How to hire Flutter developers best-fitted for your project

Intro  

Before going to the nuts and bolts of the process of finding and hiring Flutter programmers, let’s delve into why Flutter is a popular choice right now and why it usually wins the dilemma of choosing between React Native and Flutter for cross-platform development.

1.

UNDERSTANDING FLUTTER FOR YOUR HIRING DECISIONS

WHY FLUTTER

• Top-notch user experience. Compiled to native ARM code and underpinned by the hot reload feature, Flutter enables near-native app performance. Moreover, its built-in support for both Material Design (Android) and Cupertino (iOS) widgets allows for great visual appeal. These two factors lead to enhanced user experiences and engagement.
• Accelerated time to market. Underpinned by a single codebase and a custom testing framework, Flutter facilitates cross-team collaboration and notably speeds up development cycles.
• Great audience reach. Flutter is an official project by Google and a close partner of Microsoft, which highly contributes to the framework’s widespread use around the world.
• Cost-effectiveness is reached thanks to the Flutter’s ability to slash the amount of device-specific code needed for targeting multiple platforms and its built-in testing features that spare you the need to employ external QA tools.

More detailed information on the key technical benefits and business value on choosing Flutter for cross-platform app development can be found in our recent blog post.

SOFTWARE BUILT WITH FLUTTER

Another significant reason why Flutter is a great choice for your cross-platform development endeavor is its versatility in terms of industries and business domains:

• Health and fitness apps are a great niche for Flutter due to its plugins and widgets enabling fitness tracking, location-based features, data visualization, as well as notifications about workouts, water intake, medication alerts, and more.
• Media and entertainment. In this industry, Flutter excels in enhancing media playback, animation / image processing, monetization, and third-party integrations (including streaming services, databases, and content libraries).
• In the finance and banking domain, Flutter greatly assists in functionality such as authentication, forms / input fields, transaction processing, and charts / graphs implementation.
• Design and creativity apps are also easily built with Flutter. Complex drawing, smooth UI, fast image processing — this is only part of features that are enabled by Flutter’s built-in plugins.

2.

KEY SKILLS TO WATCH WHEN LOOKING FOR FLUTTER PROGRAMMERS

One of the core aspects for paying heed to on your way of hiring Flutter developers is their competence. A good candidate should have a nice mix of technical skills, a track record of Flutter-based projects, and soft skills.

TECHNICAL SKILLS

• Vast knowledge of Flutter. Potential Flutter programmers should know the ins and outs of the framework and its ecosystem — widgets, plugins, and packages — to build smooth UXes, interactive animations, as well as responsive and high-performance UIs.
• Dart language proficiency. As Dart is the primary programming language for Flutter app engineering, find out how well your candidates understand Dart’s syntax, data types, control flow, and object-oriented programming concepts. The principles of asynchronous programming for handling operations and knowledge of the Dart Package Manager are also a must.
• Mobile development competence. Experience in engineering apps for both iOS and Android from a single codebase, knowledge of platform-specific UI components and navigation — check how well your candidates navigate in this topic.
• State management is one more aspect to watch. As for simple local state management, Flutter developers should be familiar with setState(), for global state management — with Riverpod, Provider, Redux, GetX, and Bloc.
• Robust integrations. Find Flutter developers who are versatile in pairing up platform-specific functionalities and third-party services using RESTful APIs, GraphQL, native code integration best practices, Dio libraries, Firebase integrations, etc.

SOFT SKILLS

• Communication and collaboration. Check the ability of your potential Flutter programmers to clearly articulate ideas, efficiently resolve issues, communicate technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders, and work effectively in agile environments with cross-functional teams. If team members work in different time zones and countries, the target language fluency and schedule flexibility will matter a lot.
• Flexibility and adaptability are important characteristics for smoothly integrating into the team, project’s specifics, existing methodologies, and business processes — to start driving business value from day one. Moreover, the Flutter tech landscape is constantly evolving, and a great candidate should be able to adapt to changing technologies, master existing skills, learn new tools and frameworks. Effective prioritization, multi-tasking, great speed without sacrificing quality are also indispensable in this regard.
• Problem-solving mindset. Make sure your future Flutter developers take a proactive and analytical approach to addressing challenges. Namely, they should be good at predicting and managing risks, anticipating potential security and performance issues, and thinking outside the box to suggest enhancements based on user feedback / trends / emerging techs.

3.

HOW TO GAUGE THE EXPERIENCE OF FLUTTER DEVELOPERS

Years of experience are no 100-percent guarantee of a great developer anymore. Before you hire Flutter developers for your next project, you should also thoroughly evaluate the quality of their previous work. We offer the following recommendations in this case.

ANALYZE PORTFOLIOS

• Relevancy. Make sure your candidates have the experience relevant to your particular niche. Choose the portfolio with real-world Flutter apps that are similar in features and complexity to your future solution.
• Diversity of work. The more diverse (in functionality, industries, timelines, regulations, etc.) the previous cases are, the more adaptability and flexibility you’ll have for your project.

GAUGE THE QUALITY

• Code quality. If there’s a possibility to access the candidate’s public repositories (for example, GitHub/GitLab Repositories), review their code for readability, structure, and adherence to the Flutter framework’s best practices like the use of Flutter widgets / plugins / state management. Also, review the code samples for quality if possible.
• Testing. It’s a good idea to check whether your Flutter candidates performed usability testing on their previous projects, because the willingness to iterate based on user feedback shows professionalism.

ASK FOR TESTIMONIALS

• References. Talking to someone who has already worked with your candidate is a must. By asking for references from previous clients and employers, you’ll get detailed insights into not only the developer’s competence, but also into their work ethic and professionalism.

4.

WHERE YOU CAN FIND FLUTTER DEVELOPERS

There are different ways of recruiting Flutter specialists, so make a choice based on your project specifics, budget needs, and timelines.

The process of choosing the most suitable fit for your Flutter project is complicated. You need to invest much time, money, and knowledge at every stage: understand where to find developers, how to interview them, what technical and personal characteristics to watch.

At the same time, this won’t be the guarantee of success, as developers might fail during trial periods or just not fit into your company. Keep it in mind, when choosing the hiring method.

• In-house teams. By hiring engineers to form an in-house team, you get more control and can retain all the knowledge within your company, which is particularly valuable for long-term product development. However, this endeavor is very costly, time-consuming, and you need in-house recruiters who have experience and competence in searching and interviewing Flutter engineers.
• Hiring freelancers is certainly more cost effective as you’re deprived of overhead expenditures around onboarding, retention, endurance, bonuses, etc. However, flexibility, communication, and scalability might be not so effective in this case.
• Staff augmentation combines the best of the two previous options. To wit, you don’t have to pay time and additional financial resources to integrate programmers into your company. The outsourcing firm  will provide a well-coordinated, read-to-work Flutter team for full-fledged product development or  individual developers with diverse skill sets and backgrounds to augment your existing team. Another significant perk here is that you’ll be spared the headache of countless tech interviews and trial periods. Such outsourcing companies take the hiring process seriously and select the best talents for you through technical and behavioral interviews, take-home assignments, and live coding tests.

Conclusion

The process of searching, hiring, and onboarding engineers for custom Flutter development requires accuracy and time. To make the right choice, thoroughly analyze potential candidates’ technical and soft skills, access the previous Flutter projects, ask for testimonials, look for references and reviews. When conducting interviews, prepare the most relevant to your future project questions and give challenging tasks.

Remember that onboarding is also an important part of hiring Flutter programmers. The better and faster your employees adapt to the team and your organization’s specifics, the more efficient their work will be and the more business value your project will drive as a result.