What is Staff Augmentation?
Nowadays, other than full-time engagement programs, IT staff augmentation has become a great option that many companies are considering as their new employee recruitment process.
For a successful staff augmentation, the company must be informed about their needs for specific talents and their business growth, they should also anticipate changing requirements, terms and conditions of recruitment, and also budget and budgetary control of the company.
Statistics show that it takes on an average 50 days to fill the position of IT staff in the US which is 57 days in the Europe countries. So there is an increasing requirement for alternative processes of recruitment.
Why is Staff Augmentation Important?
Staff augmentation is important under certain circumstances. It becomes necessary to augment IT team when-
- Reinforcement is needed for your in-house team. If IT workforce expansion is needed for a specific project, then go for staff augmentation as the IT staffing solution for your company!
- If you want IT skill gap bridging, you can go with an extended IT workforce through the process of augmentation. This will help to create skill diversification in your company.
- Through augmenting IT teams, your company can enhance IT project acceleration. Meeting the deadline is one of the most important things to satisfy the clients.
- You can boost operational efficiency through augmentation.
- When the other staffing models do not work for your company, then you might go with the model which is the most suitable for you. And that model can be staff augmentation.
- There is a chance for expertise infusion while augmenting. This leaves the chance to recognize, differentiate and label the temporary IT professionals to work for your company.
- On-demand IT talents can be available by staff augmentation.
If we look at the statistics, we can know about the actual market situation of IT staff augmentation. Analysis shows that, from 2016-2019. Employers in the US could only hire 6 persons out of every 10 open tech positions.
In stark contrast, companies made 12 hires per 10 job openings for all positions. This shows how hard it is to hire tech candidates.
By the end of 2020, the tech occupation employed around 8 million people. From these, around 5.2 million were core tech roles and the rest were non-tech roles (technician, technical engineers, installers, and repairer). In 2019, estimated 918,000 IT job openings went blank.
That’s roughly 10% of the total 15% of core tech roles. This is an example of a market shortage of talent.
Now the market trend shows us that by 2030, tech employment will reach up to 9 million positions which is an increase of 1 million. There is also the need to replace the workers leaving for different reasons amounting to 580000 per year.
So, around 6.8 million tech jobs need to be filled with new job market entrants in the coming decade in the US.
Types of Staff Augmentation Models
1. Skill-Based:
If a specific type of skill is required for a project but the skill is very basic. Such as skills like data entry, spreadsheet designing, and transcribing. If a company is in need of employees with these skill sets, they can go with skill-based models.
2. Commodity
A commodity-based model looks for a team that can maintain strict deadlines that is, they can perform their tasks on time. In these cases, no specific skill is required. Commodity tasks depend on basic warehouse management, general retail, and labour work, etc.
3. Highly Skilled
When a company is looking for an advanced skill set from employees then they select them with staff augmentation models. Some skills that are rated as high skills are software developers, branding experts or other professionals.
How to Choose the Right Staff Augmentation Model?
While augmenting IT teams, there are certain things you need to observe first. The areas that you need to consider first while choosing the exact staff augmentation model are –
- Project duration: First, determine the time required to finish the entire project. If the duration of your project is less than six months, then you can go for project-specific staffing.
- Cost calculation: Cost-effective staffing is a very important thing when determining staffing models for your company. You need to compare the costs of staff augmentation with other staffing types such as outsourcing a team or managed IT service. Cost effective staffing should be considered as one of the best IT staffing solutions.
- Data sensitivity: For maintaining data sensitivity, a contract can help a lot. Usually, it’s between the concerned vendor and developers about the extended IT workforce with a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA).
Benefits of IT Staff Augmentation
Staff augmentation pros are huge. Companies might require additional workforce under different circumstances. Prediction of exact needs can be pretty hard. So, regardless of the project specifications, a company might be in need of one or more specific skills. In those cases, the augmented team is one of the most reasonable solutions.
