The average cost per hire for engineering positions is $4700, and it takes around 36-42 days to fill a position on average. As you can tell, the cost and the onboarding delay aren’t desirable.
Your organization may have a swift recruitment process, but it still takes a lot of time and resources to onboard a new employee. When you’re working under a time constraint and need to bring someone in as soon as possible, this system won’t do.
The solution, of course, is staff augmentation: A fast, efficient, and budget-friendly hiring process that can help you in more ways than one. But how does software dev team augmentation work?
Definition of Staff Augmentation
Staff augmentation can be defined as a highly flexible outsourcing strategy. It lets you hire high-professional tech talents for your team externally. With the staff augmentation method, you can have someone working full-time for you while skipping the necessary formalities for hiring a full-time employee.
Staff augmentation agencies offer you the necessary talents for your project on a contract basis, which usually lasts till the end of the product development cycle.
Software team augments procedure can be a big help when you’re trying to gather professional experts to complete a software project within a specific deadline. There are also other benefits, which we will discuss in detail.
Characteristics of Software Dev Team Augmentation Model
- It’s an on-demand service model
- Software team augmentation is available per hour/unit of service
- The hourly rates are very flexible and dependent on the type of work
- The services can be ramped up or down according to your project demands
- The augmentation merges with the dedicated team and works in the same flow
Different Types of Staff Augmentation Services
To summarize the information to make it more digestible, we’ll present a table with the different types of team augment methods and their purposes.
| Type | How It Works | Talent Type | Suitable Scenario | Advantage | Disadvantage |
| Traditional Staffing | The traditional method of a temporary augmentation | Skill-based/ Commodity | Regular projects where high skill isn’t mandatory | Flexible | Challenging to find high-skilled talents |
| Master Vendor Staffing | A single vendor operates a large-scale staffing operation | Commodity | High-commodity labor with low cost and scaling | Cost scaling is low | The quality of hires can be inconsistent |
| Boutique Staffing & Consulting Firms | Smaller firms that focus on specialized professionals | Skill-Based/ Highly-Skilled | Where you need highly talented professionals | Has higher quality | High overhead and expensive |
| Gig Platforms | Online platforms that work as a bridge to independent talents | Commodity/ Skill-Based | Task-based needs based on commodity | Flexible and fast | Difficult to distinguish talents because of a larger marketplace |
| On-Demand Talent Platforms | Online platforms that allow access to more specialized talents | High-Skilled | Skillful talents with rapid deployments | Flexible & can deliver quality with speed | Geographically distributed talents |
| Independent Relationships | Companies engage with Independent contractors | Skill-Based/ High-Skilled | To fill specific needs with the help of professionals | Low overhead and high quality | Tough to find reliable talents with whom you can maintain active relations with |
5 Scenarios When Dev Team Augmentation Is Most Preferred
Here are five scenarios when software dev augmentation can work in your favor.
1. Your Team Needs Reinforcements
If you’re trying to release a new product or software or design one for your clients, you may need more than your in-house developer team.
That’s when you need to bring in additional support to fill in the technical gaps of your team. With the new additions to your team, you can leverage your existing resources while finishing the project more efficiently.
2. You Need To Meet A Deadline
When you have a strict deadline to maintain, you don’t have extra time to spare for the entire recruitment process of a new staff member. Dev augmentation can save you time, and you can have the necessary members onboard to start working on the project as soon as possible.
3. Your Project Requires A Specific Set of Skills
Modern technology is frequently shifting, and it can be tough to keep up with all of them, even when you already have an in-house professional developer team.
With the software dev augment method, you can fill in your team’s gaps by bringing in experts on specific technologies.
4. You Want To Create A Bridge For Hire
When you bring in professionals to meet your short-term requirements, you can decide if they can benefit your team in the long run. If the performance of your augmented team is up to your expectation, you can hire them to be a part of your in-house team.
5. You’re Overwhelmed By The Seasonal Bumps
Any well-reputed software agency goes through seasonal crunch mode that consists of system upgrades, high-volume market seasons, or transition of existing projects. To handle the extra stress, you can take the help of dev augmentation methods to reduce the work pressure.
Key Benefits of Team Augmentation In Software Development
As you can see, different types of staff augment methods have different strong points. But still, let’s look at the general benefits across the board.
