Finding and hiring skilled developers is one of the biggest challenges you'll face as a tech business owner or founder—especially when you want to accelerate your growth. The task becomes even more daunting considering the wide variety of platforms that offer developer services. These options include general-purpose freelance marketplaces, job boards, vetted talent providers, dedicated teams, and more. So to help you with this, we've put together a list of the 14 best websites to find and hire developers in 2024.
We'll start with general-purpose platforms, which are often the best for on-site hiring. Next, we'll explore platforms specializing in remote positions, followed by those for freelancers, vetted talent, and finally, dedicated teams.
1. LinkedIn
LinkedIn Talent Solutions has a huge global presence and will be a reasonable option for you to consider regardless of your specific hiring needs.
LinkedIn has become the go-to social media product for professionals. They use it to present themselves to the world and make connections. It is the modern professional’s online resume. Candidates are familiar with pursuing their next career opportunity there so you can tap into a large and motivated audience when advertising your position.
LinkedIn offers a range of products within the Talent Solutions suite. You should pick the one that’s right for you. These products include:
Recruiter - A hiring platform to quickly source, connect with, and manage qualified candidates.
Jobs - Post your open roles on LinkedIn and easily target, prioritize, and manage qualified applicants.
Career Pages - A media-rich page to tell your company’s story, drive awareness, and spotlight your job opportunities.
LinkedIn is good at targeting candidates in a specific geography (country or city). If you’re hiring for an on-site position this feature might be especially suited to your needs.
2. Hired
Hired is a website that promises to help you hire the most in-demand tech talent. It gives you instant access to a curated pool of experienced tech talent currently in the market for a new role.
Rather than being a general-purpose recruitment service, Hired is focused on the tech industry. They help you find software engineers, DevOps engineers, product designers, product managers, data analysts—any role you’d find on a digital product team.
Hired offers a range of products, including a Talent Marketplace, DEI Hiring/Leaders, Talent Sourcing and Acquisition, Technical Assessments, Recruitment Events, Coding Challenges and Employer Branding.
They offer two pricing options. The first is Pay Per Hire, in which they take 15% of the hire’s first-year base salary. The second is Unlimited Hiring, which is a custom annual subscription tailored to the volume of recruitment you wish to do.
3. Stack Overflow
For years, Stack Overflow has been the place for developers to go when stuck with a programming problem. The website is a huge reference of questions and answers on just about every programming language, library, and framework. Users who answer questions are acknowledged for doing so through points and badges placed on their profile.
Stack Overflow Talent allows you to tap into this far-reaching community of “passionate and self-motivated tech talent”, offering a range of services under its Employer Branding solution.
They help by making your company more attractive to talent by increasing its awareness and helping you build relationships with members of their community.
They do this through several advertising and sponsorship products, including:
Company Awareness, where they drive traffic to your company’s Stack Overflow page.
Banner Advertising, in which they advertise your company website on banner ads shown on Q&A pages.
Direct-to-Developers, which are native text ads matched to content users are consuming.
Topic Tag Sponsorships, where you can sponsor a specific tag that users use when categorizing their questions and answers.
Site Sponsorship, in which you sponsor an entire Stack Exchange site (Stack Overflow’s white label product).
Newsletter, Podcast, and Blog Post Sponsorship and Advertising.
4. Wellfound
Wellfound, formerly AngelList Talent, is a platform that connects startups with job seekers.
If you are a startup, Wellfound is a website where you might find developers who are especially suited to working in your early-stage environment. They claim that candidates on their platform are specifically interested in startups.
Wellfound lets you post targeted job ads. Their candidate filtering tools are especially appealing as they include information that is unique to their platform. This information includes skills and experiences showcased in unique ways, which timezone they operate in, what their remote preferences are, and details on what assessments they’ve completed.
They also provide a free Applicant Tracking System (ATS), which means you can manage your entire recruitment process within their website (for candidates from Wellfound at least).
Their community of candidates is 8 million strong, listing a job ad takes under 10 minutes once you’ve signed up, and basic job posting is free (you can pay to get more views).
