidate persona to find tech talent that matches your needs.

3. Figure Out What Your Ideal Candidate Wants

It’s not just you who chooses your ideal candidate. Your ideal candidate should choose you too. The current workforce is spoiled for choices. They will choose the opportunity that best suits them. Hence, to find the right tech talent, you must know what they want.

According to surveys from LinkedIn and Glassdoor, these are some of the factors that IT job seekers identified as most important:

Benefits – 63%

Salary – 67%

Company Culture – 60%

Location – 59%

Work/Life Balance – 29%

Consider what makes your ideal candidates tick. Include that in your job description.

4. Look at the right places

Even with the perfect job description, you won’t get any leads if qualified tech professionals don’t see your posts. You need to know where to find the best tech talent.

Job portals like Indeed and Monster may be good for getting resumes. But most of the qualified tech talent gets hired through strong personal networks. To find the crème de la crème, go to where you know the tech community spends its time. Like:

Industry websites (GitHub, Stack Overflow, etc.)
Online forums
Local technology events

People hanging out on these platforms are the ones serious about technology. Go hire them!

5. Work with a tech talent company

Of course, building a tech team doesn’t necessarily mean making a permanent hire. It merely means finding tech talent to complete a task. Sometimes, the easiest way to fill employment gaps is by using the services of a tech staffing company. An IT staffing company saves you from a complicated hiring process.

One such trusted solution provider to find tech talent is iView.

With iView, you can build a tech team quickly without any research, job postings, or scouring hundreds of applications. iView presents flexible solutions where you can choose the number of tech people you need and their duration. Thus, you can easily scale up or scale down your workforce as needed. You can now be more flexible with your projects and save time and money hiring unnecessary full-time employees.

So, if you’re struggling to find tech talent to manage your projects, trust the experts at iView to build a tech team for you. We have rich experience and can help you get the qualified professionals you need to complete any IT project.

Footnote:

At iView Labs, we offer technical team talent on demand to supplement or add to businesses’ current capacity and meet your needs for technical development. In accordance with the talents required by the business, we match, build, manage, and operate their technical teams for a more sustainable functioning. This broadly fits with the core principle of the digitisation movement, in which technology should ease your life and allow free creative minds to reach new heights. Rest assured that our team will continue to put our best foot forward to deliver astounding results. Want us to become a part of your growth journey? Get in touch today.To know more about iView Labs, kindly log on to our website www.iviewlabs.com and to get in touch with us with your queries and needs, just write us an email at info@iviewlabs.com and sales@iviewlabs.com. Download the latest portfolio to see our work.

5 Effective Ways of Retaining Product Customers

In a saturated marketplace such as ours where competition is stiff, it makes sense to conserve the customer base that you have acquired. It’s a well-accepted fact: if you service the customers you have, you won’t have to go around hunting for new ones. Yet, sales and marketing people exert effort and expenses in generating leads.

You can sell to an existing customer 7 out of 10 times, but only 1 out of 10 times to a new customer. Plus, acquiring new customers is costly. You can retain present customers at a fraction of this cost, one-sixth to be precise. And here’s the trump card of statistics in favor of customer retention: Gartner states that 80% of all your future ROI will come from just 20% of your customers. Wow, that’s an eye-opener! This means your business can survive (at least break even) just by cross-selling or up-selling to your existing customers. You almost don’t need to onboard new customers.

Are you thinking – this doesn’t concern me, I have a great product and my customers will never abandon me? Then, there’s another bitter pill you’ll have to swallow: no matter how good your product or service is, your customers might leave if they feel neglected. This is why many top-notch products and companies shut down. They just don’t work hard enough to build customer loyalty. In fact, a good 68% of customers say a company’s uncaring or impersonal attitude is a relationship-killer.

The graphic below will prove our point:

Source

So putting things in perspective, we have compiled battle-tested techniques for retention of product customers.

1) Deliver Quality Products: The key to gaining repeat business is delivering top quality products. Nothing works as well as a product that wows with its features. Even if your product is marked higher than competitors, it will reign supreme if it’s a cut above the rest.

