Staff augmentation is the practice of bringing extra personnel for some or all of your business’s projects. Whether they’re small scale or large projects, there are many options for you to choose from. In essence, you get contingent staff from a third party vendor. However, you get to personally choose all staff that you want, and you’ll manage them directly.
The benefits of staff augmentation become apparent very fast, regardless of your industry’s nature. Sure, big and booming industries like IT or digital marketing are the obvious niches for temporary staff. However, the increasing need for highly qualified and vetted staff in other fields of work have made staff augmentation a universal option.
For example, we provide on-demand expert developers for mobile apps, but you can find contingent personnel for many jobs: sales, HR, customer service, operations, R&D, manual labor, finance, you name it!
Here Are The Top 10 Staff Augmentation Benefits
The exact advantages you’ll get from using staff augmentation will also depend on the specifics of your business, but the general ideas are the same. You have a sudden increase in workload, a project or job is too complicated for your existing staff, you need a temporary boost in productivity, etc.
Of course, you can also choose the managed services route, but that’s another topic in itself. Make sure to read our guide on which option is best for your business!
For now, let’s get into the top advantages of SA.
1. It’s a better financial option
If hiring full-time employees is your go-to solution for temporary boosts in workload, you’ll quickly see it’s not a cost-effective one.
Not only are you spending key resources (time & money) on finding qualified candidates, but you also have to onboard the one you select. Then, you have one-time costs like needed equipment for the job, but also monthly costs like their salary and insurance.
If your managers forecast that another employee will end up costing you more revenue than they’ll be generating, look no further than staff augmentation.
By using a talent on-demand platform, you’re given a list of candidates that you get to choose from. These are people that have already performed the type of jobs you require of them, so you don’t need to spend any time on training.
You just pay an hourly rate (to the talent agency) for the agreed upon work, and that’s it.
2. It’s suited to both short-term and long-term
At Five Pack, we’ve been working with some of our best clients for years. There’s no need to think of staff augmentation as just a “quick fix” for staff shortages.
You can easily find a few specialists that fit nicely with your pre-existing full-time team, and have them join your organization for lengthy timeframes. You keep paying the same hourly rate, you don’t have to worry about turnover rate, and their extensive experience will be a constant plus for your in-house team.
Additionally, in the unlikely scenario that the augmented staff isn’t a great fit anymore, you can just change them for someone else. No contractual commitments required!
3. It gives you flexibility
Onboarding a new employee and getting them set up for the upcoming work is a complex process. It also involves a lot of paperwork. What’s more, if the employee is actually turning out to be a bad hire, firing them is not easy either. It’s a task that can actively stop members of your HR team from doing anything else.
With staff augmentation, this problem doesn’t exist. If contingent staff are bringing you value, you keep working together. If they stop bringing you value, you stop paying and end the collaboration.
4. It gives you control
Temporary staff is brought in for specific tasks. You don’t have to pay them for a broader skill set, just for exactly what you need them to do. Whether this is writing code, training your team, doing keyword research, doing a UX audit for your website, etc., it doesn’t matter.
You also get to directly manage all of your contingent personnel, and they have to abide by the same rules as your in-house teams. Think of augmented staff as an extension of your employees, for which you don’t have to pay any benefits or training costs.
5. It lets you scale your business easily
With staff augmentation, your hiring costs are cut completely. You have full access to the top talent provided by your vendor, from which you can pick & choose whenever.
You can increase or decrease your team size on a project-by-project basis, allowing flexible scalability with only a few emails or phone calls. This lets you take on as many projects as you want, without sacrificing quality.
6. It brings in an outside view
By collaborating with outside personnel, you can avoid tunnel vision. Permanent staff will invariably get tangled up in a few inefficiencies your company might have, but the likelihood of anything changing fast isn’t that great.
When you bring in a fresh pair of eyes, they’ll be adept at spotting what you might be doing wrong, what’s negatively affecting your ROI, what procedures can be improved.
7. It improves operations
The bigger your organization gets, the more rules and procedures you must have in place. This is also costly when you’re just starting out, as everything must be put in place perfectly.
Unless you need manual labor, staff augmentation gives you unrestricted access to remote personnel, cutting operational costs.
No equipment costs, no need to assure a safe working space, no insurance, just a higher return on investment.
8. It highly increases your talent pool
Sometimes, the hardest part about recruiting is actually finding candidates. The more complex the job, the longer it takes to find someone that’s both a specialist, and a good fit for your corporate culture.
When you work with an augmented staff provider, you get an immediate list of candidates that fit all parts of your criteria. Yes, it’s that easy!
9. It helps nurture your in-house team
While we’re big supporters of the advantages of staff augmentation, it should be noted that it’s also important to have a core in-house team. They’re the foundation on which you can build temporary personnel.
They provide the relevant project information, specifics, and requirements to the experts that you add to your business.
At the same time, the higher skill ceiling of your augmented staff presents a constant learning opportunity for your core team. It’s a great, profitable, self-adjusting balance.
If you don’t have an in-house team though, you can still choose custom and outsourced development services.
10. You eliminate biases
Provisional staff isn’t subject to in-house “politics”. They’re not affected by who likes who, they don’t focus on multiple projects or tasks at once. While they’re still under your direct management, the potentially limiting nature of certain processes or procedures don’t apply to them.
They’re simply there to get a job done. And, thanks to the fact that you don’t have to onboard them or fit them into a permanent team, the chances of acquiring productivity impairing biases are low.
Need Augmented Staff For Mobile Apps?
We’ve been providing top talent to our clients for 10+ years, some of them being Fortune 1000 companies.
If you want to build an impressive and profitable mobile app, we’re the ones to get in touch with. Our experts are the right people for your business, no matter the industry your app will target.
We have developers, UX/UI specialists, project managers, QA engineers, scrum masters, and everything in between that you can hire for your staff augmentation purposes.
Let’s talk today about building something great together.
