Categories: Business

Everything You Need To Know About Staff Augmentation

One of the main trends in modern business is the increasing use of temporary workers, staff augmentation, in various industries. This approach is not current because it began to be implemented at a time when administrators were hired to fill positions temporarily due to employee vacations or illness.

Today, agency labor is used in many business models, one of the most famous of which is staff augmentation, which will be discussed below.

IMAGE: UNSPLASH

Operating Principles Of Staff Augmentation

The modern resource augmentation model allows a company to hire one or more outsourced IT specialists to increase its staff. Such employees become part of the team and interact with the company’s employees for a limited period.

Consider this example of staff augmentation: you want to improve your internal CRM system but don’t have the necessary professionals on staff. Therefore, you turn to an outstaffing service provider instead of going through the standard recruitment procedure, including search, interview, and training.

Outstaffing company takes care of growing your team, selects specialists with experience working on similar projects, and forwards their resumes to you. You or an authorized person may interview selected employees and sign an employment contract.

Advantages And Disadvantages Of Staff Augmentation

Staff augmentation services offer a flexible and creative solution to increase potential within an existing specialized team. It ensures a quick way to attract talent that fills your staff’s skills and experience gaps without lengthy employment commitments. Let’s look at other benefits of this solution:

Needs-based: tell the outstaffing company what skills you are interested in, and the manager will help you find the most suitable candidates.
Efficiency: when hiring an employee, you must regularly pay wages and taxes and pay for vacation and sick leave. Using staff augmentation, you can only pay for the work done.
Significant human resources potential: if there is a shortage of professionals in a particular programming language in your country, you can focus on foreign markets.

The disadvantages of staff augmentation are related to the fact that when a specialist finds himself in a new work environment, he needs time to adapt to the new conditions or adjust his work methods to become more productive in the team. When engaging an outside expert, ensuring everything will go smoothly is essential.

In What Situations Do You Need Staff Augmentation?

No matter how attractive staff augmentation may seem, this model is unsuitable for all scenarios. You need to increase your staff in the following situations:

You are implementing a short-term project: implementing a long-term program may take many months or even years; in such a situation, it is more rational to hire a full-time specialist.
You need employees with a specific skill set to complement your existing department today.
Your project has a low or medium level of complexity since it is better to choose a different model of cooperation with personnel for complex projects that require a lot of time to launch.
You have a team of developers working in an office, but you want to form another group to create another element of the digital product.

Staff augmentation is a powerful model that companies actively use to improve flexibility and optimally respond to changing industry needs. Such solutions are used for different roles, from research and development to operations, marketing, customer service, etc. For staff augmentation to provide maximum value to the firm, it is necessary to encourage open communication, correctly assign job roles, use appropriate project management tools, and support documentation-based development.