Let’s illustrate with an example: Two doorstep service providers, Urban Clap and Yes Madame. Both offer at-home salon services at competitive prices. Urban clap is priced higher than Yes Madame. Yet, it is market share is bigger. Why? The differentiator is service quality. UC technicians are better trained, use branded products, and are punctual and courteous. Granted, UC has the first-mover advantage, but it’s managed to keep up and even beat competition just because of its killer services. Although, the great marketing helps, but remember, even the most radical marketer can’t sell a product that sucks. Do ample market research when creating your product strategy. Understand what your audience needs. Have a long vision plus short-term goals. Never compromise on quality when faced with time or budget constraints. This is a non-negotiable area that every successful product company excels at.

2) Nurture Customer Relations: KPMG in their study found customer retention to be the biggest revenue driver for companies. The secret that many product companies don’t know is that loyal customers are their best promoters. Satisfied customers become brand ambassadors of a company. They campaign unknowingly about the superb experience they’ve had with a company or product they’re using. Their genuine, first-hand account is a marketing billboard in itself. You don’t need to hire expensive influencers for generating brand awareness or leads for yourself. Your happy customers are doing it for you. So, provide excellent customer service. Reward your return customers with gated offers, discounts, and resources. Treat them well and they’ll treat you better. Keep in touch with them via email, newsletters, and your website. Feature their stories on your social apps and website. Make them your family. Involve them in your journey and they will stay till the very end. A practical way to do this is to draw a list of customers who buy from you regularly. Reach out to them via exclusive offers and make them feel special. Another good tip: List out subscribers to your newsletter. These are people who show an active interest in your work but haven’t purchased anything yet. To make them jump boat, send a first-time promotion offer or discounted service/product.

3) Lend a Personal Touch: Personalize all your emails and offers. Rid the assembly line approach of sending mass emails. An Ecoconsultancy survey has proved personalized offers, based on a user’s purchase history and preference, can surge your ROI to the sky. This infographic compares the business returns of companies using personalization vs. those that don’t.

4) Listen to Your Customers: Some product companies just never stop selling. Every effort of theirs is geared towards the cash register. This is hardly effective as customers, existing or new, don’t want to be taken for a ride. You’ll have to give them something in return. One of the best ways to make the relationship mutually beneficial is to incorporate their feedback into your future offerings. Don’t send lengthy questionnaires to customers asking them for their opinion or experience with your product. Keep it short and simple. Encourage specific, precise feedback regarding what they liked or didn’t like. Try to collate points and factor them into your product strategy. Do keep respondents in the loop, reassuring that their feedback isn’t ignored. When you value your customers’ opinions, they become stakeholders in your business. Your product becomes more aligned to market needs. Your ROI improves and so does your customer satisfaction index. Source

5) Use a CRM: A CRM system is a handy way to keep track of how customers interact with your product. Draw up metrics of customer inquiries. What bottlenecks are customers facing with your service or product? Are they content with the after-sales service you’re giving? Do you need to improve in some areas? Deeply inspect issues that are reported by the majority of your customers. These have to be resolved on a priority basis. CRM also gives you a sneak peek into how well your sales or customer service staff are working. Disgruntled employees and lackadaisical post-sales staff can annoy a customer big time. This is a serious red flag for any organization and should be attended to immediately.

Wrap Up

By now, you must have grasped the impact customer retention can have on the sales and success of your business. Work your magic on your current customers. They are the big fish that’ll act as bait for the other fish in the pond.

If you are looking to build a web, mobile or a cloud product, you can avail of a round of discussion with iView Labs’ tech team. Our developers and project team are always here to help and suggest what is required and necessary for your products.

To know more about iView Labs, kindly log on to our website www.iviewlabs.com and to get in touch with us with your queries and needs just write us an email on info@iviewlabs.com and sales@iviewlabs.com.

Download the latest portfolio to see our work.

How to Develop an Effective Product Strategy

A product starts as an idea or a vision. But not all brilliant ideas transform into brilliant products. To convert an abstract vision into a concrete product, one that fulfills its business objectives, requires a precise product strategy.

