How IT Staff Augmentation Model can Enhance your Business Growth?

Recruiting new talent is always a tedious and challenging task that comes with an unpredictable outcome. No matter how efficient is your HR team, a company that provides IT staff augmentation services will always be better.

While hiring a full-time in-house team is a long term investment, there is a possibility that you need the help of external resources for the short-term. Here staffing augmentation comes into play. The offshore development company connects entrepreneurs and developers, including sharing the responsibility of a project with your offshore team.

It also helps you to scale-up and down efficiently in comparison to the traditional hiring process.

What is IT Staff Augmentation?

Staff augmentation is a strategy where you hire external resources. The organization adopts this approach to quickly scale their internal team and meet the IT requirements.

IT Staff Augmentation Model is Recommended;

• If you already have a team working in your office but you are willing to extend your team. You want to hire professionals but don’t want to allocate resources.
• Your team is creating a tech product but you want more specialized people to join in and share their ideas and give their input. As the stack of experts that you intend to hire are not available in nearby location so you want to look for a different geographical location from an IT staffing company.

Here are the Biggest Issues with the Hiring Process:

Staff Augmentation is very helpful in IT as a highly specialized team for large projects is often required. When companies don’t have the burden to hire developers and sustaining them, they tend to focus on the core business objectives.

Common Challenges

• The hiring process is expensive
• There are different expenditures involved in the hiring process.

With the staff augmentation approach, the employee is only paid for the time tenure he has actually worked on projects for the organization. There is no recruiting expense.

The professionals are hired because they come equipped with the necessary skill set for the job. For this reason, they don’t require much training or time to accumulate to a position.

Hiring is a Lengthy Process

Organization requires extra help in case of sudden firing, resignation acquisitions or for large projects which extended the capability and ability of the currently working staff. The companies are in a hurry to fill the vacancies because the productivity of the entire business is at risk.

The main issue is the total amount of time that is spent on finding, onboarding, hiring and training the new set of employees while handing over the task to them.

Talking about staff augmentation vs managed services, always consider the staff augmentation model. Glassdoor states that it takes approximately 23 days to complete the hiring process. These number of days can increase or decrease according to the hiring practices.

Phone calls, Skype interviews, face-to-face interviews and skill tests are very time consuming that require a good amount of investment. When the applicant is actually selected, background verification may add another week to the process. If the candidate backs out a day or two before the joining, all the efforts go in vain.

When an individual is hired, he takes at least one months’ time to join. Then he is trained for at least two weeks to a month before he starts working at peak efficiency. At a higher management level, it might take a month before achieving the expected outcome.

On the contrary, an individual hired via IT Staff Augmentation Model starts working within days. They not only work efficiently but also add value as subject matter leaders. Their turnaround time for full productivity is less than a week and not a month. This benefits business owners as it gives them the opportunity to hit the ground running whenever a loophole arises.

Turnover is High

As the economy improves, it becomes more challenging to hire developers in the office premises.

IT Staff Augmentation Model has the ability to tackle this issue comprehensively. It provides the company with skilled individuals having steady, consistent capacity and workforce. Random resignations don’t disrupt the productivity of the deliverables.

Benefits of Staff Augmentation

1. Reduces the Recruitment Time

Planning and organizing a recruitment drive is a resource-intensive activity. From creating a job description (JD) to updating it on different job portals. Shortlisting to interviewing takes a lot of time and effort. If anything goes wrong in the hiring process, the company has to start from scratch.

But, when it comes to IT Staff Augmentation Model, the task of recruiting new individuals is completely the responsibility of the staffing agency. It is just about a matter of days for the staff augmentation team.

2. Efficient Staff Management

When compared to the managed services, Offshore IT staffing services augmentation services provides more control over the team workflow. When the management operations are handles, it gives authority. In addition to this, actions can be taken immediately.

3. Focus on Talent and not Vendors

When you look for an offshore development center, make sure you pay attention to the total experience of the company and for how many years are they providing these kinds of staffing services.

Target the skill you require and then narrow down your options.

The staffing service provider gives you an opportunity to pick the best professional having the same skillset that you desire. You can hire one developer or a complete team, the choice is completely yours.  

4. Quality on a budget

Paying full-time wages to the in-house team may be costly especially to the start-ups. You have to provide other allowances and bonuses from time to time to make your employees happy. But this is not the case with outsourcing.

You can save big by hiring the qualified staff augmentation candidate that has the ability to produce the same quality of work and that too at the fraction of cost commitment over time.

5. Access to a Talented Pool of Experts

The organization only decides the skillset for the job and the staff augmentation agency doesn’t take much time to give the requisite experts. The staff augmentation gives the organization an opportunity to hire professionals from varied locations and access the global repository.  

