Author: Hania Saleem, Jan 17, 2023
Blog
Your IT startup is well funded and ready to kick start delivering its promised result. Now the immense pressure to provide value in your services comes in to embark on solid grounds of brand positivity.
It is crucial for businesses to have only the finest talent picks in their teams to provide user-centric scalable solutions within a set budget.
Moreover, the talent shortage in the US is estimated to reach above and beyond making enterprises struggle with finding candidates that match their requirements in key IT positions.
With the difficulty in finding skilled and qualified IT candidates being more apparent than ever, businesses need to find resources that optimize efficiency and provide quality solutions.
This leads to an expensive and slow process of getting quality hires for businesses seeking to grow in order to sell market-leading IT services.
This is where businesses can get innovative and acquire IT staff augmentation to hire remote developers and build teams of expert at a global level.
Now that you have made a smart decision of augmenting resources, let us guide you on the importance and how you need to choose the best staff augmentation company for your business.
How to Choose the Best IT Staff Augmentation Company
Now that you have carefully looked into what are the consequences of choosing the wrong staff augmentation company for your business, let us walk you through how to choose the best one.
Following are a few easy and basic steps to choosing the best staff augmentation company for your staffing needs.
1. Company’s Reputation
When it comes to hiring staff through a third-party service provider, it is necessary to ensure the company is well-known to provide reliable and domain-experienced resources.
The company’s reputation can be analyzed through multiple facets including the positive references and testimonials from previous clients and successful projects completed.
Insights into the company's reputation are important to help you get provided with a strong pool of qualified and skilled IT professionals, get delivered high-quality services, meet your expectations, and build positive relationships.
The opposite can apply when a company has a bad reputation for delivering poor-quality services, failing to meet client expectations, or having negative relationships with clients.
This could lead to a higher risk of project delays, budget overruns, and other issues that can negatively impact your business.
2. Vet As Per Your Expected Quality Of Work
Put forth your expectations, and vet the companies strictly adhering to them. Discuss your bottom-line objectives, aspirations, and the time frame you want the result to start showing up.
This will help you analyze a realistic perspective of what you demand from your staff augmentation company and make it easier to sort the best one out.
Staff augmentation is all about increasing the quality of the work to remarkable levels at a cost-effective and efficient level compared to the traditional hiring procedure. The key to maximizing the benefit of this procedure is not to compromise on the potentially great quality of the work it can bring you.
3. Clear Contract
When choosing an IT staff augmentation company, it is important to have a clear and detailed contract in place that outlines the terms and conditions of the services being provided.
The contract should include the following key elements:
4. Scalability
Look for a company that can provide staff augmentation services on a flexible basis, such as project-based or part-time arrangements, to meet your changing needs.
This can include providing additional staff members to handle an increase in demand for IT services, or scaling back the number of staff members responding to fluctuations in demand.
Flexible staffing allows companies to manage costs and guarantee that they have the right number of IT personnel to meet their needs at any given time.
Additionally, a scalable IT staff augmentation agency allows companies to quickly respond to changes in technology and adapt their IT services accordingly. This can be especially important in industries that are rapidly evolving, such as technology and healthcare.
5.Wide Range Of Services
It's important to look for a company with a range of services when choosing an IT staff augmentation agency. This lets you determine if they are a good fit for your organization ensuring that the agency has experience providing support for a wide variety of IT domains.
Inclusive of specialized IT skills related to software development, such companies can provide broader IT services such as project management and IT consulting. By having a range of services, it can be easier for you to provide the right resources for a company's specific needs. While being a one-stop shop for IT support, a staff augmentation company with a full range of services can help you save time and money by avoiding multiple vendors.
Consequence To Choosing The Wrong Staff Augmentation Company
IT staff augmentation has gained immense popularity in the coming years as it allows a third-party provider to allocate businesses with quick and on-demand resources pre-vetted to exactly fit their talent shortage requirements.
