The scarcity of tech talent is driving many startups and established companies to look out for offshore vendors and remote developers. Startups are looking for experts in particular technologies that can manage specific tasks and hence enhance the overall capabilities of their in-house team.
At the same time, companies also want to keep total control over their project resources, management process and milestone deliveries.
There’s good news for all such companies to know the fact that startup product development outsourcing is not the only game in the town. Nowadays, many IT companies are using IT staff augmentation model to achieve their goals for less time and money.
But what exactly is staff augmentation and how does it work? If you have the same question then you’re at the right place. In this article, we will discuss all the nitty-gritty of staff augmentation from what it is, how it works, to its benefits.
What is staff augmentation?
Staff augmentation is an outsourcing collaboration model in which you hire highly skilled resources on contractual basis instead of hiring them permanently. In simple words, you’re getting highly qualified and skilled employees from a staff augmentation company that helps you in meeting all your project objectives.
Staff augmentation has been an industry buzzword for quite a long time that helps IT businesses to grow their teams without bearing any extra cost. In this collaboration, the non-technical and technical resources work along with your internal staff for the entire duration of the project. Moreover, they can also work from their home or workplace.
Having knowledge of staff augmentation process flow helps in evaluating the current members of the team. It also enables you to determine whether to employ an external resource or not.
Staff augmentation has emerged as a popular for employing dedicated workforce. Staff outsourcing/ resource augmentation/ FTE/ project outsourcing/ resource outsourcing all are actually the same concept with minor differences in terms legislations, execution, and costing.
Nowadays, many companies are hiring industry specialists with the help of staff outsourcing to meet their aggressive project requirements and deadlines. This method is viable for employees and employers to work on a project-only basis.
How does it work?
To understand its working we have defined the entire process in brief steps below:
Identify your requirements
The first step you need to follow before starting to search for candidates is to determine what you’re exactly looking for? You must define a precise number of resources that you want to hire. You must also define the candidate specifications that include qualifications, expertise, years of experience, etc.
Review and selection
Once you properly understand what you’re looking for, the next step is to initiate the search process. Find and review all the candidates that are appropriate as per your requirements. Conduct interviews and tests to ensure the eligibility of all the passed candidates for joining the team.
Integration of new team members
People make mistake by thinking that signing of a contract with the new candidates means the end of all hard work. However, it’s not true. During the on-boarding process, you must ensure to provide total support for the successful integration of your new employees. You must ensure that all the new employees are getting to know about your company’s procedures, processes, rules, and values. You must ensure that they are comfortable in their new workplace.
Persistent support and nurture
Once the integration phase is over, you must continue with the ongoing support for your new staff. You must also receive feedback and establish strong relationships with them to ensure effective and efficient cooperation.
Advantages of Staff augmentation
Boosts the recruitment cycle
Enlistment is a tedious process which can take up to months, especially when you’re looking for candidates with superior and uncommon abilities. However, with the help of staff augmentation organizations, you can reduce the recruitment time from months to weeks or even days. Augmentation specialists have refreshed databases that consist of extensive pool tech talents to choose from.
This makes it highly probable that the augmentation organization would find you the appropriate candidate in real quick time as compared if you had started to hunt it yourself. This saves you lots of time.
Moreover, the dedicated team provider manages the following for you:
- Recruitments
- Background checks
- Hiring
- Payroll
This is a perfect solution for a tech-shortage that doesn’t seem to end shortly. It’s been estimated that there would be a global deficit of around 85.2 million workers by the end of 2030. Only in the US, this will translate into a mammoth $8.452 trillion as unrealized productivity.
Lower development cost
Probably the biggest and the most obvious benefit of building remote team is cost savings. Now, you will have a question how? As compared to the US and Western European countries, if you recruit resources from Eastern Europe and Asian countries, then they would demand fewer salaries as cost of living in those countries is lower as compared to the US. This will result in a massive amount of savings.
Read more: Estimated app development budget bifurcated to popular app types
Moreover, you know it very well that the cost of hiring in-house employees in countries US is quite high which also includes extra costs of taxes, employee benefits, social security, and many more.
