What is Staff Augmentation?
Staff augmentation is the process of bringing highly qualified professionals from a service company to fill a specific requirement in your organization. While it may sound similar to outsourcing or freelancing, it is different. Staff augmentation allows you to pick custom developer teams on the go to help scale your business. You can onboard a single professional or an entire team, for short-term or long-term engagements, fully customizable based on your needs.
How Staff Augmentation is Different
To understand the distinction between outsourcing, freelancing, and staff augmentation:
- Outsourcing: Work is handed to an outside agency that uses its own resources. Control over employees lies with the agency, not you.
- Freelancing: An individual works on a contract basis at their discretion. There’s no oversight or formal control.
- Staff Augmentation: You hire highly skilled professionals to work within your team for specific tasks. You maintain control over both the work and the employee, enjoying the hybrid benefits of outsourcing and traditional hiring.
Process of Staff Augmentation
The staff augmentation process has four key parts:
- Determining the Talent Requirement: Identify the exact talent gap in your team. Knowing the right skills needed is crucial for a successful augmentation process.
- Selecting the Right Agency: Choose an agency that can provide the best-fit resources. The right choice ensures a smooth experience and high-quality results.
- Recruiting Talent: Optional participation in selecting the resource from the agency’s pool. You can customize and request changes if needed.
- Onboarding and Training Talent: Integrate the new team member into your team, set expectations, and train them to align with your goals and processes.
Benefits of Staff Augmentation
- Cost-effective compared to traditional hiring.
- Temporary gaps can be filled until a permanent employee is hired.
- Reduces time spent on hiring.
- Access to a large pool of experts.
- Quickly scale the size of your workforce.
- Improves productivity by extracting more work from resources.
- Provides better control over projects and resources.
In summary, staff augmentation is the best way to scale your internal team, meet urgent requirements, and complete short-term projects efficiently. It combines flexibility, control, and access to expertise, making it an ideal strategy in today’s dynamic business environment.
