The Staff Augmentation Model: What is it and How to Use it?

Staff augmentation is a manageable and straightforward model that comes into play when you need to augment staff for some reason or hire new employees. It is an effective way to add quality staff to your business. This article will tell you how it works and how you can use it in your own business.

What is Staff Augmentation Model?

The staff augmentation model helps you evaluate the current staff and skill sets your business lacks. You can depend on staff augmentation companies to hire highly qualified and skilled employees that help you meet all your project goals.

Hence, you don't need to lose time on the recruitment process, contracting matters, and selecting a person to best fit your team.

When your project is launched, you can use a staff augmentation model and hire employees in 2 to 3 weeks. You just need to interview candidates and decide which candidates fit your needs.

Staff augmentation companies can deliver you the best programmers, QA engineers, designers, marketing experts, and system managers in the IT sector according to your business niche. 

Why is Staff Augmentation Model Important?

• Staff augmentation also enables you can trim your development processes.  You can even pay a skilled technical specialist on an hourly basis.

• If you like their work and appreciate their agility, you can consider presenting them with a full-time opportunity.

• Ultimately, the staff augmentation model allows you to have more control over your business.

• Instead of dumping time and energy into hiring permanent employees, staff augmentation lets you work temporarily with qualified specialists as projects come ahead. 
• The staff augmentation model gives you access to a reservoir of the best tech talent in the industry whenever the need occurs. 

• Both startups and well-developed businesses can increase productivity and save expenses with staff augmentation.  

How Does the Staff Augmentation Model Work?

To understand the working of staff augmentation, we have explained the entire method in brief steps down:

• Firstly, you should define the requirements you want in prospects like their qualifications, skills, years of experience, etc.

• Once you correctly understand what you’re looking for, the next phase is to start the research process.

• Discover and review all the contenders that are suitable according to your requirements.

• Conduct interviews and examinations to confirm the eligibility of all the passed prospects for joining your team.

• During the onboarding process, you must ensure to give full support for the successful integration of your new employees.

• You can give all the new employees knowledge about your company’s methods, goal strategies, regulations, and values.

• Try to make them comfortable in their new workplace.

How can Staff Augmentation Enhance your Business?

• It is more affordable to outsource workers than hire an in-house team to fill the skills gap. 
• Companies that lack IT skills can hire programmers beyond the country.
• Staff augmentation can function as a temporary legend instead of hiring a permanent team. 

What are the Essentials of having a Staff Augmentation Model?

• The staff augmentation technique will best fit if you have an in-house team. You can grow an already existing one to bring more people qualified to perform your workflow jobs.
• You have a requirement to fill the expertise void by finding specialists for particular job profiles.
• When you need intelligence in specific IT fields like automated QA, back-end development, blockchain, IoT, data science, etc.

What are the Types of Staff Augmentation Providers - 

Staff augmentation has grown into a large industry with many providers to meet the demands of varied clients. The following are the most common:

1. Standard Staff Providers:

This is an agency also known as a “commercial staffing provider”. Its prior role is to augment your team with the required expertise in non-critical projects but not the workers with specific skill sets. 

For instance, if you’re a CEO of an IT firm, you might use the benefits of such staffing vendors to find the right data entry expert.

2. Boutique Employment Agencies:

Boutique staffing refers to smaller staffing firms that can fill even the most difficult positions in your organisation, such as senior architects. Such a dealer delivers highly customised assistance and worths quality over quantity. 

3. Staffing Platforms:

These platforms are also known as “human clouds”. It provides staff augmentation services and connects possible workers and employers. They are split into the gig and on-demand platforms. 

The only distinction between them is that gig platforms do not ensure that you acquire professional employees, while on-demand platforms try to supply only interviewed and reviewed talents.

4. Recruitment Enterprises: 

Recruitment enterprises are staffing providers that hire employees for both crucial and non-urgent projects of the consumer. 

They obtain a compensation payment if they find a suitable contender for a job. However, recruitment companies may sometimes fail to find you an ideal candidate. 

It happens because they generally do not have superior expertise in a particular niche like IT and opt for unsuitable candidates.

Advantages of Staff Augmentation Model - 

1. Filling Gaps in the WorkPlace:

With staff augmentation, you can employ IT talents globally and add professional resources to your existing development team for a short or long period, based on your demands.

2. Pay Only For What You Need:

• This fantastic model permits you to hire temporary staffers. So you do not have to employ full-time employees, which can be highly expensive.

• You can only pay for what you require for a specific period. 

3. Vital Time Saver:

• It takes time to make job postings, interview job prospects and go through the suitable paperwork to hire full-time employees.

• Hence, with staff augmentation, you just ought to reach the vendor, look through the employees' CVs, interview them and hire who is the best fit.

