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Staff Augmentation: Best Practices Outlined For Your Business
Based on the recent research by Statista, the total revenue of the global IT outsourcing industry has already reached over $541 bn this year and keeps growing by 8.5% annually.
According to the survey by Deloitte, the global market of outsourcing and shared services is expected to rapidly develop in the next 5 years. With many organizations turning to remote team extension for critical IT functions such as development, security, and cloud services – especially in North America and Europe – this trend is expected to persist, as the companies focus on reducing costs and tapping into a broader talent pool.
For company owners and team leaders looking to boost their in-house team or gain access to specialized skills, this hiring model offers many benefits to business. Below is a complete guide with the top 6 staff augmentation best practices, potential pitfalls, and practical recommendations – for you to make the most out of this service.
What Is Staff Augmentation
There are 4 different types of staff augmentation: project-based (dedicated team, single hire), skill-based, time-based, and geography-based service (onshore, nearshore, and offshore). Below is a brief description and comparison of each.
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Project-based | Ideal for companies that need to engage additional software specialists for a particular project. A dedicated team is a group of developers who work exclusively for your project, bringing specialized expertise and long-term focus. A single-hire approach (for example, getting a remote web developer to launch a website on time) is good to cover specific project activities with precision. |
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Skill-based | Fine for companies that focus on hiring based on the required technical or functional skills and experience needed for a specific project, rather than on general qualifications or long-term employment. For instance, if a project requires a senior expertise of a remote CTO, a company can effectively close this skill gap with staff augmentation. |
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Time-based | Works for companies that want to engage software developers or tech consultants for a specific period of time. Gives flexibility and predictability, becoming a perfect fit for both short-term and long-term collaboration. For example, a company faced the need for manual data validation and extra research – and eventually found a perfect fix with Mobilunity. |
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Geo-based | Offshore staff augmentation comes by engaging experts from different countries, being the most cost-effective option that requires careful management though. Onshore and nearshore models ensure seamless communication with no language and time zone. Here is a case example of a geo-based solution we provided for our client, who needed a team extension in their Tokyo office. |
Benefits Of Staff Augmentation
1.Faster Time-to-Market
When you augment your staff with remote talents, you can speed up project execution, cut delivery times, and gain a competitive edge. This works particularly well for small companies and early project kick-offs, for example, when a mobile startup is using the service to quickly boost the in-house team with QA testers or designers.
Eventually, the best staff augmentation service makes it possible to launch the product under aggressive deadlines or ahead of their competitors.
2.Cost-Efficiency
The streamlined staff augmentation process leads to far more affordable recruitment and integration into your existing team, compared to traditional hiring (not to mention in-house or local talents that bear even heftier price tags). This service saves much time and effort, and helps you bridge the talent gap with no overhead costs, such as advertising, evaluating, vetting, and interviewing multiple candidates.
Additionally, you can engage new people right when you need them, effectively handling peak workloads, fluctuations, and coping with tight deadlines without ruining your budget.
3.Flexibility and Scalability
By leveraging this service, you can quickly scale up / down on the go as your project needs and global business targets evolve. This ability is also great for the early stages of the project, for example, when you just need to engage a single developer to get an MVP.
Later on, you can quickly boost your team with additional employees – with no need to spend time and resources on sourcing, vetting, hiring, and onboarding new members.
4.Access to Global Talent Pool
Staff augmentation allows companies to instantly tap into a global network of talents, a thing an in-house hiring team can never provide. By gaining access to top talent around the world, you can get specialized expertise, senior-level tech executives, or hard-to-find software engineers.
Also, this service offers a great opportunity to find professionals with diverse perspectives, industry top practices, and innovative skills – across different time zones or even locally.
Learn how to get professional IT staff augmentation services and boost your team. Check out the full range of global staffing solutions by Mobilunity!
Common Scenarios For Using Staff Augmentation
Short-Term Projects
Engaging remote software developers with a staff augmentation model is a great way to fix skill gaps or insufficient staffing for short-term projects. Unlike traditional hiring, staff augmentation is a flexible solution, as you can get the right people for urgent needs, specific activities, or spikes in workload. Freelancing can also provide cost-effective staffing solutions for current needs, however, here clients may experience a lack of control, predictability, and output quality.
