To understand what staff augmentation is and how it can work for you, picture this scenario:
You are looking to develop an e-commerce app. To meet this purpose, you need 10 developers. However, you have only 7 developers in your in-house team. Given that you want skilled developers with expertise in building e-commerce apps, it might take a couple of months to fill the gap and hire the required number of developers. Right? And what about the deadline?
Delaying your e-commerce app development just because you don’t have sufficient resources will affect your estimated revenue.
Enter Staff Augmentation
Staff augmentation refers to the process of outsourcing workers for your projects. Simply put, it is the process of hiring the resources or talents your company needs via outsourcing. The augmented staff will be overseen directly by your company as if they are your in-house team but with lower costs and liabilities associated with hiring and maintaining the staff.
Staff augmentation is an efficient solution to fulfill a temporary requirement for a specific resource.
This is quite useful for enterprises to avoid the hassles of recruiting in-house professionals, especially if you are looking for specialists or high-level talent.
In this blog, we will walk through the key benefits of opting for staff augmentation services and how to choose them.
Let’s get started.
Understanding the Type of Staff Augmentation
Commodity-based Augmentation:
In this type of augmentation, you add more staff to your in-house resources. It involves onboarding employees who can perform the basic tasks and are not necessarily highly skilled. This type can help with the shortage of employees and when you are required to fill positions that don’t call for high levels of skills.
Skill-Based Augmentation:
In this type of augmentation, you hire skilled resources. These workers should be equipped with higher levels of experience and skills than average workers, enabling them to handle tasks more completely than others within the organization.
Highly-Skilled Augmentation:
Highly skilled individuals belong to outside organizations. They are hired for particular projects within those organizations. They can help with the development of tasks requiring expertise, such as creating new products or resolving complicated issues with existing ones.
This type of augmentation can be further categorized into long-term and short-term. Short-term augmentation is done to hire temporary employees to do particular tasks. An example includes an ad campaign where you may need an intern to create the design elements. This is a short-term hiring as it can only last for a single project. In long-term staff augmentation, you hire someone for a longer period, generally for a year or more.
What are the Benefits of Staff Augmentation Services?
Letting You Hire On the Go:
One of the key advantages of staff augmentation is that it ensures flexibility. This way, you can hire employees to meet your requirements. Companies can make their permanent employees with skilled professionals to increase productivity.
Giving You Access to a Larger Talent Pool:
With staff augmentation solutions in place, you can choose from a very large talent pool of skilled professionals. Staff augmentation firms have experienced professionals in their network.
Saving You Money and Hassles:
There are times when you look for hiring for a short period, maybe for weeks or months. Opting for staff augmentation in such cases can save you more than hiring full-time employees. It provides you with efficient talent with little money spent on overheads, recruitment, and other expenses.
Additionally, you can save human resource expenses involved in training, recruiting, and interviewing staff. Given that these professionals are experienced and have expertise, they don’t require much training.
Last but not least—you only pay them as long as you require them, hence minimizing your employee expenses on salary, tax expenses, social security, health insurance, and retirement benefits.
Ensuring Higher Scalability:
Most companies are likely to scale up their operation to make the most of profitable market conditions. However, it is not immune to challenges like failure and shortage of capital. Staff augmentation can help with the firms experiencing constantly changing working requirements.
It enables you to hire on a project basis only according to your requirements. You don’t need to hire a full workforce and still be able to achieve your project goals. You can change your team from time to time.
When to Opt for Staff Augmentation Services
When You Require Expertise and Experience:
Small and mid-sized companies can find it challenging to hire fully skilled and experienced candidates to handle every task. Staff augmentation helps them find the right fit for their projects.
When it Comes to Managing an Increased Workload:
Increased workload on employees is one of the common concerns among companies. Seasonal hiring can be a way to deal with this. With staff augmentation services, you can hire the resources to manage the workload efficiently.
When the Deadline is Approaching:
If you have a shortage of resources required for your projects, opting for staff augmentation services can help you.
When You Want to Save Money:
Hiring a full-fledged workforce can require you to create a sound budget. If you are looking to save money on hiring and its maintenance afterward, you can opt for staff augmentation services.
However, staff augmentation services are not for you if you have experts in your in-house team or looking for a full-time member.
The Bottom Line:
Staff augmentation is an effective solution for companies looking to minimize operating costs while maintaining productivity by hiring as much as possible.
However, it is important to work with an efficient staff augmentation service provider who can understand your requirements.
At OFS, we provide quality and tailored staff augmentation solutions to commercial and government clients. For over a decade, we have delivered business-critical solutions to our worldwide clients both on-site and remotely. We can meet a variety of business needs irrespective of their size and scope. We ensure you find the best talent for your company’s requirements. Get in touch now so that we can understand your staff augmentation needs.