What is Staff Augmentation and How it Can Help Businesses Remotely

Staff augmentation is rapidly becoming a buzzword in the IT job market. Since the world is moving at a quicker pace, businesses might experience a new barrier to their recruiting route by hiring permanent employees to meet the company’s current and future requirements. The global market for skilled talent has been tightening for years. This often leads to endless months of recruitment procedures for positions including interviewing, testing, etc., which brings you back to square one.

A market for extremely qualified professionals is quite restrictive, so staffing difficulties have become a routine for many organizations around the globe. To overcome this challenge, staff augmentation is the solution. Designed to address business needs, it provides companies with experts with the right education, experience, and skill set.

What Staff Augmentation Actually Is

Staff augmentation is a way to contractually hire skilled resources instead of permanently hiring them. Simply put, you’re bringing highly skilled and qualified employees from a staff augmentation company to provide you with the edge to meet your project objectives. Staff augmentation as an industry buzzword helps businesses to grow their teams without any costs involved. Technical or non-technical resources function along with your internal staff throughout the duration of your project; in fact, they may also work from their workplace or home.

Knowing staff augmentation process flow helps you to evaluate your current team members, enabling you to decide whether or not to employ an external resource.

To keep things simple for you, we have precisely defined what staff augmentation is.

“An immediate solution to satisfy your adhoc & temporary staff requirement for a prompt turnaround of projects.”

Currently, staff augmentation services are a popular way to employ a dedicated workforce. In fact, Resource Augmentation/Staff Outsourcing /Resource Outsourcing / Project Outsourcing / FTE are almost the same concepts with miniscule differences in terms of execution, costing or legislations. Companies are now recruiting industry specialists via staff outsourcing to meet their aggressive project deadlines and requirements. It is flexible and viable for both employers and employees to indulge on a project-only basis. A resource engagement differs from a short-term to a long-term basis. To remain competitive in a diversified marketplace, you need top-notch talent that commands a strong grip on all market trends to stay head-to-head with industry best practices.

How Staff Augmentation Actually Works

Staff augmentation works almost like any outsourcing strategy that you may encounter. But still, it’s quite different. Here’s how.

Consider if you are going to onboard a resource from any staff augmentation business. Firstly, you need to fully explain your project along with its development and deployment phase. You are then needed to give the job description (JD) and resource expectations in terms of performance, working hours, duration, etc. After you have given the job details, the staff augmentation company ensures complete integration with your project. They will get you the greatest talent for that job available in the market.

How IT Staff Outsourcing Works

To make things clear, we have defined the process in brief steps:

1. Identify what you need

First, you need to understand who to look for before you start searching for applicants to join your team. You need to identify the precise number of individuals you want to employ and candidate specifications. These should include abilities, qualifications, years of experience, and so on.

2. Find & Review

Once you properly understand who you want to hire, the next step is to start the search process. Find and review appropriate applicants. Conduct interviews and have them pass tests to assure that they are suitably eligible to join your team.

3. Integrate new team members

It’s a mistake to assume that all the hard work is done once you’ve signed contracts with the new team members. The onboarding procedure is ahead of you, you should continue to support your new employees to successfully integrate them into your team. Throughout that time, they should meet other team members, learn your company’s main processes, procedures, values, and rules. They should get comfortable in the new workplace.

4. Support Persistently

After the integration phase, you must continue to provide ongoing support to your new staff. Picking up feedback and building potent relationships with them is essential to efficient cooperation.

How Staff Augmentation Can Help Your Business Remotely

More and more businesses are turning to staff augmentation in order to fit the time and budget constraints. No freelancers or in-house team can beat the benefits of staff augmentation.

Operational Efficiency

Some small companies incur elevated operating expenses, particularly during lean periods, with minuscule return on investment. Staff augmentation supports operational efficiency by enabling flexible work platforms. When businesses partner with supplying organizations, they do not have to bear the infrastructural expenses of constructing and conducting activities at a new place. The experts either work remotely or from the supplying companies ‘ workspaces. Despite remote work, staff is fully accountable to the employing company and its management. In order to minimize infrastructure expenses, the costs of operating offshore are considerably reduced.