4. Keeping Control over Existing Staff:

• Another primary perk of selecting staff augmentation is the power to keep control over your current staff.

• When you outsource your project to a third party, you are giving your work to the hands of strangers.

• However, you can pick a temporary team to work with staff augmentation.

5. Overcoming Geological Restrictions:

• Staff augmentation offers you to search for required specialists located in various nations.
• It directly offers you access to experts you might not find in your region or country.

6. Sustained Authority:

• Project outsourcing is used to reduce the role of the parent companies in the performance and management of the project.
• However, staff augmentation prevents this anomaly by allowing parent businesses to have the command to take the final decision.

7. Evolution and Adaptation:

• You need to grow constantly to survive in this continually changing industry and acquire new skills. 
• Staff augmentation appears like a helpful tool to fulfil the same. It helps businesses to adapt quickly to the constantly changing conditions of the market by hiring project-specific workers.

8. Well Organised Staff: 

• Managing the staff operations by yourself gives you more power than leaving the team control to the outsourcing provider.
• In addition, you can monitor the expansion process and team actions and take action instantly.

Disadvantages of Staff Augmentation - 

Even though staff augmentation might seem an excellent solution to fast find and fill the skill gaps in your company, it has some downsides that you need to be aware of, such as:

1. Lack of Dedication From Newly Joined:

• Your temporary workers know that your project will soon be accomplished, and they are committed to it for a specific time. 

• So they don’t care much about proving the productive work to your company in the future.

• For this reason, permanent employees, both in-house and remote, are a better option for you.

2. Extra Long-Term Costs:

• You may either pay a service fee and commission to the staffing platform or an augmented worker.

• Hence, full-time on-premises employees are more affordable than staff-augmented ones in the lengthy run.

3. Heightened Onboarding Time:

• After hiring temporary workers, you need to give time to onboard them and educate them about your business needs, goals, rules and regulations and existing staff members. 
• Further, you need to create an in-house and augmented workers' time-consuming communication alignment.

4. Security Issues:

• Your augmented staff need to undergo systematic security audits to discover the problems of security hazards and dangers. 

• After hiring temporary workers, you ought to be concerned about your business strategies and goals privacy. To get genuine augmented workers, you can ask them to sign NDAs post employing rules document and ensure complete security.

5. Language Barriers:

• Hiring augmented workers beyond the country can cause barriers like language, religion, earlier work history and work habits. 
• So, you are recommended to read books and articles to learn how to handle people from distinct countries to which your staff augmentation provider belongs.  

6. Workers Productivity Control:

You need to ensure that the candidate’s ability meets your staff augmentation requirements.  If they fail to accomplish so, they may conduct your project delays, end-user safety risks, and cost overruns. 

How to Grow Business with Augmented Team? 

The Staff Augmentation model can affect your business process and enhance your bottom line if you do it correctly. Here we are explaining some things to consider to execute the model correctly -

1. Determinate the Skills Void in your Company:

• You can evaluate your current or upcoming project essential and match it with the existing employees' skills results.

• This way, you can learn the crucial gaps which need to be fulfilled and hire augmented staff.

• Once you have filled the void, decide whether you require the candidate for the short or long-term.

2. Select the Right Partner:

• When picking a staff augmentation vendor, you must ask some essential questions: What's my requirement? What skills do you need in your business etc.?
• Thus, you can tell vendors your demands, and they will provide you with workers. 

3. Consider Multisourcing:

You can choose two vendors and eventually go for the better one for a long-term partnership.

4. Make Remote Employees Feel like They're Part of your Local Team:

• If you are working with remote workers, you ought to adjust your management style and build a good relationship with each team member.

• You must regularly communicate to confirm both in-house and remote teams are working in sync.

• Anytime you are having an online video meeting with your remote team, take some time for them to share their hobbies, lifestyle and interests.

5. Ensure Transparent Communication:

It is significant to improve the communication method in the development cycle so everyone can purchase into decisions and contribute to the projects at hand.

6. Adopt Tools and Technology:

• Influence project management and team association tools like Asana, Jira, Slack, Trello etc., to facilitate idea-sharing and trace projects' statuses.

• The lack of contact might lead to miscommunication which can impact the whole project.

• Thus, it is vital to use such tools to enhance communication and teamwork throughout the development lifecycle.

Bottom Line - 

Staff augmentation helps businesses to deal with talent shortages. So the augmentation model is one of the most efficient and popular methods of managing high-speed and unexpected projects when the company requires ultra-fast outcomes under defined budgets. 

We hope this article will help you understand staff augmentation and its benefits. If you have further doubts about it, you can contact us and comment.