IT Staff Augmentation: How to Do It Right
IT hiring is tough. In the United States, employers are able to successfully fill only 6 in 10 tech job openings. It is often challenging for companies to find developers with the desired skillset and salary expectations in their vicinity. Besides, some projects are short-term, and the company needs additional talent for a limited time-period only. That’s when IT staff augmentation comes in.
IT staff augmentation allows you to quickly complete your team with the right IT professionals. By working with a vendor, you can expand your hiring reach and get access to tech talent in other cities, or even countries.
Understanding IT Staff Augmentation
Now, let’s define IT staff augmentation meaning: it is a hiring strategy that allows a company to quickly onboard additional talent through a flexible engagement model. This strategy is different from similar staffing models like hiring freelancers or outsourcing your IT to a partner.
IT Staff Augmentation Vs. Hiring Freelancers
There’s a difference between expanding your team through IT staff augmentation services and working with freelancers. The former provides more transparency / insight into employees’ work, while the latter makes it difficult to know for sure how the work is performed and by whom.
With staff augmentation, you get to see full resumes of potential hires—including their names, education, and other details—as well as have those hires pre-vetted and/or interviewed by a vendor whom you trust to be the domain expert. With freelancers, you have to do the screenings and the interviews yourself. Plus, you shouldn’t expect a freelancer to be available to collaborate with your team within specific working hours, but you can have that with augmented staff.
Staff Augmentation Vs. IT Outsourcing
What is the difference between IT staff augmentation and IT outsourcing? It may be hard to draw a line between the two. The main difference lies in the degree to which your company is involved in managing the project. If you outsource your entire project to a software development vendor and your involvement is minimal, we are talking about IT outsourcing. However, if the vendor becomes an extension of your IT division, which is managed on your side, it gets closer to “IT staff augmentation”.
All in all, IT staff augmentation is a more flexible model, since it doesn’t force you to hire an entire team of developers (often complete with a manager.) Instead, you can cherry-pick just the professionals you need for a project and stop working with them once their job is done.
Staff Augmentation Vs. Working with HR Agency
Some HR agencies say they will find the right IT professionals for you. The problem here is that an HR agency is just an intermediary: you will have to hire professionals that pass the interview into your company. Besides, an HR specialist, no matter how experienced, will not perform technical interviews for you—but staff augmentation companies will, since they have engineers among hiring managers who often help assemble cross-functional development teams.
Advantages of IT Staff Augmentation
According to Research Gate, getting IT hiring right is “essential” to companies that wish to stay competitive on the market. IT team augmentation is a fast track to effective IT hiring, because it offers the following benefits:
Flexible Scaling
With staff augmentation, the company can quickly scale up or down the workforce, ensuring the right resources are available where you need them, when you need them. Such flexibility is barely possible with in-house hiring.
Niche Expertise
The team augmentation model comes handy when you need to find tech professionals with narrow expertise. Your company may not be able to interview candidates on its own, plus relevant talent may be few and far between in your location. This is when resorting to international staff augmentation can help.
Faster Time-to-Market
With staff augmentation, organizations can speed up their time-to-market by being able to fill IT job positions faster than the rivals. In oversaturated markets, timing can be a crucial factor, and market players who ship software faster have a competitive edge.
Cost-Effectiveness
Compared to traditional hiring methods, IT staff augmentation allows you to hire higher-quality talent at a lower price. Organizations can avoid the expenses associated with recruitment, training, providing benefits, and long-term commitments by engaging external professionals on a per-project basis.
Common Challenges and How to Overcome Them
Working with IT staff augmentation companies has significant advantages. On the flip side, there are some potential pitfalls to consider.
1. Limited Control Over the Hiring Process
When working with a provider, your company may not have full insight in and control over the candidate selection process. Your vendor likely has their own screening and vetting process, which may not fully align with your organization’s preferences. (Here at ObjectStyle, we adjust our hiring process to your needs and let you take part in it to the degree that’s comfortable for you.)
2. Integration and Communication Issues
Sometimes it’s hard to integrate additional staff into an existing project team. External team members could be located in various time zones, may be unfamiliar with your processes and with how things are done in your company. If you have an onboarding process, it helps to use it for external employees, too. This will increase team cohesion, and ensure everyone is on the same page.
3. Cultural Differences
We are talking about work culture as well as national culture here. With the IT augmentation model, your external employees may be used to working in an environment that’s very different from yours: they may have their own understanding of discipline, punctuality, DEI basics, etc. In addition, if those extra employees live in another country, they may have a different mentality, values, worldview, religious and political beliefs, etc. Having a robust work culture and extending it to all employees can help bridge the cultural gap.
