What Is Staff Augmentation? How Can It Benefit Your Business? Guide (2023)

Are you looking for ways to scale your team and business efficiently? Staff augmentation is a cost-effective solution that can help you do just that. In this complete guide, you’ll learn everything about staff augmentation and how it can benefit your business.

1. What is staff augmentation?

Staff augmentation is a contractual outsourcing service meant to complement the existing in-house team with skilled external expertise. It’s a solution that has become increasingly popular in today’s uncertain business landscape, where companies are looking for more cost-effective ways to find top talent.

Today, global uncertainty is forcing businesses to adapt and consider more cost-efficient ways of not only doing business, but finding top talent. Founders, CEOs, and execs are also much more conscious than ever about how they spend their time. They want to spend most of their time on income-generating tasks and anything that can be outsourced and taken care of.

Outsourcing the management of business processes is becoming much more digital—and potentially much more powerful for buyers and providers willing to engage more strategically and collaboratively. The rise of remote work as well as aided in this, businesses know that with all the new collaboration and communications tools, they are not ‘boxed-in’ when it comes to hiring and talent acquisition anymore.

2. Advantages of staff augmentation?

Fresh Perspective and objective assessment

When you bring in someone skilled to supplement your in-house team, they bring in a fresh perspective on things and an objective assessment of ongoing operations. This can often be a key catalyst for a change in productivity for the team. This is their job in a sense, they are being tasked to come in and perform or do a specific job that nobody else can.

Simplified HR and recruitment process

Unlike traditional hiring and recruiting processes, staff augmentation is much simpler, faster and straightforward. You are able to agree on flexible payment terms (per hour, weekly). Also in most cases, potential candidates are presented to you for hire in 3-5 days. On average, it takes 2-3 months to recruit and onboard for full-time roles.

Access to highly specialized skills

One of the main advantages of staff augmentation is access to the highly specialized skills that you need most. Unlike traditional hiring where you sometimes need to train and upskill employees for a couple of months after onboarding, team augmentation allows you to bring in highly skilled professionals that are proving to be much more productive.

Cost saving without sacrificing quality

This is perhaps the biggest benefit of choosing to augment your team. If full-time specialists’ employment is outside of your plans and budget, then an outsourcing service provider can match you with specialists worldwide at a comparatively lower price.

Experienced mid and senior-level professionals

By working with an outsourcing service provider to augment your team, you get to access a global pool of talent including mid and senior-level professionals. These professionals do not need much time to adjust since they already have the experience you’re looking for. They can therefore come in and get to work on the project immediately.

Increased flexibility helps you save time and money

The ability to hire on a contractual basis for the project you need help with can save you a lot of time and money. These professionals come in immediately and you are only hiring for hours worked and not incurring costs on office space and equipment since they work remotely.

Opportunity for Growth and Adaptability

Flexible hiring allows startups to expand their operations on a trial basis without committing to a full-time workforce and risking failure and investment loss, especially in the current economic climate. Augmentation services provide startups and other businesses with the alternative of hiring on a project basis as they evaluate market acceptance.

How do you choose the right staff augmentation model for you?

Many businesses use different companies at a time depending on their needs. While considering going the augmentation route, it’s always important to consider your business needs and goals.

So when is staff augmentation right for you? Here are a couple of things to consider:

1. Project length – Augmentation services can help to meet the demands of an organization in unique ways. Still, it’s not a perfect solution in every scenario. Staff augmentation is typically best utilized in shorter-term projects, as opposed to long-term projects, which require months or years to complete. It could still make sense for an enterprise to engage a contingent worker on longer projects. In this case, an outsourcing arrangement would be a better option than a staff augmentation model. Often, staff augmentation providers are willing to negotiate such agreements.
2. When you are looking for high-level skills – Augmentation services can be right for you when you are in need of highly skilled individuals to come in as soon as possible. Experienced or senior-level software engineers are the best example here. It’s a faster and more straightforward way to adapt an adept engineer to the project’s working ambience.

What are some of the challenges of staff augmentation?

We can’t forget to mention some of the challenges facing companies, which come with every operation model. 

• Language barrier – With access to global talent, the challenge of language and communication arises. You might find the best senior data analyst for your business or startup in terms of skill but he or she might not speak the language you need or not fluently enough.
• Time difference – As with language, the time difference is also another challenge that comes with global talent sourcing. Although some companies don’t mind, other companies prefer to have their team operating within the same time zone with 1 to 2 hours being the most acceptable difference.
• Security – Another major challenge of staff augmentation is security, specifically data security since businesses are engaging with third parties. This can always be navigated with non-disclosure and patent clauses when signing contracts.

Example

Here is a staff augmentation example for your better understanding: You have an internal customer management system you wish to update, but your current team doesn’t have the necessary specialists or experience to re-engineer such a product. So you contact a recruiting agency so that you don’t have to go through the traditional recruiting process of creating a job post, sourcing, vetting and onboarding.

Types of staff augmentation

There are three main types of staff augmentation:

• Skill-based – This type demands a specific skill set, like data processing, clerical work, basic copywriting, transcription, etc., but the relevant skill is not essential.
• Commodity – You demand a reliable employee to conduct tasks, like warehouse work, events, retail, or manual labour, but not a specific skill set.
• Highly skilled – You need highly advanced skills, like contract law, software engineering, and brand design, that you can get only through experience or training. A level of skill is also needed.

Bringing in experienced and skilled personnel quickly and with flexibility allows your business to keep scaling efficiently.

3. Conclusion

In brief, staff augmentation is a flexible and cost-effective solution for organizations looking to scale their teams and businesses effectively. While there are some challenges to consider – such as language barriers and data security, the benefits of bringing in experienced and skilled personnel quickly and with flexibility cannot be ignored. Whether you need a specific skill set or highly advanced skills, staff augmentation can provide the support your business needs to grow and adapt

Superbhire helps you source and augment your staff or team with skilled professionals that match your exact needs. Are you about to start a new project, do you have a job that you need to take care of as soon as possible to help you focus on more income-generating tasks? Get in touch with us today!