Time-consuming. That is the typical adjective that anchors itself with the recruitment and hiring of technology specialists.
This seems particularly true when it comes to finding senior and mid-level software developers with particular expertise and experience.
If a company is needing to hire a new team member in the quickest time possible then in-house employment may not quite work. 
If time is of the essence, then it’s worth looking into staff augmentation.
Staff augmentation is a service that is one of the most used practices within the IT industry. It means using outside employment in order to temporarily extend an in-house team – broadening its skills and deepening its expertise.
Typically, there are two types of services that staff augmentation provides: 1. short term, which is used to plug temporary gaps, and 2. long term, which is used for multiple reasons from keeping costs down to recruiting difficult to find recruits to bulk up a team.
When it comes to the supply of global talent, software development companies are the prime source of tech talent for staff augmentation.
The good of staff augmentation
Value for money. There are plenty of costs that can be eliminated by augmenting your in-house team with external support. These costs include full-time salaries, medical insurance, vacation days, bonuses, equipment, etc. All of these are covered for employees. Yet with augmented staff, these costs are none of your business!
Hire on demand. Staff augmentation provides flexible engagement types so companies can expand teams tied to their specific needs – whether they be short or long term. This makes it ideal for scaling the size of teams depending on the needs of business, rather than retaining all employees no matter whether the workload is light in given moments of the year.
Quick recruitment. IT startups tend to lack IT specialists as they struggle to attract top talent with relevant experience in a specific project. As such, it is usually very time-consuming to find and hire someone. With streamlined processes compared to hiring full-time in-house employees, hiring augmented staff cuts down on the time of hiring.
Despite these “goods” of staff augmentation, there are inevitable “poors” associated with it – as with all aspects of life.
The poor of staff augmentation
No quick guarantees. Although staff augmentation tends to equate to fast-moving hiring and integrating processes, it’s not guaranteed. Not all augmented staff will be able to dive right into a project with all the know-how. They may take time to get used to the project specs or workload.
Other alternatives. As well as staff augmentation, there are other options out there for companies that want to extend their teams. Among these is project outsourcing. The difference between the two is that the person who maintains control over the team under staff augmentation is the hiring company, while under outsourcing it is shared with the staffing vendor.
When would staff augmentation work better?
There are many cases where the ideal staffing model to carry out is staff augmentation. These include when you have an in-house team that you want to expand; when you need to scale a team at super speed, as staff augmentation lets you bypass time-consuming processes; when you want to retain full control over a project.
