What is Staff Augmentation?
Staff augmentation is a process of filling up highly qualified professionals from a service company to fit a particular requirement in your organization. This concept may feel like outsourcing or freelancing to you. But it is not. It is an arrangement to help you pick on the go and custom developer teams to help you scale up your business. You can either choose to onboard one person or you can pick a team. You can either have them for a short term or long term. It is all up to you to customize based on your need.
How Staff Augmentation is different
Now to have a clear differentiation between Outsourcing, Freelancing and Staff Augmentation let us see about each of them. Outsourcing is giving your work to an outside agency who will use their resources and get the work done for you. Here the control of the employee is with the outside agency, and you have no say about it. Freelancing is an individual who gets work done for you on a contractual basis at their free will. There is no credibility check, or they are not under the control of anyone. Whereas in Staff Augmentation, you can get a highly skilled professional hired into your company and work for a specific task in your team for a short or long-term basis. In this model you have control over the work as well as the employee. The resource works as a part of your existing team. In a highly dynamic environment, Staff augmentation is the best way to expand and strengthen your technical team. This model offers the hybrid benefits of outsourcing as well as traditional hiring without having to really hire or outsource.
Process Of Staff Augmentation
There are four parts to the staff augmentation process.
- Determining the talent requirement
- It is particularly important to first identify the right talent gap that is missing in the environment. Once you have nailed that right then the rest of the process will fall easily in place. It is important to evaluate properly regarding who you want and why you want.
- Selecting the right agency
- Once you have nailed the missing resource it is now time to hunt for the right agency who is going to provide the resource. Selecting the right resource is a key factor to determine the experience you are going to derive from the process. There is a different blog on how you can choose the right agency. That is a separate task on its own. The right choice can give you the most pleasing and comfortable experience.
- Recruiting talent
- This step is an optional one. You can participate to choose whom you want to hire from the pool of on- demand developers that the agency has. You can take part in the recruiting process and personalize the resource as much as you want. Or you can request a resource and accept whom they offer for you. You can also change the resource if you feel there is a need for that.
- Onboarding and Training talent
- Once you have made the decision and recruited the person you can now board the new member into your team. Once the onboarding is done it is time to train and mold the resources to fit your requirements. It is quite necessary to walk them through your expectations and goals to set them on track to align with your thoughts.
Benefits of Staff Augmentation
- It is cost effective in comparison to traditional hiring.
- Temporary gaps can be filled till an alternate employee is hired.
- Reduces time spent on hiring.
- Access to a huge pool of experts.
- The size of your workforce can be altered quickly and easily.
- Can extract more work there by improving productivity.
- You can have an upper hand over project control and the resource person.