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“Product Strategy” can be defined as a product’s journey from the sketch board to the market. A journey needs to have a destination. This can be equated to the user experience a product envisions to give to its users. It needs to have a route. This can be the processes, protocols, and resources that go into a product’s development.

Why is Product Strategy Essential?

Can you reach your destination efficiently if you don’t know where you are headed? Or which route to take? Or what obstacles you might encounter on your way? The answer is an emphatic NO. You will most likely get distracted en route, or get lost in the crowd, or reach your target too late or too tired.

Similarly, a product needs to know its end goal and its end users so that it can be termed as a “business success”. There is no dearth of products that were made with great intent but without great knowledge of the market and users. Consequently, they fail to generate desired revenue and are a deplorable waste of time, resources, and manpower.

An astute product strategy gives direction to the product team. It outlines the intent of every step of the manufacturing process. By eliminating guesswork, product strategy gives a scientific algorithm that facilitates strategic decision making. Not based on assumptions but hard facts, product strategy tenets will make your product a profitable investment.

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Source: https://www.myproductroadmap.com/collections/product-strategy-templates
How to Craft a Winning Product Strategy

People buy products. No. Let me tweak that a bit. People buy products they NEED. If you want more people to buy your product, it makes sense to examine the needs of your users. The more your product aligns with users’ needs, the wider are its chances of success.

But the first question that you need to sort is: who are your users? Let’s delve into this right away.

Step #1: Identify Your Users

In a competitive market scenario such as ours, you can’t afford to make mistakes. Your product needs to hit the bullseye in the first go. There is no room for ambiguity.

Create really accurate user personas for all segments of your user base. The more specific you get, the better will be your understanding of their mindset.

Indulge in market research to examine new users. Send mail surveys to existing users. Ask questions, feedback, and personal experiences from your customers to derive their aspirations. How-to-Develop-an-Effective-Product-Strategy_3 Source: https://www.researchrockstar.com/can-you-name-8-market-research-methods/

Step #2: Identify Their Problems

Once you have a few well-defined user personas, get inside their minds. Learn how they think and what they want. What challenges do they face and what expectations do they have from a product?

Understand this: Customers don’t want the same old product, packaged differently. The millennial customers especially are discerning and aware. They research products online and offline before reaching for their pocketbooks. Ensure you astutely understand customer aspirations so that you can create a product that is tailor-made to fulfill their needs.

Step #3: Identify the “Sweet Spot”

You know your users. You know their expectations. You know what the competitors are offering. You also know your monetary objectives and constraints. The next milestone is to find a balance between what users want and what you can give them (within budget and time constraints). The common area between user expectations, competitor offerings, and your deliverables is called the “Sweet Spot”.

Bear in mind: You can’t promise the moon and stars to customers and deliver rocks. But you can’t burn a hole in your pocket trying to cater to user demands which are non-feasible to your business.

How-to-Develop-an-Effective-Product-Strategy_4

Source: https://idea-sandbox.com/blog/strategic-sweet-spot/#axzz62Ui2OtEU

Align corporate goals with market demands. Then, include product features that can fulfill both these variables. What you will get is a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), a working product model with all essential features. The embellishments can come later, as budget and market reach expands.

Step #4: Watertight Your Development Processes

Now we come to operations. Convey your product vision to the entire development team. Don’t silo them. Encourage open communication between designers, developers, and marketers. Conjunction between thinking of all the teams is necessary for the timely, smooth delivery of your product.

Agile development methodology can work wonders in an evolving market such as ours. Integrate continuous development, delivery, testing, and improvement into your processes. Have time-bound, iterative development sprints. Keep clearing backlog from previous sprints whilst working on new requirements.

Conduct usability testing on real users and observe their interaction with your product closely. Note the bottlenecks they are facing. Improve upon them in the next iteration. Keep improving and keep delivering.

Step #5: Track Your Progress

Don’t get complacent after an initial spurt of activity. Have Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and build metrics to monitor how well your strategy caters to each area.

Use tools such as CRMs to get first-hand information on your customers’ satisfaction levels. You can leverage agile tenets to integrate user feedback into the development process. Re-align your strategy accordingly.