Through this system, the company solves its problem of shortage of skilled employees for a temporary time period. Now let’s discuss the benefits provided by staff augmentation.
Short-Recruitment Time
If a company needs new employees and goes through a traditional recruitment process, they have to follow step by step process which is complex and takes a lot of time. First, you have to develop a proper job description, advertise them through suitable media, evaluate the candidates and develop a shortlist.
The next thing is, planning, designing, and organizing an interview, selecting the candidates who are right for the position, taking them on board, and making sure of their skills and abilities.
This process is quite long and it takes many resources. And by the time you get a suitable candidate, that particular opportunity or deal might have been closed. But if a company follows staff augmentation, it can avoid the complexities of the recruitment process and cut down the time required for recruitment.
Wide Talent Pool
IT team extension advantages create new opportunities for expanding workforce talent. There are different types of models that encourage the company to engage a talented workforce with varieties of skills.
The model allows companies to create a global workforce without any complex or expensive system. Your company can engage the required number of talented pools of employees which will support you to gain a competitive edge over others, introduce to a wide array of perspectives and involve quality people as your workforce.
Accessibility
Accessibility of expert and qualified talents overnight is another great benefit of IT staff augmentation. This process helps to identify the needs based on of the company and matches the exact talents for fulfilling those needs.
Moreover, a reliable company can always meet the problems faced for hiring new employees or replacing employees.
Scalability
Staff augmentation ensures enhanced project scalability. You can test the team according to their performance and then go for a permanent solution. Relying on the performance, you can scale up or down and make a choice.
Flexibility and Adaptability
There is flexibility in IT staffing. Staff augmentation gives your company the option to introduce variation as much as you need according to your requirements.
Staff augmentation is generally needed for product development purposes to lead the existing team, or hiring experts to work with the current team to build a customized app especially for the company with versatile features, or even to augment the current workforce in tech with full stack developers specialized in-
- iOS or Android
- QA
- UX/UI
- AR
- VR
- PHP
- IOT (Internet of Things)
- Node.js
Cost-effectiveness
Another very important side of staff augmentation is that this is a very affordable system for your company. The process is proven to reduce the costs of the company.
In this process, the company does not have to spend on a yearly basis for paying the workers, rather than that they will spend for the specific period of time when the work is needed to be done and the workers are hired for only that specific project.
The whole process of staff augmentation is finished excluding the cost of administration and inventory. The recruitment process can be very expensive which can increase the total cost of the company.
Study shows that recruitment expense can reach $4000 on average in the US companies to hire new employees for a long-term period. But staff augmentation program helps the company to maintain a suitable model that balances the revenues and expenses of the company.
In-House Level Control
In-house level control is one of the important factors of staff augmentation. It’s considered a challenge to expand the same level of control towards the augmented staff as the permanent staff.
The aim of this process is to support security and deliver transparency through workflow. Besides, ensuring enthusiastic participation of each member is also necessary which is part of the control level of the administration.
For increasing efficiency the whole workforce needs to work as one team and executing the objective of the business is the one thing everyone should work on. A successful and high level of control can do all of these things and make the project successful.
The Pitfalls of Staff Augmentation
Although staff augmentation has huge benefits, it still has some drawbacks. The drawbacks are-
Oversight and Management
The expansion of the workforce requires proper oversight and management which can be a complex thing to maintain properly.
Language Barrier
As staff augmentation is a global process, there lies a challenge of language and communication. You might find a very well-skilled and educated software engineer or programmer but he/she can be poor in the language that is used by most of your employees.
Time Difference
Differences in time can be another problem. While it’s office time in your country, it might be sleeping time in the country of your augmented staff. This might create a problem for each party. So, many companies hire employees within 1-2 hours difference in time zones.
Security
Another major challenge of staff augmentation is data security. As here, your company has to deal with a third party, you need to be clear about the trust issues. The contracts should include non-disclosure and patent clauses.