Gaining Flexibility in Team Size
In a highly competitive business environment, projects must be agile to respond to changing conditions and new opportunities. Remote team extension is a powerful solution that enables businesses to increase their team size rapidly, particularly during peak workloads or critical project phases. Companies can adjust their workforce to match the exact requirements of each project or phase, ensuring optimal resource management, flexibility, and freedom from full-time commitments.
Filling Skill Gaps
Staff augmentation offers a great way to fill skill gaps, capitalize on new opportunities, and execute the project more effectively. For example, engaging specific software specialists on a part-time basis. With this service, you can take the time to see if this team expansion is needed permanently, and whether a newly hired expert aligns with the working flow and company culture. Eventually, you can turn it into a full-time cooperation.
Reducing Time-to-Hire and Costs
While traditional hiring often involves a line of time- and resource-consuming processes (advertising jobs, screening candidates, interviewing, training, etc.), staff augmentation helps to skip the lion’s share of such activities. The right staff augmentation provider should typically have a vast talent network with pre-screened candidates, as well as a whole in-house recruitment department who can engage rare expertise or hard-to-find software engineers. This results in cutting down on hiring time, costs, and training expenses.
Temporary Replacement for High-Turnover Roles
Staff augmentation offers an ideal solution for companies that face high turnover in specific roles. It becomes particularly effective when you need to ensure continuous operations, minimizing costs and delays related to hiring full-time employees and training them over and over again. Also, the core of this approach is broad access to a large pool of pre-screened professionals who are ready to step into roles on short notice.
Gaining External Perspectives
By bringing in external developers or consultants, you can gain access to fresh ideas, unconventional problem-solving, and improved decision-making skills. This provides a unique opportunity to gain valuable external perspectives, and drive innovation with new insights and different approaches that might be unavailable within your internal teams.
Managing Increased Workload
Some projects and industries need more team members from time to time, for example, during high-volume seasons and conventions. Staff augmentation is the ultimate solution to help you during spikes in workload, helping to scale the team up and down quickly and with no long-term commitment. As a result, you can distribute work more effectively, speed up project completion, and avoid potential hiring mistakes associated with a lack of experience or cultural mismatch.
Maintaining Continuity During Employee Absences
Engaging remote experts can be a successful staff augmentation strategy for maintaining continuity during employee absences, ensuring that critical business operations remain uninterrupted. For example, planned leaves (maternity or medical leaves), unexpected absences (illness or personal reasons) – staff augmentation helps to fill your temporary staff gaps seamlessly, with no need for time-consuming training and onboarding.
Access to Niche Expertise
Today, most of every business strategy faces a skill gap for short-term initiatives, for example, with emerging technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence or cybersecurity. Staff augmentation can be an effective option to quickly bring in a highly specialized expert just for the duration of the project. As a result, you can benefit from cutting-edge skills, save valuable time and resources, and even establish effective knowledge transfer and cross-functional collaboration for in-house software developers.
Testing New Markets / Product Lines
Businesses looking to minimize the risk and long-term commitments can go for staff augmentation to test new markets and product lines. By bringing in temporary talent, you can quickly respond to market demands, experiment with new products, and pivot strategies based on project requirements and real-time results. Additionally, you can ensure such new initiatives are handled by professionals who can provide invaluable insights and speed up the project delivery.
Meeting Compliance / Regulatory Requirements
Staff augmentation has become a critical factor in helping businesses meet compliance and regulatory requirements. This is especially demanded by highly regulated industries, such as healthcare, financial services, and manufacturing. By getting access to specialized experts in risk management and regulatory standards, you can ensure the company stays in line with all legal requirements, avoiding potential operational disruptions and penalties.
Supporting Digital Transformation
Hiring additional technical specialists is a perfect way to undergo critical IT upgrades and digital transformation initiatives. For example, engaging professional cloud engineers through staff augmentation can help you cope with the digital overhaul. Leveraging external talent can help you complete the upgrade, benefitting from flexibility, cost efficiency, and driving disruption of daily operation to the minimum.