4. Intellectual Property Concerns
Same as with freelancers, engaging with an external staff augmentation company may introduce intellectual property and data security risks. Organizations should ensure appropriate agreements, such as non-disclosure and confidentiality agreements, are in place to safeguard sensitive information. (By the way, ObjectStyle follows a practice of signing an NDA agreement with almost all of our clients from the get-go.)
To avoid these pitfalls, organizations should carefully select reputable and reliable staff augmentation agencies, establish clear work and communication processes, promote a healthy and inclusive work culture, and ensure data safety through contractual agreements.
Psst! ObjectStyle is now on DesignRush – be sure to check out our profile there.
IT Staff Augmentation Done Right – Best Practices
How do you ensure successful implementation of the team augmentation strategy? Feel free to use ObjectStyle’s step-by-step guide to get the most out of your staff enhancement process.
1. Identify Your Recruiting Needs
The first step is to decide on the skillset and the seniority level of the employee(s) you are looking for. In our job postings on ObjectStyle.com, we normally provide the following details:
- Tasks the employee will be performing
- Technologies (programming languages, frameworks, etc.) they should be familiar with
- Years of experience required
- Other requirements (sometimes, the employee should be in a specific location/timezone, needs to speak a certain language at a certain level, etc.)
If you are having a hard time identifying team augmentation requirements, drop us a line and let us see how we can help.
2. Choose the Right Vendor
When selecting a staff augmentation partner, beware of companies that promise the moon and ask very few questions. Also, it’s common knowledge that “there is no such thing as a free lunch” – if the provider offers prices way below the market, proceed with caution.
Yes, there are good deals out there. In some countries, you can find developers with much lower hourly rates than in others. The key here is to look for an optimal price/quality ratio instead of just going after the cheapest deal right away.
3. Decide on Tools and Processes
When managing an extended team, it’s vital that you have a process in place that describes and specifies every aspect of your typical workflow. It’s best to agree on the specific communication channels/tools additional team members will use.
It is also good to have an onboarding routine that facilitates resource provisioning (for example, you may have to grant new employees access to certain apps / environments / systems, so it helps to know what resources a particular role will require and at what level.)
4. Keep Additional Talent In the Loop
Do your best to establish rapport with the extended team. From status meeting invitations to occasional online team building events, there are many ways to make your “extras” feel like they are a part of your team.
Keeping your team happy is essential to their success on the job. If you build a normal human relationship with additional team members, this will increase engagement and make them more productive.
IT Staff Augmentation Services at ObjectStyle
Here at ObjectStyle, we provide IT staff augmentation services through two main engagement models:
- Team augmentation. You can start small by adding only 1-2 professionals to your team, and scale up/down on demand.
- Dedicated team. We will put together a cross-functional development team complete with the roles and skills required for your project.
We specialize in carrying our complex development projects. If you are looking for senior-level IT personnel (including solution architects, project managers, etc.), we can help you fill those roles, as well.
Case Studies: Our IT Staff Augmentation Success Stories
During its 20+ years on the market, ObjectStyle has helped dozens of companies enhance their teams with unrivaled tech talent, while offering affordable prices and great service.
Client #1 – Hiring a Mobile Development Team
Our client, a technology startup, was working on a corporate training platform meant for B2B customers. The idea was to provide a white-label app that could be customized to the needs of a particular corporate user. A decision was made to develop native mobile applications for iOS and Android to provide the best possible native experience.
The client worked together with ObjectStyle to staff the iOS and the Android development teams that would not only each work on its mobile app, but also collaborate with each other on the product as a whole. Our cooperation has been going on for 3 years, and counting.
Client #2 – Assembling a Dedicated Development Team
This client is a tech-heavy family business that needed to upgrade and further develop its core backoffice application. Our cooperation began as a one-off software modernization project, which later evolved into a decade-long partnership.
Over the years, the number of IT specialists (developers, testers, managers) provided by ObjectStyle increased from just a few people to almost ten IT professionals on the client’s team.
Client #3 – One-Off Tech Consulting for a Client
Our client is a banking platform provider who needed help with optimizing their SaaS product’s performance. The client manages a popular SaaS product with a large international user base, so speed and performance is mission-critical to their business. ObjectStyle’s consultants flew to Australia and worked side by side with the client’s engineering team for a week. According to the feedback we received, the company was very pleased with the work we did.
Your Path to Effective IT Staff Augmentation
In order to get IT staff augmentation right, the first thing to do is to understand what it is, and what it isn’t. This hiring approach allows you to easily scale your IT team up and down as you go. Also, it passes the onus of managing the paperwork—individual employment contracts, taxes, benefits, etc.—onto the service provider.
When engaging external help, it’s important to have robust onboarding, communication and collaboration processes to smoothly integrate additional workers into your company. When done right, IT staff augmentation yields great benefits in terms of cost savings and convenience.
Related Blogs
Estimating a Software Project
LEARN MORE
Long Distance Relationships, or How to Manage a Remote Team
LEARN MORE