5. We Work Remotely
We Work Remotely is unashamedly a remote-only job website. Their mission is to enable flexible, meaningful work and they’ve been doing it for over a decade.
They claim to be the largest remote hiring website out there. They fill 90% of the positions posted. In short, if you’re looking to fill a remote position they’re a safe bet.
One advantage of using We Work Remotely is their partner network. When you post a job on their website, it will also be distributed to many other job boards including Google Jobs Network, SitePoint, Unicorn Hunt, and Designer News.
You pay a flat rate of $299 per month for each job listing. On top of that, you have multiple upgrade options, each designed to provide more visibility to your listing.
6. Arc
Arc offers a comprehensive and high-quality recruitment experience. Their service is focused exclusively on remote, senior developers.
To assist you, they provide an AI-powered chatbot called HireAI. To help you find the right candidate you can chat with HireAI rather than use traditional means.
Their candidates are highly vetted. They claim that only the top 2.3% pass their Silicon Valley-caliber interview process.
They can help manage the entire recruitment process for you. This includes doing manual profile screening on your behalf, making candidate introduction videos available to you, pairing with you during technical interviews, and performing final candidate reviews. Their service continues after a hire has been made, with onboarding and ongoing performance reviews once the developer has joined your team.
To entice competent developers to join their community, they provide an experience in which companies approach the developer (rather than the other way around, which is more typical in hiring situations).
It takes Arc around 14 days to help you hire a candidate for your team. They claim this is four times faster than a traditional recruitment process.
Arc has two pricing packages. The first is $399 per month for access to their HireAI Lite subscription. With this package, you are limited to what their chatbot can assist you with. Their second offering is HireAI Premium, in which you get the chatbot plus high-touch, human assistance in the form of a dedicated recruiter and custom candidate sourcing. The fee for HireAI Premium is a percentage of the developer’s annual salary.
Arc is a great choice if competent senior developers are who you’re after.
7. Upwork
Upwork, formerly Elance, has been connecting companies with freelancers for over 25 years. The name is often felt as synonymous with the word “freelancer” in the digital economy. Their model is simple. You post a job on their platform and you'll start getting proposals from freelance developers.
Freelance work is provided through three services:
Talent Marketplace, in which you engage a developer through milestone billing our hourly contracts.
Product Catalog, where you can browse and buy predefined projects and fixed rates.
Consultations, which is all about getting 1-on-1 advice from “Top Rated” talent on scoping, planning, or optimizing your project.
Their Top Rated program is a designation they give to outstanding freelancers on their platform. It’s a badge of honor for talent who consistently do great work.
Portfolio and historical performance information is available for every freelancer on their platform, allowing you to make informed decisions about how you choose to engage.
In addition to just hiring a freelance developer for a job, you can build a Virtual Talent Bench. This allows you to proactively build relationships with suitable developers and reach them quickly when the need to hire them arises.
Upwork strives to bring you cost-effective services. One of their taglines is “Work with the best—without breaking the bank”. They provide relatively low transaction rates. If you hire through their Talent Marketplace you will pay a fee of 3-5% (depending on billing method). On top of this, the developer will pay a 10% freelancer service fee on their earnings.
8. Toptal
Toptal aims to provide the top tier of freelancers, with their tagline of ”Hire the Top 3% of Freelance Talent” highlighting this. They include developers in the list of disciplines they provide.
Their exclusive network of talent consists of hands-on freelancers who augment directly into your team “as an internal team member working from home would.”
They are a vetted talent provider, in that all their members pass through a rigorous screening process before joining their network. This process measures their subject matter expertise, professionalism, and communication skills. Their process includes project-based evaluations that test against real-world scenarios. Only around 3% of applicants make it through this screening.
To hire a developer through Toptal you’ll be taken through the following process:
- Talk to an industry expert. This person will learn about what you need and will manage the recruitment campaign for you.
- Work with hand-selected talent. They’ll quickly introduce you to developers who they think are especially suited to your needs.
- The right fit and a performance guarantee. You get to work with the developer on a trial basis and only pay once you are satisfied with their contribution.
Their website exemplifies their talent pool by providing detailed profiles of many of their candidates. There are also many case studies showing how reputable brands have used their services successfully.