Now, if you compare this with the costs of utilizing a staff augmentation services from companies in Eastern Europe and Asia then there’s a huge difference. First of all, the salaries are lower. Even the additional costs like equipment, office space, taxes, etc are lower. S, the bottom line is that hiring offshore staff augmentation is the best way to put taps on your development costs.
Less legal hassles
Hiring people comes with a lot of paperwork and legal responsibilities which includes payroll, taxes, employee benefits, and many more. However, when you’re using the staff augmentation, the outsourcing company acts as the employer and take care of all the above mentioned legal responsibilities and paperwork.
Overcoming geological limitations
Many tech-startups are facing the problem in drawing the right resources at the right price locally. Staff augmentation offers a complete solution to this problem by enabling you to search needed specialists located at different nations without actually searching for them yourself. It directly gives you access to the specialists that you may not find in your region or country.
High flexibility
For IT startups, staff augmentation plays a major role in providing the flexibility. The startups don’t need to worry if there is any unexpected workload looming ahead as they can add the required resources possessing required skills in just a matter of few days. Moreover, startups can scale up and scale down based on their present requirements. So, they are not tied to those employees who won’t be required for months.
Sustained Authority
While the businesses leverage their hired professionals, they still get to keep control over their management and job with staff augmentation. In the case of project outsourcing, there is a transfer of entire project work to an external unit. However, with staff augmentation in place, the businesses can keep the control in their hand by obtaining human resource from an external agency.
Staff augmentation offers companies with management control that helps them to shape the project in their desired way. Project outsourcing used to diminish the role of the parent businesses in the execution and management of the project. However, staff augmentation prevents this aberration by enabling parent businesses to have the charge to taking the final call.
Expansion and adaptation
Companies often aspire to expand their businesses by leveraging the prevailing market conditions. However, the risks and chances of failure associated with it often discourage businesses to take such steps. Staff augmentation comes in support for such businesses. Now businesses can leverage the flexible hiring to scale their business on a trial basis without making investments on the full-fledged workforce.
It encourages the business to test their acceptability in various industries by hiring on project basis. Apart from expansion, flexible hiring also enables businesses to keep up with the inconsistent nature of the market. With market-changing every day and millennial acquiring new skills, companies need to evolve constantly for their survival.
Staff augmentation emerges as an effective tool to achieve the same as it enables businesses to respond effectively to the changing conditions of the market by using project-specific workers.
Leverage new concepts
If you have a specific set of employees for a longer period, then it may cause stagnation of opinions and lack of creativity. This can be a major obstacle for your business’ development and revenue growth. The successful and evolving enterprise demands for innovative ways to sustain its success.
Staff augmentation motivates the enterprises to engage with a diverse set of experts rather than operating with the same set of recycled thoughts. With project-specific hiring, companies can leverage a set of new ideas and concepts that can boost their business operations.
Key things you must know about team augmentation
Let’s have a look at some of the crucial aspects of staff augmentation model.
NDA and intellectual property protection
You must sign a non-disclosure agreement with the staff outsourcing firm to ensure the safety of your intellectual property rights. Moreover, you must also remember the fact that your remote developers can access the confidential information one they become full-time developers. So, you must ensure that they misuse it.
The outsourcing company is the official employer of remote developers
No matter for how long the remote developers are working for you, the outsourcing company remains the official employer of those remote developers. That’s why it becomes imperative for you to define areas of responsibility for each party in the contract and ensure that both parties agree on working terms like the number of off days, vacations, and many more.
Transparent monthly fee
The outsourcing company that you hire should charge a flat monthly fee for each of its developer. The fee should include both the actual salary of the developer and the company’s commission for providing the service.
Conclusion
IT staff augmentation provides companies with several benefits such as fast recruitment cycle, lower development costs, less legal hassles, higher flexibility, sustained authority, and many more that we have discussed in the article. If you’re also an owner of an IT company or a startup and are looking for use IT staff augmentation services then contact Peerbits.
We are a top software development company that has a pool of proficient resources that possess expertise in various technologies.