Legal Issues
Legal issues might create a hurdle in the process of dealing with staff augmentation. There are many pitfalls that can be avoided by proper contracts and managing the challenges with proper skills and techniques.
Choosing the Right Staff Augmentation Service
When selecting a staff augmentation provider, first you need to ensure certain factors. The factors are-
- Available skills and experience: You need to select a provider who can accommodate your changing needs and make a team as you require.
- Flexibility and scalability: Flexibility in IT staffing and enhanced project scalability should be provided by the provider.
- Cultural fit: Your provider should be culturally matched with you. Cultural alliance is very important for smooth communication, integration, and efficient collaboration.
- Easy communication: The communication channel of the provider should be easy. No complex medium should be expected from the client’s end.
- Project management: Project-specific staffing is an important project management tool that ensures enhanced project delivery benefits and so on.
- Talent pool: Resourceful IT personnel addition is the most needful for enhanced project delivery and rapid project ramp-up. So your provider should be able to provide a talent pool that is perfect for filling up your company’s needs.
Why Vivasoft is the Best IT Staff Augmentation Company?
There are many staff augmentation provider companies in the market. Among them, Vivasoft is really showing its worth through its services. We provide unique service on-
- Meeting your expected talent requirements.
- Signing a contract with the promise to meet your demand.
- Provide a ready-to-go team as you wish.
- Continuing your project with your in-house working team.
- By providing flexible, customized, and fully tailor-made staff augmentation service for your business.
- We provide dedicated on-demand IT talents.
- Our skilled team uses trusted technology to generate significant business results through operational efficiency boost.
- We will provide the highest security and transparency to give you proper data security.
- We provide an Agile project staffing approach which is helpful for your business growth.
Hire Today: Get The Best Developers for Staff Augmentation.
Comparing Staff Augmentation with Other Models
Staff Augmentation Vs Independent Contractors
Hiring a freelancer would require a client to be responsible for most of the work. All of the things like communication, management, payroll, etc. will be covered by vendors in staff augmentation.
On the contrary, if you hire independent contractors then you won’t have to pay vendors, rather than that, you can hire the contractor directly. For example, you wouldn’t need to provide employees IT expertise infusion perks or it wouldn’t cost you any overhead expenses.
Staff Augmentation Vs Managed IT Services
Staff augmentation only permits the provisioning of staff required to the vendor, and the rest are controlled by the clients.
Managed IT operates as a one-in-all service. Vendors who offer managed services, presume external control of a client’s non-core systems. Additionally, a managed service provider has a separate development team “benched”.
An ODC is an office that is set up by your vendor. There, they will recruit an extended IT workforce, and find a proper space for the office, and the necessary types of equipment. All these are included in the vendor fees. After everything is well prepared, you can go to operate the office as a part of your company.
Staff Augmentation Vs Time and Material
Time and material is an outsourcing model where a client pays for the time invested by the developer working under them.
Staff augmentation is different from this in the way that it involves employing temporary IT professionals by augmentation companies who bears all the related costs.
Staff Augmentation: An Example
If we consider the above picture as an example, then we see that there are three phases necessary to launch a staff augmentation program successfully.
Analysis Phase
This phase consists of analysis to realize the requirements, and sharing them for finding out the staff right for your company. Researching the market, and specifying the project needs are important for analysis.
Execution Phase
In this phase, you should source the profile necessary for your project, consult with your in-house HR team, and inform the shortlisted candidates. Thus, you will know if your requirements match with each other and you can run the project.
Closure Phase
This phase includes signing the agreement by both parties and closing the deal.
Conclusion
Augmented workforce benefits a company through many unique ways. Other than IT talent augmentation benefits, there are more things like IT resource supplementation perks, enhanced IT project scalability, skill diversification benefits, scalable tech team benefits, supplementary IT staffing advantages and many more. So staff augmentation might be a precious solution to many challenges where the outcome of generally recruited employees might be unpredictable.