Companies can best leverage external and internal resources, look for loopholes and fill the gaps if any by the staff augmentation. This staffing solution service facilitates access to professionals while lowering the training and development experts required to enhance the resources while being a part of the project.

6. Reduction of the Operational Cost

The recruitment and staffing services of augmentation save hiring cost incurred on full-time IT recruitment services and also saves various additional operational costs. The hiring is paid on the project basis while avoiding payment of full-time salary at the time when the project isn’t underway.

The company has to provide benefits to full-time employee benefits like insurance and other perks. But all this gets eliminated when employees are outsourced. This brings down the overall operational cost.

7. Enhanced Flexibility and Scalability

Upscaling and downscaling is easier when staff augmentation is adopted. It brings another level of flexibility and scalability to the table. It is always good to augment the existing staff with new resources as per the demand rather than recruiting full-time employees and then laying them off.

How to Make IT Staff Augmentation Model Work for your Business?

The staff augmentation model can turn highly effective for your business if you will implement it correctly. Consider the following:

1. Choose Projects having a Fixed Deadline

Staff Augmentation works best for one-time projects. This type of project has the most viable option you avail the benefits of staff augmentation. If you want to create a website or an app for your business, instead of looking for direct hires, you should consider staff augmentation.

There is a reason why staff augmentation feels like a perfect fit. Hiring a new developer on the project basis is a good decision as compared to recruiting someone on a full-time basis that will be one time only.

2. Ensure Clear Communication

Clear communication is important for the success of every business. You have to develop the process early in the development lifecycle to enable open communication.

Team collaboration and project management tools like Basecamp and Slack encourage idea-sharing.

The lack of communication may also result in major miscommunication. And this may have a detrimental effect on the overall project. So, it is very important to communicate when augmenting new employees.

3. Define Roles and Responsibilities

Defining roles to every member in the project ensures that responsibilities have to be met at their end. Both in-house and outsourced developers should understand the core objectives of the project and how they play an important role in the vision.

Project managers and team leaders should ensure that tasks are distributed among the team members equally. So that everything should get completed on time and as per the expected standard. Allow the team members to share their opinion or feedback, that may prove beneficial for the project.

For IT staff augmentation Model to be effective, it is highly imperative to implement the development workflow. Every member should have a clear picture of all the steps involved in the process and which task is allocated to whom.

Having a documented workflow works best for the whole team.

4. Embrace Tools and Technology

As per the project Management Institute report, companies taking help of project management tools specialize in meeting the budget constraints while adhering to the quality standards.

To get the best out of the augmented team, companies have to adopt the project management tools and technologies. Tools like Asana and Jira keeps the project on track while monitoring their current status.

Recommended Read – Project Management Statistics: 45 Stats You Can’t Ignore

5. Make Sure to Document the Codes

Code documentation is the backbone of every app. Organizations should keep a check to ensure that the outsourcing team members keep a record of their code at different stages.

The process requires continuous updation and maintenance. When there are multiple developers taking care of the same project, it becomes easier to figure out the bugs and potential risks.

Follow a collective approach of code documentation that works for everyone. Tools like Swagger help helps in implementing clear mythologies for the code documentation.

6. Identify the Skill Gap in your Company

Every business process requires an in-depth analysis. This can be instrumental in providing you the insights regarding the talent gaps this present within the organization. Whether it is about evaluating the current project needs or planning for the upcoming projects, going for a talent audit is essential. This helps in identifying the present talent deficits.

Once you fill the loopholes, determine the requirement of the candidate. Do you need an external resource for long-term or just for a couple of days? It is where staff augmentation helps you to bridge the gap.

7. Identify the Skill Set Requirements

Once the project role is specified for which you are looking for the candidate, the process of finding the right person begins. The technology partner with which you join hands should provide you with the right talent ensuring that you develop a quality product or service.

Hiring employees from IT staffing company on a short term basis has the benefit of being experienced in handling the same type of project like yours. And this way they will bring their own expertise to the table which is an added advantage. The breadth of knowledge of all the developers who have worked on diverse projects is way more than the ones who work on similar type of projects for a longer time period.

The Bottom Line

The staff augmentation allows a company to sustain its competitive advantage. As this model provides companies with a huge list of benefits like less operational cost, less legal responsibilities and paperwork, it provides more flexibility.

Augmentation addresses various issues giving the company a steady and consistent capacity of the workforce. Augmentation saves time, money and effort involved in the hiring process. Every company looking for growth should seriously consider this hiring model.

With the right employees hired by the staff augmentation model, you will be able to gain a new perspective on how things can work. The efficiency and disciple that the experts bring will encourage the in-house staff as well to improve their performance.

Do you have a project coming up? Want to embrace IT staff augmentation model for this new project? Just drop your line of requirements at info@yourteaminindia.com and our team will get in touch with you shortly!