What's better:
educate tech specialists or
headhunt them?

(Spoiler: it all depends on the project specifics)
Do you think that hiring junior developers in your team isn't profitable for your company? Junior developers rarely have hard skills, lack experience, make mistakes... Well, that's not always true: there are cases when hiring novice tech specialists becomes the best decision you've ever made.

Let's talk about when you should hire junior developers in your team, and when it's better to hedge your bets and recruit the Senior-level specialist:

When you shouldn't recruit
junior developers?

If a project involves fast technology growth and rapid scaling, then hiring junior developers would sooner do harm than profit. To educate a novice specialist, you need not only a lot of time, but also the lion's share of patience: a specialist will complete tasks several times longer, make a lot of mistakes and take hard knocks.

Therefore, in this case, Senior-developers who can initially create an architecture that can develop rapidly and dynamically.

However, these cons are the only ones that
junior developers have

Despite the fact that novice specialists are not as experienced as Mid or Senior-level specialists, many junior-developers:
educate very fast;
easily adapt to new conditions;
are initiative;
are full of fresh ideas.
It should be noted that the recruiting of both junior and senior developers is a complex and time-consuming work. There are too many juniors, and it's not always clear, how to select them. On the contrary, there is an acute shortage of Senior-level developers, and to motivate them to accept exactly your offer is a really challenging task.
In general, hiring junior developers is a good decision, and if everything is organized properly, the company will only win and after a year (or even faster) get a loyal, experienced and highly demanded on the market Mid-level specialist.
It turns out that in the future the company has a chance to get a loyal team of Senior-developers, which has overcome all the challenges together with the project, deeply understands the specifics of the processes, is completely absorbed in the project and is ready to create a profitable high-tech product.

Hiring a junior developer is especially beneficial if:

1
you need to release your Senior-specialists from routine tasks;
2
your project is at its outset;
3
you need to build a product prototype;
We've added a third point to the list not without a reason: at the Zero2Hero project, exactly junior developers build product prototypes. For almost a year of the project's existence, we've built five prototypes, and each time the juniors coped with the task excellently, despite the fact that this was their first serious work experience.
Test the hypothesis?
Yes!