Nasrullah Patel — March 26, 2020 You already have a wonderful idea ready to shape as a startup. What you don’t have is a wonderful team to transform your idea into reality.
Often this is a common problem with startups wherein they don’t know where to kickstart things with hiring the right talent in-house. This is where the need for staff augmentation arises for both measuring software development metrics and productivity.
For successful non-tech startups and tech startups, it is the people who can make or break a business, and hence staff augmentation plays a critical role when handled wisely. Before getting down to how staff augmentation can impact a startup, let us first understand the concept in brief.
Staff Augmentation – What it really is
Staff augmentation simply refers to outsourcing the job of hiring people to a competent partner capable of building robust teams to work in tandem with your in-house people. The process involves conducting interviews to identify skills and audit potential candidates with relevant knowledge as well as experience, and the best part is everything is taken care of by your outsourcing partner.
So, how staff augmentation can uplift your startup on an initial level? Let us find out.
- Recruitment gets simplified to a great extent
You can surely hire contractors independently all by yourself. However, it would not just be time-consuming to take interviews and shortlist candidates after scrutinising them, but can even get expensive gradually down the line.
This is where a staff augmentation specialised firm with a team of specialists can take away all your headache while simplifying the entire process by hiring experts the right fit for the job. Only a staff augmentation specialist firm with extensive experience in the field of HR can deliver the right manpower to you with an organised and systematic approach.
Just tell your partner about your staffing needs and they would handle the rest for you. All your outsourcing needs are taken care of by your staff augmentation partner who would hire state-of-the-art people onboard for you.
- Recruitment gets a solid accelerated boost
The team working at a staff augmentation firm has experience in recruiting both on-shore and off-shore people for years. A dedicated group of people working after the hiring process goes through a thorough process of screening potential staff starting from a background check to scheduling interviews, taking followups, conducting interviews, deciding on payroll, and finally placing them into the company.
- Augmentation is cost-effective compared to in-house
One of the biggest advantages a startup can avail with augmented staff is the flexibility of dispersed teams in terms of flex hours and flex pay. This way a startup does have all the freedom to scale up or down staff as and when required to do so while paying only on an hourly basis for the time augmented staff have worked for.
Imagine, paying the staff for days or even months together, without much things to do as per their job role, just because you have them on your payroll. With augmented staff in place, you have employees on payroll, but you are not bound by paying them unnecessarily even if they serve no purpose.
Since you have remote people working for you, there are no overhead expenses to expect, and more importantly, you have skilled staff from varied countries at low cost. Since you are not having a fixed salary to offer in place, you need not to worry about overhead expenses, or other benefits usually offered in a salary package.
- Hire skilled expertise instead of hiring randomly
So true, isn’t it? Most of the times you tend to hire irrelevant people in a hurry, without realising whether they would serve the purpose for the long term or not.
Staff augmentation is a practical solution when you need specific expertise just for a short term, and not planning to have them for a long time. Imagine, having people on payroll for job roles that last only for the short term, after which they aren’t required since the purpose is fulfilled.
- Have business turnaround time boosted
Since you have the augmented staff hired in no time, you can allow them their job roles and get them to start working upon their job responsibilities allowing you to stay ahead of your competitors. This not just result in quick design and development of a minimum viable product (MVP), but also a rapid release to market when compared with your competition.
- Expect top-notch quality with exceptional skills
When you have augmented staff in place, you are having a varied group of remote employees from across the globe with a range of skillsets that are sometimes rare or difficult to find when you do it all by yourself. Different projects need people with an extensive range of expertise that is not necessarily always there with in-house employees.
When having remote global employees, you have all the skills covered who can focus on projects of all complexities. With you doing it yourself, the recruitment process can take months, but with a staff augmentation firm, you can have them recruited in a matter of hours or days.
How Traditional Outsourcing differs from Augmented Staff Outsourcing
Both recruitment models might appear the same, but they do have a thin line of difference with not so similar delivery models to offer. Let us differentiate both and understand what startups mobile app development works best and when.
With a conventional outsourcing model in place, it is the complete responsibility of your outsourcing partner to execute the entire project without your intervention, while having complete control over it. Moreover, costs and outcomes are predefined in the Service Level Agreement (SLA) with no scope of alterations at any point in time.
This is not the case with staff augmentation outsourcing wherein the project control lies both with augmented staff and in-house staff so that project alterations be done as per the convenience and project requirements. Additionally, outcomes and costs are dynamic and decided as per the project scope, progress, manpower requirements, and running status.
When to opt for which outsourcing app development model? It’s best to hire augmented staff when time and cost factors are critical for business success, while if there are no-cost and time constraints it is best to outsource your project completely.
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