1. Your In-House Team Has No Skill Gaps
The staff augmentation model lets you hire based on your needs. When your team has certain gaps in skills and technical expertise, you can take the help of different staff augmentation models to fill in the gaps and enable your team to work in full force.
Instead of working on looking through resumes and other boring procedures, you get to work with people you need on your internal team right away.
2. You Only Pay For What You Need
Since you are hiring people temporarily, it can save you a lot of time and resources that you would use to hire a full-term employee. You only get to pay for the duration the contract is active, and you also get to save money on office resources and extra office space.
3. It Is A Great Time Saver
Think about all the steps of employing a full-time employee: creating job posts, looking through candidate resumes, interviews, HR, and other formalities. These can take up a lot more time than you think, even when you have a highly efficient recruitment system.
With staff augmentation, you can skip all the steps and onboard new members right after signing the contract with the staff augmentation provider you are looking to partner with.
4. You Have Direct Oversight On Your Workforce
If you outsource your software dev team, you are handing your work to an enterprising third party without any control over the workforce. On the other hand, with team augmentation, the additional members work as an extension of your team, which is completely under your control.
When you have creative control over your team, you get to prioritize the right options during product development to make the whole cycle more efficient.
5. You Can Find The Right Team Members Faster
Staff augmentation works in many different ways, and you have many different ways to choose the right talent for your team. That way, you can choose from a wide array of options, and you can add the right members to your team as soon as possible.
6. You Have Access To Top Talents
It’s very normal to have technological and experience gaps in your team. Sometimes, you may or may not have the financial scope to hire one. But you need to cooperate with them for a shorter duration to complete the project.
That’s where staff augmentation comes in. Hiring top talent may be highly expensive, but staff augmentation can get you access to the same level of talented individuals at a lower cost. As a bonus, you get the same level of efficiency as well.
7. You Save A Lot On Unnecessary IT Costs
There are a lot of additional costs associated with onboarding a full-time employee, a few of them including the following:
- Training costs
- Day-to-day operation costs
- Allowance
- Bonuses
- Office space
- Workstation
With staff augmentation, you only have to take care of the contract and fee while the vendor sets everything else up. It saves your cost and frees up your schedule to focus on other administrative duties.
8. You Ensure High Productivity
Whenever leveraging software dev team augmentation, you’re bringing in the additional workforce to focus on one task: current product development. The augmented team works as a dedicated team for product development, and it increases high productivity.
9.Your Team Has More Flexibility
You have much more flexibility in team building when you augment your team. You may not always need the same workforce you started with, and your contract gives you the freedom of upscaling or downscaling your team according to your needs.
Looking back to the benefit of “only pay for your need,” you don’t have to pay for the additional workforce if they aren’t required for product development.
10. Your IP Rights Are Secured
Your additional team is bound by contract to follow your non-disclosure rules. It protects your IP rights and confidentiality, as the team cannot reveal any information about the product to anyone else without facing legal issues. Securing the business with legal contracts saves your business from leaks.
How To Augment Your Software Development Team
Now that you know how beneficial software dev team augmentation can be for you, let’s get to know the steps.
Step #1: Define Your Goals
To ask your team to build something, you must know exactly what you want. Before you start looking for teams to hire, you need to define your product vision for proper operations management down the line.
When you know what you need to develop, you get an idea about whom you should hire to make the best of your product. Clearly define your goals so that every time a new member onboards, they have a clear idea of what they are signing up for.
Step #2: Pay Attention To Expert Opinions
When you bring in new team members, it’s not always about making the team bigger. It’s about bringing in expertise that can help the development and progress.
Sometimes, you may have someone in your team who comes in with vast experience and knowledge. When you have someone like that on your team, always ensure you are taking their advice in the count during the development phase.
Step #3: Identify Gaps In Your Team
Every development team in any business can have a skill gap. As a business owner, it’s up to you to identify those skill gaps if you want to complete the team by bringing in the missing pieces.
To get the best idea about your current standing, consult with your IT experts to get an estimation of their skills. Now, compare that to what you will need over the duration of the development cycle. And voila! You have a list of potential developers you need to onboard.
Step #4: Find The Right Agency To Partner With
Choosing the right staff augmentation partner is always a tough choice to make. There are many things to consider if you are looking to partner with an agency that can help you find the talents you are looking for.
