4 Tech Challenges Solved by Staff Augmentation

According to recent research conducted by Cornerstone OnDemand, talent shortages are the top concern for executives across all industries.  In fact, nearly half of employers surveyed placed skills and talent shortages within their top three most urgent concerns. Post COVID, all industries have faced a significant shift in the way they have to conduct business. One of the primary ways companies have adapted is by taking advantage of the benefits of staff augmentation. 

As described by TechTarget, staff augmentation is one of the outsourcing models that allow for hiring tech talent and managing distributed teams. For example, let’s say you need to develop a critical new app that calls for a team of four developers and two UX designers. If you only have one developer and one designer in-house, then finding and hiring three in-house developers and another UX designer can easily take 3-6 months.  This wasted recruiting time postpones the launch of your app and may allow competitors to seize the advantage.

However, there are many strong reasons for considering staff augmentation options.  Capital Counselor research shows that often the primary driver of outsourcing was a decrease in cost. Another 40% of the businesses outsourced to have added flexibility and another 20% cited increased speed to market.

Staff augmentation is an easy way to scale up and reinforce your in-house development team while also remaining in control of the process.  This unmatched flexibility can also benefit your internal team members by introducing best practices and increasing diversity of perspectives within the team.

Taking all this into consideration, let’s explore some ways in which FortyAU has successfully aided their clients by implementing staff augmentation.

Done correctly, staff augmentation offers numerous benefits for businesses of all shapes and sizes.  Ideally, you can create diverse, flexible teams that combine your best in-house SMEs along with outside technical expertise.

In addition to skipping the laborious recruiting and hiring process, you also retain flexibility to scale-up or scale-down the team in a compassionate manner as your business dictates.  Staff augmentation is also an excellent option for short-term (ie. 6-9 month) projects that require dedicated expertise but not necessarily full-time employees.  

The four most common challenges we hear from our clients include:

1. Save time – we cover sourcing, hiring, and onboarding.
   1. Having over 100 developers on-staff allows us to get the proper resource without spending weeks or months in the recruiting, interviewing, and hiring process. 
   2. We are able to spin up a full scrum team in just 3-4 weeks from contract execution.
2. Find passionate developers – We attract the best talent because we are focused on quality of culture and developer employee experience.
   1. In today’s employment market, FortyAU has been able to maintain a 95% retention rate for our employees. We foster a culture of learning and personal growth in every FortyAU employee. 
3. Protect you from hiring risks such as culture mismatch and attrition.
   1. Every company or team has its own culture. We do everything possible to ensure our assigned developers are an excellent fit for your group. In the off chance that there is a misalignment, we work with your team to find the right fit.
4. Contain unnecessary spend – developers are only on the project when they are needed.
   1. We can ramp up and down as needed with no penalties for early termination.
   2. Our developers can also be assigned to your team on a part-time basis if needed for light support or consulting.  We can also provide developers for any duration you would like – everything from a few days to months/years. 

IT staff augmentation is a cost-effective alternative for businesses to hire external talent in the shortest possible time. It not only helps in the specific talent-related scenarios but further provides business benefits as follows:

• Pick the staff with the relevant skill set, seamless communication ability, and capability to adopt new changes with ease.
• Get hands-on experience with emerging technologies and industry-related products fully matching your requirements.
• Hire the developers temporarily, especially during current projects in progress or those facing near-term deadlines.
• Eliminate monotony within the existing team of designers, testers, and developers. Bring freshness to the team and start thinking out of the box.
• Bring industry diversity to the in-house team by bringing external talent who already worked for other verticals and assisted in numerous project successes

The IT industry continues to rapidly expand with no sign of slowing down anytime soon. Enterprises are looking for agile ways to start and deploy software development projects with utmost efficiency. Counting on the staff augmentation model of external hiring is beneficial to get the desired talent for a long or term period swiftly. Let’s connect to see how the experience at FortyAU can strategically benefit your company.