How to hire remote developers

Search how to hire remote developers and every answer points the same way: sign up to Arc, Toptal or Upwork and hire someone a few time zones away. That's one way to do it. It's rarely the way you need, because the thing those platforms are selling, access to engineers who work remotely, is already sitting much closer to home.

So before you go offshore, it's worth knowing what "remote developer" actually looks like in your own market now. To hire one, you define the role and the stack, decide whether it's fully remote or hybrid, and go directly to engineers who already work that way. In the UK you add the compliance basics on top: right to work, IR35 status, and PAYE or an employer of record for anyone based abroad.

Remote is already the default

The premise of the question is a few years out of date. Hiring remotely used to mean going somewhere special to find the people who'd do it. Now it's how most engineering roles are filled anyway.

On cord, 90% of engineering roles offer remote or hybrid working, and more than 40% are fully remote. On the other side of that, more than 300,000 engineers on the platform are open to a fully remote role, and around 94% will consider remote or hybrid. The "global talent pool" the marketplaces advertise isn't something you have to leave the country for. It's the default setting of the market you're already hiring in.

The benefits are real. The offshore tax isn't required.

The case for remote hiring is sound, and the guides have it roughly right: a wider pool than your postcode, lower overhead than a full office, and people who tend to stay longer when they're trusted to work how they work best.

What those pages skip is the cost of the route they recommend. A vetted marketplace reaches those engineers for you and charges for it, often 15 to 40% of salary or a markup on every hour. You can have the same reach without the middleman. A hire made directly on cord costs around £940, the message goes straight from the hiring manager to the engineer, and roles fill in a median of 31 days. The pool is the point, not the platform fee on top of it.

Vet for how remote actually works

Remote changes what you screen for, and this part is on you rather than any platform. The technical bar is the same, so keep the practical task you'd run anyway, a short piece of real work rather than an abstract puzzle. What you add is a read on written communication and self-direction, because a remote engineer who can't write clearly or manage their own day will struggle whatever the code looks like. A take-home followed by a proper conversation about it tells you both things at once.

The UK part: get the compliance right

One reason the marketplaces feel safe is that they handle the admin, so hiring directly means you take that on. It's manageable. Check right to work. Work out IR35 status before you engage a contractor, because getting it wrong is expensive. Run permanent staff through PAYE, and for anyone based outside the UK an employer of record handles payroll and local law without you opening an entity abroad. None of that needs a marketplace. It needs a checklist.

The short version

Remote isn't a special category you go abroad to find any more. It's how most engineers already want to work and how most roles already get filled, so the talent is reachable directly, faster and cheaper than the marketplace route the search results push. Keep the offshore option for the rare role that genuinely needs it.

The quickest way to test that is to look at how many remote-ready engineers in your stack are open to a move right now, before you pay anyone to go and find them.