Benefits of Staff Augmentation

Basically, staff augmentation refers to the hiring of third-party workers or contractors to assume short-term positions in your company. It’s typically done through an agency that maintains a database of temporary workers.

Usually, such workers are hired on a per-project basis. You’re the one who chooses which candidates to hire, manages your augmented team, and decides whether to cut or expand the team.

For instance, you have a project that requires another two skilled workers, but it’ll only last for three months. You aren’t sure if you should hire permanent workers because you won’t have any work for them to do after the project is finished. You may find yourself in a messy situation if you fire them, but it’s a waste of money to keep them on.

The best thing to do is to bring in qualified temporary workers who can immediately contribute to your team. Staff augmentation enables you to boost or “augment” your existing workforce without the hassles and long-term costs that come with hiring permanent workers.

Regardless of the size of your company, you can benefit from staff augmentation in a variety of ways, including:

- Quick and easy staffing: The contractors you hire through staff augmentation can jump right in and start working. They don’t have to go through the onboarding process and other hiring formalities, which can help you save valuable time.

- Cost-effectiveness: Under a staff augmentation model, you only hire when the need comes up. This means you don’t have to take on additional payroll responsibilities. You can ramp up or down to meet your changing staffing needs without having to bear the costs associated with hiring permanent workers.

- Complete control: Since you won’t be delegating the entire project to another company but only adding workers to an internal team, you’ll still have total control over how things are done. The contractors will conform to your existing structures like your regular employees, allowing you to manage your resources closely.

- Specialized talent: With staff augmentation, you’ll be able to hire highly specialized talent who can provide expert advice and help you solve project issues. Experienced contractors can share knowledge and add value to the project soon after they join your team.

- Ability to meet tight timelines: Sometimes, leveraging staff augmentation may be the only way to punctually complete a project with a tight schedule or catch up when you’ve fallen behind.

- Enhanced scalability: When you’re experiencing rapid business growth, you can also use staff augmentation to meet your need to increase staffing. You have the freedom to adjust your team size according to revenue upturns or client needs.

If you’re thinking of implementing staff augmentation, it’s important for you to know your options. This hiring model comes in three forms, including:

- Commodity: This type of staff augmentation provides workers who are reliable but don’t have a specific skill set. They’re suitable for basic factory or warehouse work, retail jobs, and manual labor.

- Skill-based: You should consider hiring skill-based workers when you need certain skills such as typing and using spreadsheets, but you aren’t particular about the relative level of skill. Examples of the types of tasks these workers can do include data processing, clerical work, transcription, and basic copywriting.

- Highly skilled: Highly skilled workers possess advanced skills that can only be attained with significant training and experience. Some examples of such workers include software engineers, brand designers, and contract lawyers.

The effectiveness of your staff augmentation strategy largely depends on which agency you choose to provide you with workers. Follow the tips below to pick the right agency:

- Do research online: Before you work with any particular staff augmentation agency, you should view its social media profile. By doing so, you can know a lot about the company, including its services, experience, track record, and customer satisfaction levels. You may also want to visit B2B review sites to do more research.

- Choose an agency with a proven record in handling similar projects: If a company has extensive experience providing staffing for the type of project you’re hiring for, you’ll know its workers have the necessary acumen to work on your project.

- Work with a vendor that has established methods and processes: An agency with established methods and processes will provide you with an augmented team that works in an organized and efficient manner.

- Evaluate the agency’s approach to staff augmentation: Staff augmentation will only work if the augmented staff and your project team are properly aligned with each other. You can know whether a certain agency is a good fit for your company by having preliminary talks and looking at how it intends to move forward, such as conducting tech screening and test programming.

By Dom & Tom

Cover Image via Flickr by Rawpixel Ltd