What is staff augmentation in IT, or ways of closing the recruitment gap

Let’s be realistic: Hiring a mobile app developer can take one or two months. But this will delay your launch and deprive your business of revenue. With staff augmentation, you can cut the hiring time in half.

What is staff augmentation in IT? In short, it’s a way of complementing an in-house team with outside talent to augment an organization’s capacity. Staff augmentation companies provide businesses with the right developers, designers, testers, and marketers to meet their requirements. 

Staff augmentation vs product outsourcing

When businesses can’t access the employees they need in-house, they see staff augmentation and product outsourcing as their basic solutions. With project outsourcing, companies delegate all software development responsibilities to a third-party vendor’s development team. This qualified team then carries out all delegated development services using their own in-house QA engineers, designers, developers, DevOps, project managers, etc.

Staff augmentation, on the contrary, is the choice of businesses that have their own in-house teams but lack specific knowledge and technical skills. IT staff augmentation enables businesses to add specialists to their existing teams. Contractors are hired for a certain period of time to complete a set scope of work. During this time, contractors function as in-house team members and work under the supervision of in-house managers.

To make it easy to see the difference between staff augmentation and product outsourcing, we’ve created a comparison table to see who’s responsible for what.

Types and classes of IT staff augmentation

Timewise, there are two basic types of staff augmentation:

• Short-term staff augmentation works for the most hectic times or when an in-house developer is on sick leave or on vacation.
• Long-term staff augmentation complements a business’s in-house team to match prolonged development requirements.

Toptal divides staff augmentation into three general classes:

• Commodity — Businesses are looking for reliable employees for manual labor. No specific skill set is required. 
• Skill-based — Businesses require employees with a certain skill set, yet the relative level of skills isn’t critical.
• Highly skilled — Businesses need employees with advanced skills attained via training and experience. The skill level is important. 

In the IT sector, companies need highly skilled specialists. There are several options for finding and hiring IT specialists to augment existing teams. Below, Toptal compares six options based on the type of talent, use cases, advantages, challenges, and examples of real-world staff augmentation providers:

Source: Toptal

Technical staff augmentation use cases

Staff augmentation services help businesses reduce their recruitment expenses and avoid development delays. There are five scenarios in which you may want to consider staff augmentation.

• You need to reinforce your in-house team

Though you have an in-house team of developers, improving your existing expertise has become a must when launching a new project or supporting existing apps.

• You have no time for recruitment

IT staff augmentation companies can rapidly adjust to your needs whether you sign a short- or long-term agreement. While you need around one or two months for recruiting and hiring, with access to a large pool of software engineers, a staff augmentation team can provide talents within weeks.

• You need high-level skills

You have no time to train a talented junior developer. What your team lacks is a middle to senior software engineer with high-level development skills to join the project right away.

• Your in-house team lacks certain expertise

You need to expand your team at short notice by adding a narrowly focused technician (data scientist, DevOps, quality assurance engineer, or business analyst). 

• You have an in-house CTO or PM

Specialists acquired through staff augmentation will report directly to your in-house project manager or chief technology officer, allowing you to keep things under control.

Five ways staff augmentation benefits your business

• Reduced costs

IT staff augmentation services can cut expenses at different levels. This works especially well when you hire specialists from Asia or Eastern Europe. 

Source: Fulcrum

• Better control

When outsourcing project development, you can’t fully track the development process and become dependent on your outsourcing team. With the staff augmentation model, you can monitor the development process and employees’ efforts in real time. Plus, you can take action immediately.

• Increased scalability and flexibility

Staff augmentation allows businesses to scale their workforces on demand and scale their businesses faster than they could by recruiting and training in-house staff. IT outstaffing services allow you to take on more businesses without making sacrifices to your project under development. 

• Access to top-tier talents

Staff augmentation services hand-pick specialists at the top of their fields to fill project gaps. With this hiring model, your project will stay on schedule.

• Minimum legal requirements

Traditional hiring goes hand in hand with lots of legal responsibilities: taxes, payroll, health insurance. Under a staff augmentation model, the staffing vendor becomes the developer’s official employer. Thus, it’s the vendor that takes on all legal responsibilities and handles the paperwork. 

How to choose a staff augmentation partner

Assess your team’s gaps 

To hire an IT staff augmentation service provider, determine what experience and skill set you need. Seek advice from your tech leads and HR executives to see where your projects need a boost. Based on this internal research, create a staffing blueprint that defines essential employee requirements.

Explore what markets your potential vendor serves

Confirm that an IT outstaffing company has contacts in your market. If your business is global, working with multiple vendors can add complexity to the recruitment process. Choose an IT augmentation company with a global reach. If your business is local, hire a vendor that has resources in your key market.

Check the vendor’s expertise

Verify your potential partner’s expertise through:

• Getting in touch with past clients
• Reviewing the vendor’s portfolio
• Making sure the vendor can provide the staff you require
• Reading reviews on websites like Glassdoor and Clutch

Ensure the vendor can meet your timeline
Answer these two questions:

• How fast can the vendor execute your project?
• How nimble is the vendor?