However, choosing the right staff augmentation company to fill in your talent gaps promptly is important. Let us help you analyze the major number of negative consequences of choosing the wrong right staff augmentation service provider for your staffing needs.
1. Lack of expertise
It is highly evident that going for a staff augmentation company to provide you with the best talent requires you not compromise on the value they bring to optimizing your operations.
If you fail to choose the correct staff augmentation company you will most likely be provided with a staff that does not have the necessary skills or experience to complete the tasks at hand.
A lack of expertise can lead to poor results, and a waste of the invested time and money with an overall loss.
2.Misaligned goals
The service provider you avail from must have their goals strictly aligned with your company’s overall growth and revenue.
A successful and best staff augmentation company will ensure the providence of an optimal experience withstanding the dynamics of your project’s requirements and help you fill in the talent gaps with the right resource.
If the staff augmentation company you chose does not value its ratings and the overall experience they provide to its customers, your company goals are most likely to be ignored.
Misaligned goals happen when the staff augmentation company's priorities do not align with yours. This leads to conflicts between the two companies, wastage of time, and second-guessing future investments.
3.Poor communication
Poor communication is the key to the majority of the business operation failing to attain the successful output it requires.
To maintain swift delivery and empower a highly collaborative team engagement, healthy communication with everyone working on the same page is necessary.
Without effective communication channels in place, it can be difficult to coordinate and collaborate with the staff provided by the company.
4.High turnover rate
The dedicated staff brings dedicated growth. Employee turnover is closely related to hiring entry-level employees with values and goals that do not align with your desired results.
If you have chosen to acquire tech services through an IT staff augmentation company, you will expect dedicated developers to find the ideal solution for your company.
Staff provided by the company may not be fully invested in the project and may leave, causing disruptions to the project and additional costs for replacement staff.
5.High cost
Opting for a staff augmentation agency is an investment your startup or an enterprise with a shortage of employees looks for.
When the company you chose does not bring the return on investment (ROI) you had planned, it will lead to a money loss to what you anticipated.
Moreover, if the company charges high rates, it may be more expensive than hiring and managing staff in-house.
6.Security Risks
Your company data is confidential and the staff augmentation company you picked must have a proper NDA ( Non-Disclosure Agreement) signature policy to be adhered with.
The external team may not have the same level of security clearance or access as your internal team and could cause security breaches of sensitive information.
Key Takeaways
No doubt a staff augmentation company can provide you with a cost-effective solution for increasing your workforce, as you only pay for the needed resources on a project-by-project basis, rather than committing to long-term hires.
However, choosing the right staff augmentation company is significantly important to get your invested money’s worth.
It ensures that you have access to highly skilled and experienced professionals who can deliver the quality of work needed to meet your business objectives.
There are plenty of options if you want to hire a third-party development team to assist your startup.
Although finding the right talent can be challenging, a trustworthy partner can add real value to your business if you look for them based on the right criteria.
FAQ’s
1.What is IT staff augmentation?
IT staff augmentation is the process of hiring additional IT professionals to supplement an organization's existing IT staff. This can be done on a temporary or long-term basis to address a specific project, skill shortage or increase in workload.
2.What is the purpose of using IT staff augmentation?
IT staff augmentation is used to address specific project needs, skill shortages or an increase in workload. It allows organizations to quickly and efficiently bring in specialized skills or additional resources as needed, without the need to make a long-term commitment.
3.What are the benefits of IT staff augmentation?
IT staff augmentation can be exceptionally effective for businesses seeking flexible resources with the ability to scale up or down as required. It is a hands-down cost-effective method of reducing the overhead cost associated with hiring perments staff.
4. What are the key steps in selecting an IT staff augmentation provider?
When selecting an IT staff augmentation provider, it is important to consider the major factors of the company’s experience and track record in providing IT staff augmentation services. The company should have a profound ability to understand your specific needs, ability to scale up or down as needed, provide transparency with communication throughout the engagement and provide qualified staff accordingly.