6 IT Staff Augmentation Best Practices
1. Set Project Goals and Expectations
Next, clearly define the current goals and global business objectives for your software development project. Start by setting requirements to specific skill sets and expectations in terms of industry experience, tech background, deliverables, KPIs, seniority levels and soft skills you’re looking for. This will ensure your vendor can focus on the most suitable talents to complete your request.
Should you face any challenges or simply have limited time, consider trying our tech consultancy services. Our expert recruiters will provide practical insights that will help you pick the right technology, align staff augmentation with your business goals, and eventually find the top-matching specialists to extend your team.
2. Identify Talent Gaps
Identifying the areas that face talent gaps is the first thing to be done before going for staff augmentation. Run a thorough analysis to see which specific tech skills are missing within your internal team. This includes evaluating available skills related to the project requirements and collecting insights from PMs, team leaders / heads of departments.
Take into account external factors like tech innovation and market trends. Stay up-to-date with emerging skills that can give you a competitive edge. Doing so, you will be able to avoid potential redundancies and prevent from getting underqualified or overqualified experts.
3.Choose the Right Staff Augmentation Partner
Make sure you’re going to collaborate with an experienced staff augmentation service provider. But choosing the right fit is not an easy task, as today’s business landscape is vast and diverse. That’s why you’ll need to have clear criteria for selecting a reliable and professional vendor.
Below are the 5 core aspects for you to focus on.
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Capacity |
While traditional hiring may take months even in countries with a large talent pool, it’s important for a service provider to possess a vast global network of pre-vetted specialists. So, if you need to grow your development capacities, it’s important to consider the capacity of the vendor and available talent capabilities. |
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Reputation |
Client reviews on different platforms like Google and Clutch is the right way of getting a grasp of your shortlisted vendors’ reputation. Consider looking through rankings and industry awards that prove high trust and credibility. And don’t hesitate to ask service providers for references right when you contact them. |
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Employer Brand |
The ability to quickly scale your team, provide high-quality talents, and retain them over time depends heavily on the employer brand. Check out if the companies care about their employees, and whether they have a positive reputation in the local IT market. Look through Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google reviews to see if people like working there. |
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Experience | Look for case studies and real success stories that will demonstrate proven experience on the shortlisted vendors you consider dealing with. Focus on specific niche experience, skill sets, and tech stacks you want for your project. Ideally, your new service provider should possess a matching or at least close industry expertise to fit your evolving business needs. |
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Communication |
English fluency, strong tech / communication skills, and cultural fit are also important factors of high-quality service. They shouldn’t be underestimated. If you go for offshore or nearshore team members, consider hiring developers from proximate or at least overlapping time zones. This will help you facilitate effective communication and problem-solving in real time. |
4.Track Performance and Provide Feedback
To build successful relationships and drive positive business outcomes, you need to proactively monitor performance metrics. Establish clear KPIs and provide constructive feedback, both to recognize achievements and to spot room for improvement. Delegating management responsibilities to a team leader helps new team members instantly see the expectations and milestones, adhere to deadlines, support open and transparent and mutually beneficial communication.
Ask your shortlisted partners whether they have dedicated account managers to support their clients. A high-quality service provider should add an extra layer of performance monitoring, foster transparent communication, and take care of motivation for every software specialist they hire for you.
5.Articulate Your Corporate Values
To ensure smooth working relationships and effective collaboration, it’s vital to remember that working with augmented staff members happens from across the globe. They come from different countries, with different cultural backgrounds, soft skills, and working styles.
Make sure to clearly articulate your corporate values and let your new employees understand the core of the company’s culture from the very beginning. Doing so, you will be able to ensure smooth collaboration with minimal disruptions, maintain productivity, and get many benefits (for example, unique solutions or unconventional problem-solving capabilities).
6. Integrate New Members Effectively
To avoid stress and maximize the productivity of your remote experts from day 1, a professional staff augmentation provider will ensure you have a custom-fit and effective onboarding for every position. Meaning you get highly experienced people with the right set of hard / soft skills who can perform their roles and cover your project goals and objectives effectively.
At the same time, you should also invest time and effort in training programs to help your new employees adapt to the workflows, tools, business process, and culture at your company. This includes providing access to all necessary resources, documentation, support channels, and mentorship during the early stages of onboarding.