Find and partner with a staff augmentation provider whose culture suits yours, has authentic credentials, and can offer you the talents you need to complete your team. The right team dynamic can propel your team forward even further in terms of progress.
A diverse team that doesn’t follow the generic rules of the status quo can open up new possibilities for innovation. It can also offer different transformative perspectives for your organization.
Step #6: Make Your New Members Feel At Home
No matter if your new augmented team is in-house or remote, you need to make them feel right at home, and here are a few ways to do it right:
- Maintain transparent communication practices with your team so that you are setting the right expectations for them.
- Create a collaborative environment with a mix of the right project management tools, soft skills, and efforts.
- Set up measurable goals and milestones with regular meetings.
- Arrange different team-building practices, so the bonding increases over time. It also paves the way for knowledge transfer between your extended team and in-house employees.
- Earn the trust of your new team members by knowing their hobbies and interests.
- Don’t get in the way of your team by being too bossy. Your team members are experienced professionals with the right tech talent, and they know what to do.
Downsides of Staff Augmentation
There are two sides to each coin, and we cannot talk about the highs without talking about the lows. Let’s look at some cons of staff augmentation solutions as well.
1. The Onboarding Process Can Become Challenging
The onboarding method doesn’t get much time when you’re doing staff augmentation, leading to emotional burnout of the employee/ employees you bring on board.
The employees need time to get used to the company culture and views, which doesn’t happen when the team is required to get to work right away.
2. Team Members Might Lack Motivation
An employed member can count on different bonuses provided by the company. An augmented employee doesn’t have access to these additional benefits unless the staffing agency provides them. As a result, they can feel left out.
This creates a lack of motivation among the additional staff. It creates a negative mindset in the workplace and defeats the core purpose of bringing in extra staff.
3. You Might Have Lower Accessibility
Modern staff augmentation depends a lot on remote work, which means you will not have direct supervision of the work being done by the team. That way, your accessibility is lowered.
You also have to wait longer to provide feedback and implement them in case your team is in a different time zone.
4. There Are Chances of Miscommunication
The difference in culture can mean different levels of effectiveness for the same management level. An individual’s culture affects how effective they are in different situations. This can cause a lot of potential issues during work.
A clash of cultures and miscommunication is a common issue when working remotely with professionals from different nations.
5. Some Projects Might Need A More Long-Term Solution
There are times when staff augmentation simply won’t work, and you need a proper, long-term solution in the form of a full-time employee.
Staff augmentation may be a cheap solution for short-term issues, but the costs can pile up quickly when working on long-term projects. It’s a good idea to assess your situation before determining what you’re looking for and then consider team augmentation methods for the in-house development team.
Is Dev Team Augmentation The Right Choice For You?
Despite the negatives, dev team augmentation is the fastest way for you to scale your team within a budget. But it depends on your company’s culture and your current needs.
Suppose you’re planning to work on a complex project that requires professional opinions and scrutiny. In that case, team extension can help you bring in the much-needed additional expertise.
Impala InTech’s Software Dev Team Augmentation Services
70% of organizations worldwide have a digital transformation strategy. This high rate is coming from everyone trying to adapt to the latest technology and trends to stay competitive and relative.
Recently, software dev team augmentation has moved beyond its infancy and is a great strategy for adapting to new trends by onboarding experts of current trends to work in tandem with the core team.
Impala InTech has a great in-house team that will take no time to integrate into your own. Our team is flexible enough to fit into different company cultures and structures, and we offer only the best to work with you on all your projects.
Contact us today, and let’s get working right away!
Staff augmentation is a method of outsourcing where you onboard additional team members without going through the recruitment process. The members are added on a short-term basis, and you can scale the team as needed.
Staff augmentation doesn’t require the long procedure of traditional recruitment practices. All you need to do is sign a contract with a staff augment agency, choose your team members, and get to work.
If a company has a project that needs to be completed within a short time, and the company needs expertise on board without spending time on recruitment. In that case, the company should consider staff augmentation.
Staff augmentation is mostly remote, so the biggest concern is the difference in time zones. It can affect reporting and work schedules, causing overall progress to become slower.
Yes, the main focus of staff augmentation is on short-term projects.