Toptal’s pricing is incorporated into the rates they charge for their freelancers’ contributions.
9. Lemon.io
Lemon.io provides a refreshing take on developer recruitment, through bold design and a snappy narrative. They use grand, startup-esque language like “miraculous devs”, “get devotees to build your vision”, and “diabolically fast”.
Their process is straightforward:
- You describe your needs to them.
- They review their pool of vetted developers and match suitable ones with you.
- You work with a matched developer, who contributes to iterations of your product.
They vet developers using a four-stage process:
- The resume review, in which they reject candidates who lack outstanding experience.
- Soft skills check, where developers undergo a screening call to check soft skills and language proficiency.
- Hard skills check, which involves Lemon.io technical assessors testing the candidate’s hands-on development skills.
- “Elect the awesome”, in which they only accept candidates who are passionately committed to startup culture.
Lemon.io has a focus on iterative product development. It frequently mentions this in its messaging. Many of their developers come from big-name tech companies like Apple, Google, Airbnb, and Netflix.
Lemon.io charges hourly rates of between $55 and $95.
10. Turing
Just like Arc, Turing leans hard on the AI angle to differentiate itself.
Your company must be based in the U.S. to hire developers through Turing. But if you are then you’ll get to have an AI pick and match developers who are highly suitable for you. Turning this on its head, you’ll see that Turing has a strong pitch to developers. It offers U.S.-quality roles to suitably qualified developers regardless of which country they are based in.
In addition to hiring, Turing also offers outcomes-based services. If you were to hire them in this way, you wouldn’t have one of their developers join your team. Rather, you would have Turing complete a technical project on your behalf. Their services include:
- AI Services - business solutions in artificial intelligence and machine learning.
- Cloud Services - cloud adoption or migration.
- Application Engineering Services - modern, world-class applications.
- Managed Teams - go hands-off with your hands-on projects.
11. Deazy
The nice thing about Deazy is the flexibility they offer. Their services range from part-time access to a single developer, all the way through to hiring an entire development team.
If you’re on a tight budget you can hire developers on a part-time basis. As long as your project doesn’t need a high degree of input this might be the right option for you. And as your product (and budget) grows you’re able to scale this up, perhaps eventually reaching full-time commitment.
If you’re an enterprise business, Deazy offers a range of larger-scale hiring options including Full Project Build, Team Augmentation, Retained Teams, and Support & Maintenance.
Deazy has 6,000+ vetted developers in their community, spread all over the world. Their vetting process involves:
- A screening call.
- Technical, cultural, and communications tests.
- Rigid security checks.
- Continued improvement (once the developer joins their community).
Getting started with Deazy starts with a call, during which you’ll brief them on your development requirements. A couple of days after that you’ll start assessing hiring options they present to you. Around a week after the call, you’ll share project specifications and start onboarding your new team member(s).
12. A.Team
A.team provides teams that build tech products. Their secret to doing this well is highlighted through two factors: their use of AI and their ability to be flexible.
Your experience with them starts with sharing information about the team you wish to assemble. The first step is to tell them what you’re building. Next comes choosing roles for your team. Then finally you give details about your mission (i.e. project).
This information is fed into their TeamGraph AI, which comes back with a team proposal (which takes about a week). You’ll get a chance to review this and make comments and revisions.
Once you’re happy with the proposal the newly formed team kicks off and starts building (or contributing to) your product. Engagements usually last between 6 and 18 months.
A.team provides a Company HQ product, which gives you control over and visibility into what your team is doing. You can adjust your team size and composition here, and even build entirely new teams.
A.team is a broker of sorts. Their platform is a product designed to assemble teams on your behalf. Once your team is assembled, your relationship is directly with those team members rather than with a.team itself. They don’t set out to provide full-time hires out of the gate. However, they do support full-time transition paths and enable this through a contract-to-hire placement fee.
13. X-Team
X-Team provides high-performing, on-demand teams of developers for the world's leading brands. In a way that seems similar to a.team, they will hand-pick a suitable team of developers for you, based on your needs, timeline, and product objectives.
