To meet increasing business demands while reaching for minimal resources, staff augmentation has become the go-to solution in the last few years.
For outsourcing companies, they have boosted their service scalability based on the current demands of the market. This includes software development outsourcing such as dedicated development teams and staff augmentation.
The global economy has been deeply influenced by both traditional outsourcing as well as staff augmentation. Back in 2019, the value of the global outsourcing market reached $92.5 billion. 
Remote teams are proving successful solutions within the IT industry as a whole, bringing with them refined skills and experience in programming, who are used to delivering top-quality jobs.
On the opposite end, in-house recruitment can be quite challenging as well as time-consuming. As a solution, staff augmentation provides multiple benefits almost always at a reduced cost. This is one of the reasons why businesses choose staff augmentation, along with other reasons:
- In-house hiring is expensive
- High staff turnover
- Extended time spent on recruitment
- Shallow local talent pools
- Limited budget
What exactly is staff augmentation?
The staff augmentation model extends an organization’s in-house team with specialized experts on a short-term or long-term project basis. It means that an organization can cover a team’s skill gap by contracting dedicated specialists that will match specific IT project needs as well as add a competitive advantage.
Take, for example, an organization that is developing an ecommerce site. It already has a team of in-house developers, but to launch everything on time, the team lacks 3 more programmers with specialized skills that your in-house team are not well-versed in.
Implement staff augmentation in order to save months on recruitment, eliminate contracting issues. You can select a person to fit your team, using staff augmentation, and hire developers in weeks. And when the project is launched, they simply take a bow and take their leave.
Firms that provide staff augmentation services are the places to find such dedicated pros that provide plenty of expertise and experience. They can be deployed in days because they are employed and managed by the firm.
What this also translates into is a faster onboarding process as there is no need to think about things like payroll management, administrating office space, vacation days, training, and legal issues. 
For augmented staff firms, they will hold a database on their workers that will outline their specific skill sets. Their talent pools allow you to scale your teams easily and fast, making it particularly vital for businesses that need to hire additional developers with different and/or unique skills as soon as possible but for a specific period of time.
The biggest challenge involved in implementing augmented staff is actually finding a trustworthy and quality partner. So if you’re deciding to go ahead and opt for software development, there are some points to keep in mind.
Time zone. Perhaps you have unique needs, but you’re most likely wanting to work with a partner with a similar time zone so as to align as close as possible in-house and augmented staff. If the firm is located far away, have a check to see if the vendor has flexible or fixed working hours.
Evaluate needs. Analyze your organization’s needs that you want covered by augmented staff. Are you looking for specific skill sets? Do you want to free up your in-house team for a specific project? Take a note of the scope of the work for augmented staff and the possible duration of the project.
Check their experience. Look at the testimonials and reviews from the clients of the vendor. There are plenty of places and ways to do this, such as on websites like Clutch. Or simply ask the vendor for reviews. Good ones will be happy to share them. In addition, make sure to check out their credentials and work portfolio. Maybe they’ve worked on previous projects in your niche and a needed skill set in their stack.
