Staff augmentation is increasingly becoming one of the best and most common staffing methods to hire a fast and efficient workforce.
As the rising trajectory of staff augmentation is visible to more and more businesses, it generates more and more questions from the basic to the technical level.
Whether it’s quick-moving startups, software dev companies, or well-known enterprises that are gearing towards expanding their capacity through staff augmentation, the following questions and answers will go some way to clarifying the visibility of what this outsourcing staffing method is.
So let’s go!
Question one: How does staff augmentation actually work?
First off, the company that is looking into expanding their capacity needs to define the skill set that they’re lacking, the number of developers that are needed, and their quantity of their previous experience. Think of it as a kind of laying out a detailed job description.
Only then can that company begin scanning the landscape to recruit a partner that matches all or most of the job or project expectations. Many agencies that provide staff augmentation services will have a database of specialists in their own fields. They will also have lists of devs who are either on the beach or are currently in action.
After screening is done and interviews have been taken care of, the candidates will be given job offers.
Question two: Why use staff augmentation?
The most common reasons to use staff augmentation include lower costs of software development, the lack of specific skills in-house and in the local market, and, of course, the need for specific skill sets.
Imagine the following example: there is a startup that is quickly emerging as a big hitter in its industry. It has raised a few million in funding, and needs to scale fast to deliver on its potential. Yet after doing reconnaissance in the local area or region, the startup realizes that it lacks the specific skills. So what is there to do here? You’d look elsewhere, further, wider, for a reliable software vendor or staff augmentation team.
Question three: What is the best approach with staff augmentation?
The staff augmentation approach is a way of engaging external team members. And there are four ways of engagement: on-site consulting, remote consulting, and individual or team specialists, plus a blended approach of using all three of these at the same time.
The best approach is the one that best fits the needs of the company. To reach such a decision, a company can carry out audits of the existing resources and identify the gaps.
Question four: What is the best way to find a reliable staff augmentation agency?
There are a number of ways in which a company can find a reliable vendor. For example, from recommendations. Word of mouth may be the least technologically sophisticated approach, but it’s one of the most proven ways to find trusted partners. All the marketing in the world can’t beat a close friend’s word on a proven and trusted service.
A second example is from listings. There are platforms like Clutch or Good Firms that tend to have thousands of vendors. And they usually are checked and ranked by many of the partners that they’ve worked with before.
A third example is from Google. Browsing through pages of vendors allows you to dig deeper and discover the broader aspects that surround a company. Millions of websites are going to be encountered that offer software developers. But generally, this is the starting point for many staff aug searches.
Question five: What is the difference between staff augmentation and outsourcing?
Outsourcing is the umbrella term that encompases a broad range of models, of which staff augmentation is one solution. There are also other outsourcing options out there such as onshoring, nearshoring, and offshoring.
Question five: What are the key stages of the staff aug process?
The staff augmentation process tends to consist of a couple of core stages: the requirements gathering stage, the interviewing and hiring stage, the proceeding to work stage, and the initial support stage. This is the typical process that is involved for many if not most recruiting agencies. But that doesn’t mean that a specific process can’t be filled in with much more detail and scope.
