Staff Augmentation is a popular strategy for hiring employees. When companies need to extend their internal workforce, nowadays an easy solution to this is staff augmentation. This process is very effective and provides an exceptional service to find the right employees required for your company. According to the US Labour Bureau of Statistics, the demand for technology experts is expected to grow about 25% by 2031. Besides, the shortage of software experts is predicted to exceed 1.2 million by 2026. As the scarcity increases, staff augmentation is a very efficient solution. Today we are going to learn about how does staff augmentation work.
What is Staff Augmentation?
Staff augmentation is the process of building an external workforce to the existing in-house workforce. This is a very efficient technique to produce the maximum output while incurring the minimum cost. It is cost-efficient because your company can save money on the expenses of full-time workers.
To avail of staff augmentation in your company, you have to contact a staff augmentation service provider. The service provider will provide you with a team consisting of experts to work on certain programs for your company.
So, instead of the conventional recruitment process, you contact an IT staff augmentation vendor and find the experts you need.
The vendor will find expert workers based on their experiences and skills. They will then send you the work profile of the staff for you to evaluate and finalize. And then, you can go through the selection process from the shortlisted candidates.
Generally, staff augmentation is suitable for short-term projects. If your project duration is less than 2 years, then you can choose staff augmentation.
Types of Staff Augmentation Models
1. Skill-Based:
If a specific type of skill is required for a project but the skill is very basic. Such as skills like data entry, spreadsheet designing, and transcribing. If a company is in need of employees with these skill sets, they can go with skill-based models.
2. Commodity:
A commodity-based model looks for a team that can maintain strict deadlines that is, they can perform their tasks on time. In these cases, no specific skill is required. Commodity tasks depend on basic warehouse management, general retail, and labor work, etc.
3. Highly Skilled:
When a company is looking for an advanced skill set from employees then they select them with staff augmentation models. Some skills that are rated as high skills are software developers, branding experts or other professionals.
Staff augmentation can also be divided into short-term and long-term solutions. Short-term staff augmentation should be used when your in-house engineers aren’t available for a specific project.
On the other hand, long-term staff augmentation should be used when you need to cut operational gaps or to fill skill gaps in a long-term project.
How Does Staff Augmentation Work?
If we go into the process of how staff augmentation works, then the following steps should be included:
- Identify the need for staff augmentation. If your employees are not available for a specific project, or there is a scarcity of expertise, then you should think about augmenting IT teams.
- Then you should go to the service-providing agency. The service providers or vendors will then match your requirements with the experts available for augmentation.
- If the service provider is contracted for all the aspects related to the hiring process, then they will arrange all the processes like recruiting, shortlisting, interviewing and onboarding.
- When the hiring process is done, then the augmented team will work alongside the permanent employees of the company. They will continue working according to the contract.
- Once the staff are hired, then it’s your company’s responsibility to manage, support and cooperate with the augmented ones. Ensuring proper resources and guidance will help them perform the best which will be beneficial for your company.
Difference Between Staff Augmentation and Traditional Hiring
Unparalleled Skill Set
Staff augmentation ensures your access to a reservoir of expert individuals. So, you can fill the existing gaps in different working positions with the best talent. This will save you the time and cost of traditional hiring.
Agile Scalability
When your project demands are volatile, staff augmentation provides the best solutions. It provides you the opportunity to scale your business properly according to the requirements. This will help you navigate changing business traits without being affected by long-term constraints.
Utilized Financials
The traditional hiring process has a lot of costs including recruitment cost, training cost, and other beneficiary costs. Staff augmentation avoids these versatile expenses by providing short-term alternatives. Thus you can allocate resources efficiently and maximize your financial prudence.
Flexibility
Staff augmentation provides increased operational flexibility by grabbing the right approach to workforce orchestration. While running the operation you can keep your main focus on core competencies, and minimize the hassle of full-time staff hiring.
Proficiency maximization
By augmenting staff, you can get immediate access to the specialists for your vacant position. But the most exclusive part is, you can avoid the overhead of training and development expenses. This process saves both time and cost and also lets you accomplish your projects from the beginning.
Clear Choices
Staff augmentation avails your business the capacity to adapt, the power to excel, and the acumen to thrive. Staff augmentation provides a high level of adaptability and efficiency through its very own features. This is one of the reasons companies are going for staff augmentation rather than the conventional employee hiring process.
Best Practices for Successful Staff Augmentation
To benefit the most from a staff augmentation strategy, you need to make sure you run everything properly. Here are some ways to guide you toward a successful staff augmentation process:
1. Identify the skills required
Identifying the needs is the first step of the solution to any problem. You need to do a thorough analysis of the project you are going to run and its current state. Thus, you will be able to examine the capabilities you have and what you lack.
Moreover, you also need to identify the duration of your project to determine how long staff augmentation is needed.
2. Selection of the right staff
Next, you need to analyze the staff you are going to hire. From their working records, previous working environment, educational excellence, and examining the required skill set, you can choose the right partner for your company. Double checking the skills is also very important to match with your demand.
3. Clarity in Communication
Miscommunication is a waste of both time and cost. You can lose valuable resources for simply a single miscommunication.
