Hire Vetted Developers

What does a vetted developer actually mean?

A vetted developer has passed a structured evaluation of their identity, technical ability and communication before being presented to a client. The word carries no legal definition, which is why two platforms can both say "vetted" and mean very different things.

At the weak end, vetting is a resume screen and an automated quiz. At the strong end it is a multi-stage process that takes two to three weeks per candidate and rejects most applicants. When you compare platforms, ask for the stages by name and the pass rate. A provider that cannot tell you what share of applicants it rejects is not measuring anything.

Our own process runs five stages: identity and employment verification, timed technical assessments graded by two senior engineers, a 60-minute live peer interview with a domain expert, a structured English evaluation scored across reading, writing, listening and speaking, and an AI tooling check covering Claude Code, Cursor and Copilot. Roughly the top 1% of applicants clear all five.

Why hire vetted developers instead of screening yourself

The cost of screening is paid in senior engineering time, and it is paid whether or not you make a hire. A single open role can consume 20 to 40 hours of a lead engineer's month across resume review, take-home marking and interviews. Multiply that across three open roles and the hidden cost of hiring exceeds the cost of the platform.

The cost of getting it wrong is larger. SHRM puts the cost of replacing a salaried employee at six to nine months of salary, which for a senior engineer means a five-figure loss in recruiting, onboarding and lost delivery before anyone writes usable code.

Vetted hiring moves that work upstream. You still interview, but you interview a shortlist that has already failed the people who would have failed your process anyway.

How to vet a developer yourself

Treat platform vetting as the filter, not the decision. Four checks separate a shortlist that survives contact with a real codebase from one that looks good in a deck.

Give them real code, not a puzzle

Hand over a pull request from your own repository with a genuine flaw in it and ask what they would ship. Agent-written code has made this the highest-signal exercise available: the scarce skill in 2026 is judging output quickly, not producing it. Ask what they would change, what they would test, and what they would refuse to merge.

Test the almost-right case

Two thirds of developers in the most recent Stack Overflow survey named AI answers that are "almost right, but not quite" as their biggest time cost. Give a candidate an implementation that passes the happy path and breaks on an edge case. How fast they find it tells you more than any algorithm question.

Interview the people who will talk to your team

English matters in the roles that talk: business analysts, tech leads, anyone running discovery with your customers. Interview those people directly rather than the account manager who hands you over after signing. Against a clear specification, an engineer's spoken fluency changes very little about what ships.

Ask about the account, not the company

Company-wide attrition hides the number you care about. Ask what share of engineers placed with clients last year are still on those accounts today, and what happens contractually if the answer disappoints you.

What vetted developers cost

Rates depend on the market, not the label. Across our own September 2026 rate data, mid-level full-stack engineers in Asia run roughly half to a third of comparable United States rates, with Singapore and Malaysia at the top of the regional band and India, the Philippines and Indonesia below them.

Three cost models are worth separating before you compare quotes:

• Agency or dev-shop rates cover bench, delivery management and cover when someone resigns mid-sprint. They sit well above individual rates for that reason.
• Direct employment through your own entity is cheapest per head and slowest to set up, since it means registering a company, payroll and statutory contributions in the market.
• Employer of record sits between the two: the engineer is yours, the employment paperwork is ours, and there is no entity to open.

There should be no upfront fee for being shown candidates. If a provider charges to send profiles, the incentive sits in the wrong place.

Where to hire vetted developers

The market you pick decides the trade-off, not the quality ceiling. Every market below has senior engineers; they differ on price, overlap and English.

• Vietnam is the deepest engineering pool in Southeast Asia for the price, strong in backend, mobile and AI.
• The Philippines offers the best English in the region alongside full US-hours overlap.
• Malaysia is the second most expensive market in Southeast Asia and the strongest on English after the Philippines, which suits customer-facing and regulated work.
• Singapore and Hong Kong cost the most and are worth it for fintech and enterprise work where local licensing matters.
• Indonesia and Thailand price below Vietnam with growing product engineering pools.
• India offers the largest pool and the widest quality spread, which makes vetting matter most there.

Time zones are the constraint people underestimate. On a shifted schedule, most Asian markets give a US team four to six hours of overlap, East or West Coast. Decide how much synchronous time the role genuinely needs before you rule a market out.

How to employ a vetted developer legally

Hiring the person and employing the person are two different problems. A contractor agreement with someone who works your hours, uses your systems and reports to your manager is a misclassification risk in most jurisdictions, and the exposure sits with you rather than with the engineer.

Three routes are available. Open a local entity if you plan to hire five or more people in one market and can wait months. Use an employer of record if you want the engineer on your team now without an entity, which is what most companies hiring their first two or three engineers in a market choose. Engage a vendor if you are buying a delivered project rather than a team member.

The distinction matters at renewal. If the engineers who understand your system best are employed by a vendor, your negotiating position two years in is whatever that vendor says it is.

A checklist before you sign

• The provider names its vetting stages and states a pass rate.
• You have interviewed the engineer who will do the work, not a sales lead.
• You have seen the candidate judge real code, not just write it.
• The contract names a replacement path and its cost.
• Repository, cloud accounts and CI are in your name from the first commit.
• The employment route is chosen deliberately: entity, employer of record, or vendor.
• Overlap hours are written into the agreement rather than assumed.