Staff augmentation has become a mainstream practice globally, with over $500 billion in annual expenditure in filling the talent gaps and optimizing in-house development and marketing teams.
The practice of resource augmentation became prominent back in the early 2000s in the USA and Europe. Moreover, this practice gained immense popularity within a decade in regions like the Middle East and Asia due to its countless benefits.
Today, around 75% of businesses leverage staff augmentation to strengthen their internal teams, meet deadlines, and promptly fill talent gaps. These numbers are even higher in the technology sector, with almost 90% of global technology companies using staff augmentation services to enhance the capabilities of their internal teams.
This blog is a comprehensive guide to resource augmentation services. It will cover areas like definition, use cases, and benefits of staff augmentation.
So without further ado, let’s get started.
What is Staff Augmentation?
Staff augmentation helps enhance the capabilities of in-house teams to cater to deadlines and urgent tasks more efficiently. It’s an alternative to outsourcing projects to third parties, allowing fast-paced companies to promptly fill the talent gaps and cater to the ever-changing needs of their clients.
Staff augmentation is an intermediary phase between permanent hiring and outsourcing. This approach enables businesses to onboard highly-skilled professionals to work alongside their internal teams to meet deadlines and improve workflow.
Let’s take the example of a mobile app development in Dubai. As the epicenter of technology and innovation, Dubai has always been in need of experienced IT professionals for a decade or two. Today, however, businesses in Dubai are leveraging IT staffing services to promptly fill the talent gaps and fuel their growth with the help of global talent.
3 Use Cases of Staff Augmentation Services
Staff augmentation services can help you transform your business if you want to:
Optimize your In-house Team
Staff augmentation enables businesses to enhance the capabilities of their internal teams by onboarding skilled professionals on a contract basis to work alongside them.
Staff augmentation should be your go-to choice if you are an entrepreneur looking to strengthen your in-house team to manage tasks more effectively.
Meet Short-term Deadlines
Staff augmentation helps businesses cater to a broader clientele without compromising the quality of work or delaying the work past the deadline.
Staff augmentation can help entrepreneurs manage temporary projects they don’t usually entertain without hiring permanent resources or outsourcing them to third parties and potential competitors.
Experiment on Ideas
Staff augmentation enables entrepreneurs to fuel their ambitions and invest in their ideas without compromising on the stability of their businesses.
Entrepreneurs looking to create new avenues of revenue in their existing businesses or try out different ideas in their domain can really benefit from using resource augmentation services.
For instance, a custom software development Dubai looking to enter the game development arena can set up a dedicated team of remote game developers in Dubai to fuel their ambition. And if the plan does not work, the company can close its game development operations at any given time without prior notice to the team.
Why do Businesses Prefer Staff Augmentation Services?
With remote work becoming globally acceptable post-covid, staff augmentation has become the preferred method for employers. Hiring permanent employees to fill loopholes in product development or work on temporary/short-term projects can trigger financial instability. Moreover, recruiters have reportedly faced issues onboarding highly skilled and experienced profiles merely to fill the talent gaps due to job insecurity.
Here are the three most prominent reasons why staff augmentation is so effective today:
Flexibility
Staff augmentation helps entrepreneurs fuel their ambitions of achieving exponential growth and scalability without going the extra mile. It enables them to cater to a broader network and deliver more projects on time without compromising the quality and risking the stability of the businesses via excessive hiring.
With staff augmentation, businesses can scale their teams as per their needs without requiring them to make long-term commitments involved with permanent hiring.
Swift Recruitment
Staff augmentation makes recruitment effortless and convenient. Unlike hiring permanent employees, IT staffing does not require recruiters to spend months prospecting candidates, shortlisting the ideal profiles, and conducting a series of interviews and tests to finally onboard them. Instead, businesses can contact IT staff outsourcing companies and choose the ideal candidate from a vast pool of global talent.
Affordability
Staff augmentation services are surprisingly more affordable than it seems. Besides recruitment costs, infrastructure costs (for remote workers), and many other apparent cost-saving aspects, businesses can save thousands (and even millions) in other traits like insurance coverage, 401k, paid time off, etc. In this context, nearshore staff augmentation emerges as a strategic option, offering businesses the advantages of geographical proximity and cultural alignment, along with significant cost savings compared to traditional staffing methods.
Businesses do not get bound to stick to permanent employment contracts and can scale up or down depending on their needs.
Wrapping Up…
Simply put, staff augmentation is the ultimate solution to optimizing internal teams, accelerating workflow, and promptly filling temporary talent gaps without compromising quality.
The practice of IT staff augmentation has become mainstream. If you are not leveraging staffing services to fuel your business, you are missing out on plenty of options to scale your business with sustainability.