What sets X-Team apart is their dedication to their developers. While most hiring websites are keen to play the role of matchmaker, X-Team makes it clear that dedication to their developers’ well-being and career progression is the key to a successful engagement.
They go to significant lengths to provide this. Two parts of their culture that stand out here are:
X-Outpost, in which X-Teamers (which is what they call their developers) have the opportunity to get together in a “hackerhouse” to explore and work in some of the world's most beautiful places.
Unleash+, which is a gamified way to encourage X-Teamers to keep learning, growing, and doing what they love.
With perks such as these, it’s not difficult to conclude that developers at X-Team are committed, energized, and motivated to do good work.
14. Hivekind
If you are looking for a fully dedicated development team, then you could also consider hiring one of our dedicated teams here at Hivekind.
Unlike a matchmaking service in which a team is assembled for you on-demand, Hivekind teams have been working together as units prior to you hiring them. Keeping people together like this helps form strong working relationships and ensures consistency, predictability, and productivity.
Each team has a Product Manager, which makes the team able to do end-to-end product development.
Hivekind cares about the return on investment you’ll get from hiring one of their teams. When you get in touch to discuss your project, they’ll talk to you about your desired future state, how to measure progress towards it, and what value reaching it will have for your business. They’ll then propose a range of engagement options designed to capture the value you have in mind.
Teams at Hivekind follow Agile and Lean Startup principles, pursuing your objectives iteratively and learning about your users’ needs along the way. This helps you build what your users actually need, which in turn makes the end result more successful.
Hivekind’s vetting process is designed to select only the very best developers. Their assessment process follows these steps:
- Take-home technical test, in which the candidate provides changes to a working web application.
- An interview to explore general technical knowledge and to assess cultural fit.
- A pair-programming session, in which the candidate implements a coding task with oversight from two Hivekind senior developers.
Ensuring a software team performs well over the long term is no small challenge. Hivekind achieves this by providing each team with engineering management. Each team member is given regular support in pursuing career progression and becoming the best version of themselves. Developers at Hivekind are employees of the company and are given all the benefits and security this entails. They are well looked after and bring their best each day as a result.
If you want an important technical challenge taken off your hands, with a clearly understood ROI figured out before you start, Hivekind might be the way for you to bring developers into your company.
Now that we’ve covered the best websites to find and hire developers, let’s take a look at how to choose the best one for you from this list.
Choosing the best hiring website for your needs
You won’t be able to pick the right hiring website for you until you know what you need from the role. Here are some questions to ask yourself before you start your recruitment campaign. The answers to these will help you choose the website or service that’s right for you.
- Will the position be remote or on-site?
- Are you creating a new team or adding to an existing team?
- What skills and experience are required?
- What are the responsibilities of the role?
- What seniority are you looking for?
- Are you able to assess the skill level of candidates?
- What will the onboarding experience be like?
- How will you measure success in the role?
- How long do you expect the relationship to last?
- How many people do you wish to hire?
- Why would a developer want to join your team?
If there are certain questions you don’t have a good answer to, you should choose a hiring website that covers those. For example, if you’re not confident in your ability to assess candidates then you should choose a website that is particularly good at vetting.
Once you have a grasp on your needs, consider the different types of hiring options that are available:
On-Site. If you must have the developer physically on-site (at your office or facility), you will have to constrain your hiring effort accordingly. There are often country-specific (or city-specific) services for this.
Remote. If your business is set up to support remote team members, you can consider remote-centric job websites. Hiring for remote positions opens you up to a large pool of talented developers (worldwide or at least regional).
Freelancers. If you’re hiring for a short-term or fixed-scope project, you might want to consider hiring a freelancer rather than making a longer-time commitment.
Vetted Talent. If you’re unsure about assessing candidates, you may want to have the hiring website do that for you. Many providers vet candidates before allowing them to apply for jobs, reducing your need to do so.
Dedicated Teams. If you want to move quickly and want recruitment, assessment, and team management taken off your hands, it may be best if you hire a fully managed dedicated team.
Wrapping up
Choosing the right hiring website can be challenging. However, by following our advice and carefully evaluating your options, we're confident that you'll make the right choice, and will find a solution that meets your development needs. Good luck and all the best!