It’s obvious that waiting 40 to 60 days to fill a team’s gaps isn’t cost-effective. Your potential vendor should help you move your project forward rapidly.

Assess your contract

Avoid working with companies offering one-size-fits-all contracts. This kind of contract shows that a vendor lacks the experience to handle specific staffing requirements. Instead, choose agencies that offer to tailor all work agreements to meet your needs. 

Common challenges of IT outstaffing

Staff augmentation can help you decrease costs and get access to specialists with the experience and skills necessary for your unique project needs. However, it’s easy to make mistakes with staff augmentation.

• Cultural barriers. You’ve already built a specific team culture and created core values which your augmented employees might have a hard time embracing. It can lead to organizational friction and hindered collaboration. Additionally, you’re likely to deal with people from different cultural backgrounds which can mean communication challenges.
• Time zone differences. Coordinating across time zones can be tough. It may not be a big deal if it's a small time difference. But how do you manage a team with a ten-hour time difference?
• Knowledge transfer challenges. When outsourcing or outstaffing occurs, it always means knowledge transfer or knowledge sharing. Sometimes, businesses find it challenging to capture, transfer, and protect knowledge. But without a structured knowledge management strategy, you risk misunderstandings, errors, and inefficiencies.
• Security and privacy concerns. Sharing sensitive data and files about your business is an inevitable aspect of staff augmentation, raising concerns about privacy, security, and confidentiality.
• Lack of necessary skills and expertise. Finding an IT staff augmentation company that has enough talent to scale up your team can be challenging. Especially, if your project requires particular domain knowledge and technical skills.

How to resolve the challenges of outstaffing?

Below, we outline some tips on how to mitigate risks in IT staff augmentation.

• #1 Bridge the gap between cultures. Culture has a great influence on how we communicate, deal with problems, manage time, build trust, handle feedback and criticism, and celebrate wins. Therefore, it’s important to address cultural gaps in a multicultural team.
  • Acknowledge the differences among team members. You must develop cultural awareness by learning the diverse social norms, traditions, and customs. What’s appropriate in one culture may not be in another. Being aware of these differences can help you avoid misunderstandings with your team members.
  • Respect other cultures. You should ensure all team members feel valued and respected. You can encourage employees to share their cultural experiences and unique perspectives, provide opportunities for everyone to learn from each other, and promote a welcoming work environment.
  • Adapt to diversity. Be curious, open-minded, flexible, and willing to learn new things. Be an active listener. If you don't understand something, ask for clarification. Speak clearly and avoid slang, pop culture references, idioms, and jargon that may confuse non-native speakers.
• #2 Understand time zones. To build effective collaboration across time zones, it’s important that you:
  • Know the working hours of your remote team
  • Set clear expectations and time boundaries
  • Master asynchronous communication
  • Find a meeting time that works for everyone
  • Use the right communication tools
  • Regularly review and adjust the work schedules based on your team’s feedback
  • Do not micromanage
• #3 Provide adequate training to new members. An effective onboarding process not only leads to higher engagement and retention but also ensures a new employee gets well-integrated into the team.
  • Get your training materials ready for the newcomers: project requirements, technical specifications, design assets, etc.
  • Start with introductions between your in-house team and augmented staff
  • Set and manage expectations of your augmented staff and clearly define their roles, responsibilities, and priorities
  • Set onboarding goals
  • Track the progress of the new hire(s)
  • Get regular feedback
• #4 Establish a robust security framework. Create a security policy that outlines procedures, principles, and processes your company will follow to manage security threats, risks, and vulnerabilities. A security policy spells out clear expectations for all parties involved.
• #5 Research and compare providers. With so many IT outstaffing companies out there, it can be hard to find the right one. Here are a couple of tips to help you select the right staff augmentation partner for your project:
  • Pay attention to a service provider’s website. Companies often display their industry awards and certifications, real-life works, and technology stacks they use.
  • Ask for references. The best way to know if a development company you’re looking to hire delivers high-quality services is to check out feedback from past clients.
  • Get in touch with the best candidates, evaluate their proposals, and request a quote. When selecting a software development partner to work with, interview to see how they treat the work and whether they’re interested in your project and confident that they can complete it. You can also request a quote from a company you’re considering and ask about the payment methods they accept.

IT staff augmentation services at Globaldev

Globaldev has been providing information technology staff augmentation services for a decade and pays particular attention to industry-specific requirements.

With Globaldev as their strategic staff augmentation vendor, businesses benefit from transparency, quick recruitment for critical positions, scalability to handle any load, ad-hoc services, and lower operating costs.

Here’s how Globaldev searches for best-fit candidates for your project:

We bridge the software development demand–supply gap through a three-step hiring process and quick onboarding. This allows our clients to ramp up their teams within weeks, not months.