A Beginner’s Guide to Staff Augmentation

The Information Technology sector is becoming increasingly dynamic by the day. Companies and businesses are caught up in a vicious circle of continuous hiring and attrition. With the demands of customers in the market becoming more specific, brands are forced to always stay ahead of the curve to deliver both the expected and the unexpected.

This has given rise to a desperate need for niche specialists to get on board and do the job. While the in-house team sometimes experiences a bottleneck situation, it generally calls for an expert from the outside to look at concerns from a fresh perspective, identify loopholes and fix them.

The concerns could be anything from developing a product to running the operations. However, the catch here is that these experts come with a hefty price tag. Because they have years of experience and solid expertise, hiring them often turns out to be very expensive in the longer run.

While bigger companies and market players can afford them, it’s usually the small and medium scale businesses that can’t afford them. Ironically, it’s these businesses that need them the most.

Well, that’s where staff augmentation comes in. With this hiring framework, companies have to no longer worry about hiring a niche specialist for their teams regardless because this framework is all about having an expert in place temporarily.

Sounds new?

Then let’s find out what is staff augmentation and how it can help businesses in detail.

Once a buzzword now a norm, staff augmentation meaning is the process of hiring niche specialists and staff for your organization based on your specific needs and requirements. Unlike the conventional hiring system, this augmentation is not permanent but a temporary filling up of an evident gap on a contractual basis.

As per research and statistics from Statista, the IT outsourcing industry (ITO) was $314.92 billion as of the year 2015 and it is expected to reach the mark of $481.27 billion by the year 2022.

Staff augmentation is becoming increasingly popular among businesses and startups as it prevents them from shelling out a huge chunk of their budget into hiring that key resource for a short-term basis.

Some of the key aspects that make staff augmentation unique are the fact that it is different from freelancing and outsourcing yet these augmented staff can work out of your workspace or remotely.

From the outside, the concepts may be very similar as the ultimate aim is to get a key resource onboard to ensure your workflow remains unharmed. But when you zoom in, the differences are visible.

To understand what staff augmentation means, you should understand what freelancing and outsourcing are. Apart from these differences, we can take a look at Staff Augmentation Vs Managed Services: What to Choose and Why?

Though freelancing is very close to staff augmentation, a freelancer differs from an augmented staff in terms of attitude, competency, pricing, and integrity. An augmented staff comes from a credible company that is held accountable for the attendance, performance, and deliverables of the staff.

While on the other hand, a freelancer is another profile online that lacks airtight credibility. A freelancer is most likely to ghost out when exposed to pressure but that is not the case with an augmented staff.

We believe you’re familiar with outsourcing and that most of you are already outsourcing some aspects of your business. In outsourcing, you bestow the entire responsibility of product delivery or management to a third-party company while you focus on other equally important things.

You could outsource your content requirements, app development, hiring, and more. In this, you hardly have any control over how the outsourcing company goes about executing your vision as the processes and workflows are indigenous to the outsourced company.

On the other hand, an augmented staff as part of your team is sourced from a staff augmentation company. The staff is oriented to your culture, modus operandi, visions, and missions and is your team member regardless of the staff’s duration.

For the uninitiated, staff augmentation is of two types –

This is when you require staff to be working for you for a longer period of time, say, more than six months. The most ideal times to look for a long-term augmented staff are when –

When the requirement of staff is very temporary for weeks or a couple of months, it’s called short-term staff augmentation. You would be a needing a short-term augmented staff if –

Though it looks complicated, staff augmentation is quite simple. It takes a systematic approach in helping you find and recruit a specialist or a team of specialists for your requirements. If you’re looking to implement this framework in your business, understand that it has three core steps or flow.

This is the preliminary stage, where you identify the skill gap prevailing in your organization. The skill gap could be because of a very sophisticated requirement presented to you by your client, your in-house team not having the required competency to complete the job, you overlooked the requirement of a specific job role because there was no initial need for it, and more.

Regardless of the case, it is now you identify it and look for vendors to help you fill the gap.

Once you’ve identified the skill gap and found the most ideal fit, you recruit the staff and orient them into your organization. This involves them getting familiar with your business needs and requirements, visions, and goals, getting to know your staff and team members, workflows and processes, culture, and everything they need to be comfortable working with you.

The process does not end with their orientation. In fact, it starts with it. Once the staff is on board, it’s on you to consistently nurture the staff for optimized performance. As an augmented staff, it becomes involuntary for them to implement workflows and processes they worked on previously. It is only when you nurture the recruit for your needs and goals you pave the way for complete utilization of the resource.

Staff augmentation offers a lot of advantages. I’m sure you’ve already pointed out a few staff augmentation advantages and found ways to incorporate this approach into your business.

But if you’re still not convinced, staff augmentation helps you :

So, I believe you now know what staff augmentation is, how it brings in change, and if your business needs it. Understand your requirements, explore the workflow we’ve mentioned, and get your processes up and running without having to worry about spending too much on one resource.