So, for hiring staff through augmentation, first clear communication between you and the staff is necessary to let them know about your requirements. Also, it’s important for you to have a clear idea about the employee.
You should also ensure that all the existing team members clearly communicate with the augmented staff for the maximum utilization of resources.
To avoid the means of miscommunication, effective phone systems, email, or other electronic mediums should be made available.
4. Enable technological opportunities
To ensure effective communication amongst the team members, project management and team collaboration technologies should be embraced. Through these techniques, new ideas, sharing of thoughts, and brainstorming can be done which can encourage unity and cooperation. Some useful tools are Slack, Asana, and Trello.
5. Enable technological opportunities
The newly hired staff should be made feel like they are working with their very own people. The work environment should be friendly and cooperative. Every employee should be treated equally. A positive relationship among the workers will benefit the results of your projects.
6. Professional Service for Maintaining Product Quality
Web developers, Mobile developers, designers, or any other professional- whatever you need, we have exactly what you need. A team of professionals is waiting to join your team to make your project successful.
Vivasoft follows a very effective strategy for hiring the best specialists. The best way to ensure product quality is to hire talent. So, no more delay, contact us today!
Future Trends of Staff Augmentation
In recent years, there have been huge technological changes. Due to technological changes, there’s been a change in the working nature of people, a change in the working environment, and so on. All of these have created a major shift in the staff augmentation industry. The latest trends in the industry are-
1. Increase in Remote Staff Augmentation
Remote work has been the new normal in recent times, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. In continuation to this, remote staff augmentation has also been increasing, so that companies can access specialists from all over the world.
Regardless of their location, companies can now hire talents from anywhere in the world, without any geographical limitations. This process helps to minimize the costs of relocation. This trend is going to be followed widely in the coming years.
2. Increased Upskilling Focuses
As the demand for skilled workers is the main point of the whole staff augmentation process, it is becoming harder for companies to find skilled talents perfect for the required positions.
For this, the demand for upskilling the workforce is rising. Staff augmentation services are now offering different programs for enhancing expertise in their required fields. Training and development programs offer courses of action that help to enhance skills and adapt to changes in the whole working environment.
Thus, companies can access a more skilled workforce and the service providers can increase marketability.
3. Greater Focus on Diversity and Inclusion
In this dynamic age, companies have to offer more diversified and inclusive services. Focusing on that, staff augmentation services are now offering talent pools with diversity and inclusion. These talent pools have a wide range of access to skills and expertise.
4. More Flexibility in the Staffing System
Staffing solutions in this age have to be more flexible. The upward changing of technological innovations and other changes are making the staff augmentation service providers provide more flexible solutions. Project-based and on-demand staffing are two of those. These solutions allow companies to scale their workforce up or down according to their needs.
5.Emergence of Niche Staffing service providers
As a response to the changing needs of businesses in the modern economy, there is the rise of niche staffing firms. These are companies that provide specialists with specific skills, knowledge, or expertise in a particular industry.
Generally, niche staffing firms provide some unique benefits to the companies. They have access to a talent pool that is very highly skilled. The specialty of this talent pool is that the specialists are skilled in a particular field. So, businesses can get more benefits from these talent pools, rather than generalized ones.
6.Integration with HR Tech
Effectively managing the workforce and delivering value to the customers is another important angle of staff augmentation. HR tech refers to the tools that help to manage a workforce. Recruitment, training and benefits activities, onboarding performance management, compensation system, and so on.
Integrating with HR tech helps the recruitment process by leveraging technology. Through the use of technological devices, firms can have a smooth recruitment process.
Screening the CV of employees, properly communicating with the candidates, and increasing efficiency by saving time in all the lengthy processes can help improve the performance of management.
Besides, the performance of the service providers can also be checked through various tools. So tracking their performance will enable you to get the best performance and thus to add value to your company.
Through HR tech services, invoicing and payroll activities can also be monitored. So that the service providers get their remuneration at the perfect time.
7.Rise in the use of Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence is a new tool that is used everywhere. In the recruitment process of staff augmentation, artificial intelligence is of great help. From the screening process to selecting the final candidates, AI is a very effective way of talent acquisition.
AI tools help analyze data from multiple sources such as resumes or CVs, profiles on different online platforms (Linked In, Facebook, and so on), and job applications and thus identify the best candidates for a particular position.
AI tools help to prevent biases in the recruitment process. It evaluates candidates based on their skills, experience, background, etc. This process erases bias and increases diversity in the whole staff augmentation process.
Conclusion
Hope we covered how does staff augmentation work. IT staff augmentation is a powerful solution for businesses to optimize their team, find a specialist for the required position, and utilize their service to achieve company objectives.
So, you need to contact a service provider who can give you the best service possible for your organization.
Through staff augmentation, you can get in touch with a talent pool able to serve you with efficiency and also you can upskill your existing in-house talent pool.
Staff augmentation is a very flexible and scalable system. It helps organizations align their activities properly. With the flexibility, businesses can adapt to any changes the team needs to meet the requirements by ensuring efficiency.
Staff augmentation increases team efficiency through all of its characteristics and thus it brings the highest success to the entire company.