Hire on the Go

One of the main benefits of staff is its flexibility. This enables companies to employ staff to meet short-term requirements. Companies can replace their permanent employees with qualified professionals for a specific period of time to fit the need of the hour. This efficient hiring prevents companies from incurring additional hiring expenses, such as employee provident fund and health benefits. On the contrary, it also provides professionals the flexibility to work on a project basis and only participate in projects of their choice and excellence. This creates a win for both parties, yielding mutual benefit. This fills the gap between professional skills demand and supply in a cost-effective and efficient way. Hence, staff augmentation serves the interests of employees and employers in a creative manner by enabling recruitment on the go.

Caters to Skilled Professionals

Staff augmentation as a means of short-term recruitment offers companies with access to a very large pool of qualified professionals. Permanent hiring restricts the ability of a company to leverage the available market talent. On the other side, it aims for greater hiring of millennials with extensive skill training. Its recruits are mostly domain-centric and hence the methods they carry to the ground are distinctive and useful. Moreover, it helps companies to interact with skilled experts who may not be in a financial state to hire on permanent roles but may benefit from their skills for a brief project. Thus, by allowing the hiring of specific skill sets, staff augmentation improves any company’s talent pool.

Cuts Down Overhead Costs

Extending the significance of the above point, staff augmentation guarantees a cost-effective means of leveraging from specific skill sets. Since experts are recruited for a specific project, the company does not have to endure the long-term cost. Hiring project specific recruitment enables businesses to pay for the skill only during the specified period. Furthermore, this skill-specific talent offers an edge over all competitive brands by adding domain-centered expertise to the operational framework. The existence of external talent also enables companies to reach larger markets by showcasing the pool of talent available to them. This brings the companies a double victory. First, they get access to an enormous talent at the fraction of a traditional recruiting cost. Secondly, this talent pool brings them a greater position compared to their competitors who lack such flexibility in hiring.

Expansion and Adaptation

Flexible hiring encourages companies to expand their operations on a trial basis without spending in a full-fledged workforce. Companies often aspire to ramp up their businesses and benefit from the prevailing market circumstances. The associated risks of failure and the drowning of investments, however, serve as an obstacle to such scaling. Staff augmentation comes to the support of such companies. By encouraging businesses to hire on a project basis to test their acceptability in the new industries, it opens new opportunities for firms desiring expansion. In addition to the expansion, such flexible hiring enables businesses to keep up with the changing market conditions. With new skills and capabilities obtained by millennials day after day, market demand is constantly evolving. Companies unable to react to such changes succumb to failure. Therefore, staff augmentation equips businesses with responsiveness. This enables them to respond to changing conditions by using project-specific workers to meet new standards.

Put Forward Contemporary Perspectives

Although it’s true that experience comes with age, the millennial generation has a lot to offer in terms of modern worldviews. Having a specific network of employees often results in a stagnation of opinions and thoughts for business development and growing revenues. The newly evolving enterprise demands often call for innovative means to achieve results. Accordingly, staff augmentation encourages companies to participate with the outlook of a diverse set of experts than to operate time and time again with a box of recycled thoughts. Project-specific hiring provides companies with the capacity to leverage new concepts to propel their operations.

Sustained Authority

While businesses leverage from hired professionals, they still keep control over their job and management. In contrast to project outsourcing where the entire work of a project is transferred to an external unit, staff augmentation assures that only the human resource is obtained from an external agency, while the management is still in hand. This management control helps companies to retain a stronghold over their projects and shape them in any required manner. Project outsourcing often leaves parent businesses out of any say in project management and execution. It helps prevent this aberration by allowing parent companies to remain in charge of the final call.

Conclusion

Software development staff augmentation has moved beyond its inception stage. It is readily identified as an alternative staff outsourcing model. Companies benefit from this flexible recruitment by leveraging professional competencies with extensive skill sets in a cost-effective and productive way. It stands as an effective bridge guaranteeing an ideal pathway of talent for companies that are available for a specific time period.