Don’t know how to choose the right partner?
Contact us to see if Mobilunity’s staff augmentation service is right for your project!
Staff Augmentation Challenges And How To Overcome Them
While staff augmentation offers a wide range of benefits for projects of different scales and complexity, it still comes with a few challenges. Consider integration, communication barriers, communication, knowledge transfer, potential management issues, and security concerns as the most common pitfalls to keep an eye on.
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Integration issues |
Structured onboarding process and clear role definitions will eliminate the lion’s share of potential integration issues. Whether you’re going for short-term or long-term staff augmentation, you should establish knowledge transfer. This will enable deeper integration of new team members and the full understanding of the company’s culture, processes, and core business goals – contributing to better performance and the overall project success. |
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Work quality control |
Implementing a comprehensive performance review and feedback strategy is important to keep your external employees productive, just like your own in-house team. Measure task completion rate and progress using project management tools. Evaluate the quality of work through code reviews, testing, and by encouraging cross-functional feedback and collaboration sessions. |
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Communication barriers |
Using advanced project management and communication tools is critical to keep your team well-connected. Platforms like Slack, Google Meet, and Zoom can facilitate effective video communication and address issues in real time. Management tools like Jira, Trello, or custom systems help to track project milestones, match progress with expectations, and keep every remote specialist engaged and productive. |
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Knowledge transfer |
Augmented staff may not possess the same level of business understanding as in-house workers. And vice versa, when hiring a professional with rare skills, internal team members will certainly lack such a level of knowledge. Sharing essential expertise and available resources, scheduling training sessions, and encouraging cross-functional collaboration will help you ensure clarity, consistency, and higher level of productivity. |
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Managing remote teams |
Even highly skilled and carefully selected augmented staff needs clear leadership. While a vendor covers all legal and admin activities, you’ll still need to have a team leader to manage remote employees and ensure optimal performance. Regular check-ins and feedback sessions will help them align with internal teams, foster collaboration, maintain accountability and accelerate project delivery. |
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Security concerns |
External team members will have shared access to the company’s systems and sensitive business data. That’s why security and privacy should be addressed proactively. Make sure your vendor offers to sign a staff augmentation contract along with an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) and other security documents before getting started. Ideally, a reliable provider should provide an NDA even before starting early-stage negotiations about your project requirements. |
Future Trends In Staff Augmentation
The future of staff augmentation is dynamic, bringing new challenges and opportunities for businesses that want to leverage global talents, drive innovation, and stay agile and on budget. Consider the following emerging trends to thrive in an increasingly competitive digital environment.
- Use of Artificial Intelligence and Automation
- Greater Emphasis on Data Security & Compliance
- Expansion of Augmented Teams in Non-IT Sectors
- Increasing Focus on Specialized Skills
- Rise of Global Talent Pools
- Enhanced Collaboration Tools and Technologies
- Short-Term / Project-Based Hiring
- Sustainability and Green Workforce Initiatives
- Hybrid Hiring Model of Remote and On-site Work
What’s Next
Staff augmentation has already become a revolutionary change over traditional hiring – so many companies around the world would go for it. Implementing staff augmentation provides a strategic approach that enables quick, high-quality, and flexible global hiring. And most of today’s businesses prefer talents who are subject matter experts and possess deep practical experience in specific industries.
However, extended staff presents not only opportunities (such as enhancing development capability, access to rare and hard-to-find talents, faster project timelines, etc.) – but also a line of challenges. Both short-term and long-term projects should be following the best practices of staff augmentation when building specialized teams, of course if they want to reduce risks and get successful project outcomes.
Choosing the right staff augmentation partner remains challenging. From the side of a vendor, it demands covering all 5 core aspects of high-quality service (vast talent capacity, fine reputation, strong employer brand, proven industry expertise, and effective communication / cultural fit). For you, it requires precision in identifying talent gaps, and accuracy in setting project goals and expectations. Should you feel stuck with any of these, contact us and tell us about your staffing needs. Book a free consultation and find out how staff augmentation by Mobilunity can help your business achieve new milestones.