To Wrap Up

Product strategy is the link between a hazy product vision and a well-defined development roadmap. It bridges the gaps between these two. Products based on an intuitive product strategy are able to make good ROI, capture markets effectively, and get a strategic advantage over competitor products.

Product strategy proves to be a game-changer in the long run. All successful products have a clear cut product strategy as their foundation. Invest in crafting a product strategy so that you don’t have to reinvest in overhauling your entire development later.

Download the latest portfolio to see our work.

Don’t forget to share the knowledge by hitting the share button.

– Team iView Labs

“Developers on Demand” for IT Companies

Catering to the new shift in IT industry of reducing bench resources

Typically, as most persons are familiar, Just in time is an inventory management method for materials and goods to be available “On Demand” or be replenished as required in the production process.

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The general perception is that this method is most suitable for companies and industries where repetitive manufacturing functions are involved and are beneficial when the tasks involved are on an assembly plant or a job floor. However, with the rise of Information Technology and the advent of service-based businesses in the last one and a half decades, this has become an established practice in the IT circles too.

With a growing industry but season based demand for example in case of service businesses, it is highly time-consuming to build, maintain and manage the turnover of developers inventory through the traditional candidate pipelines. Moreover, despite the time and efforts put in it is not always as value adding for either the firm or the client since many software developers remain as Bench Resources in wait for a project and are a preventable cost to the company.

“Benched Resources” by definition are software developers who are waiting to get the project(s) to work upon. While these are important assets for the firm, it is also crucial to note that Benched Resources do not bring in revenues till such time that they get a project and hence remain more of a cost to the company. On the one hand, in situations or seasons where there are no or limited projects with the firm, it considers trimming down resources on the bench and on the other, the fact that he/she is waiting on the bench and a trim-down possibility can be demoralizers for the resource. Bench Resources were considered as the key strength of the Indian IT industry for a long time. However, with the increasing popularity and relevance of Developers being available on demand for short and fixed-term contracts, the environment is different. Added to this is the rise in automation and all these factors have reduced the average bench strength from 8% to 4% in recent years.

“Great vision without great people is irrelevant.” – Jim Collins, Author of Good to Great

How can IT companies then maximize the value for both the software developers as well as the company with appropriate planning and work allocation?

This is where Developers on-demand model comes into the picture. Traditionally, firms build and maintain candidate pipelines without an actual need but with developers on-demand model, IT companies are able to hire candidates that exactly match the needs or requirements of the project, at the time when they want them, in the appropriate number and at a mutually agreed cost or fees. Albeit, this does not provide the safety of the traditional candidate pipeline approach yet it is more targeted and rewarding. Also, with the advent of gig economy, business models where services are traded on the basis of access rather than ownership are picking up.

In some cases, many companies consider outsourcing projects for a specific duration when they want to focus on their core businesses. Many IT companies today send their benched resources to other companies for a project. In this way, the companies are able to leverage expertise from multiple talents for specific projects and also better utilize the available resources by sending them for specific projects outside.

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Given below are some benefits of Developers On demand method.

This is a pull system where the resource is pulled or utilized based on a need or demand. This permits IT companies to cover the staff requirement without having excess human inventory.
Developer on Demand faster resource replenishment and lesser burden on the human resource department of the company.
Developer on Demand model gives companies flexibility and convenience to get access to different talents which are existing across the industry. Moreover, since resources can be found quickly (usually within 24 hours) there is increased productivity and less slack time.
This approach reduces the overall cost to the company, increases efficiency, productivity and saves on crucial organization time.

“The smartest business decision you can make is to hire qualified people. Bringing the right people on board saves you thousands, and your business will run smoothly and efficiently.” – Brian Tracy

With so many advantages on the table, still one cannot nullify the importance of having some benched resources in this industry. Resources which specialize in certain skills and are high on performance are contracted so that they can be called upon as needed

The Developers on-demand model is beneficial as it makes underused software developers, both tangible and intangible. If companies come together and start sharing their underused resources or services, this will decrease cost and also will make sure that every resource is rightly utilized.

– Team iView