Staff augmentation is a form of hiring employees for a company or organization. In some situations, its use is more profitable than hiring employees. To use staff augmentation effectively, it is crucial to understand how it works, its inherent features, and its strengths and weaknesses.
What is IT staff augmentation?
Staff augmentation is temporarily using outside personnel to augment your organization's capacity. These developers are part of another company and work in compliance with all norms of labor law. The employer of such employees is a staff augmentation provider but not the one they are working for.
The staff augmentation provider pays these people their salaries, maintains the related personnel documents, arranges their work following labor legislation, and pays taxes on their behalf. However, they are working in the company that hired them.
Developers are actually involved in the performance of their employment duties. At the same time, the staff augmentation provider is paid all wage costs and the additional remuneration provided by the contract concluded between them.
Pros of Team Augmentation
When a company partners with an IT staff augmentation provider, it has access to top nearshore or global dev talent that it can hire and onboard quickly on an hourly paid basis.
Saving the cost of finding developers
Sometimes developers may be needed for a long time, while in other cases, finding a developer for a few weeks or months is necessary. An example of the latter is hiring a developer for the duration of an employee's pregnancy, vacation, or departure on an extended business trip.
When looking for new people, companies usually have to spend a lot of time, and there is no guarantee that the new candidate will have suitable qualifications and professional experience. With staff augmentation, there are no such problems. For example, at MaybeWorks, you can hire developers who meet the requirements. Moreover, we only offer developers that have shown their high expertise in our internal projects.
Reducing the workload of paperwork
When developers are normally hired, their work is accompanied by the maintenance of statutory personnel and accounting documentation. This work creates a significant burden on the relevant services of the company. When partnering with an IT staff augmentation provider, all the paperwork is handled by it.
The company has almost nothing to do with this side of the activity. You pay the amount stipulated in the agreement for each developer’s working hours. You are not responsible for the accuracy of calculations and paperwork following labor laws.
Reduced risks associated with inspections
When running a business, supervisory authorities carry out checks of the company's activities on a mandatory basis. In particular, compliance with the labor legislation provisions and bookkeeping accuracy is checked. IT staff augmentation provider does not expose your company to the risk of audit connected with the observance of the Labor Code provisions, the correctness of bookkeeping, and payment of remuneration.
There are no problems when hiring foreign developers
Sometimes companies need to use the labor of developers with foreign citizenship. Issues connected with their employment are regulated by migration law. When employing them, the established rules must be strictly observed. With IT staff augmentation, compliance with these rules is the responsibility of the IT staff augmentation provider.
You get an opportunity to use the work of foreign developers without focusing on the peculiarities of their registration for work.
What is the difference between staff augmentation and outsourcing?
There are significant differences between staff augmentation and outsourcing. The following are the most powerful of them:
- Level of independence. In the case of staff augmentation, developers work on the client side and under the client's control. In outsourcing, developers work independently. The client just is interested in getting the result of the work done.
- The payment is formed differently. The salary and the remuneration to the staff provider are paid in case of staff augmentation (involvement of developers). In the case of outsourcing, you pay for work performed, or service received (for result).
- The considered ways of activity have different purposes. The use of staff augmentation is aimed at the ability to hire qualified personnel quickly. If a company needs outsourcing, it wants to outsource part of its business processes to a company with the appropriate experience and qualifications.
Outsourcing and staff augmentation are pretty different from each other, both in their tasks and in the way they are performed.
With staff augmentation, the tenant firm enters into an agreement with an IT staff provider. No agreement is signed with the employee. Technically, you do not have any relationship with the employee other than a working one. The employee does work for the company but is formally subordinate to the staff augmentation provider.
We recommend you read our article comparing IT managed services vs staff augmentation.
When is IT staff augmentation used?
IT staff augmentation can be used in different situations, but it is most needed in the following cases:
- Suppose the urgent task is to reduce costs and free up labor resources. This situation often arises in small companies. The use of IT staff augmentation can significantly facilitate the development department's work and reduces the number of its employees.
- When the company can not achieve the goals with current developers due to cultural and communication issues or poor software quality.
- In some cases, the law establishes the requirements for the number of employees working in the company. Employees working under the rules of staff providers are not considered when determining the total number. Thus, the company actually uses additional developers but, at the same time, does not violate the relevant provisions of the law.
- When development work is carried out on a seasonal basis. In this case, developers are involved only for the needed time.
- Work that requires a long probationary period to determine the employee's professional suitability. Applying IT staff augmentation, it is possible to extend it as long as necessary.
- When a company is growing fast and looking for reliable developers to sustain the momentum.
IT staff augmentation, when used wisely, can effectively solve some of the problems a company faces. It is important to understand how IT staff augmentation works and when its use is effective. Most often, IT staff augmentation is used to find high-skilled developers.
MaybeWorks - reliable IT staff augmentation provider for your business
MaybeWorks is a team of full-stack web developers with an eye on a React/Node.js stack. We have 50+ developers onboard, each with a rich technical background. We are proud of developing hundreds of products using top-notch frameworks & libraries within the TypeScript/JavaScript tech stack. Our advantages:
- In-house team. We only propose services of the in-house developers who have verified their experience within our crew.
- Laser-focused specialization. All our internal processes are tailored to cultivate knowledge within the team and help our guys grow wider daily.
- Focus on communication. We are always in touch with our client: from the first contact till the project completion, to ensure that our cooperation is as fruitful as possible.
Feel free to contact us to discuss high-level staff augmentation of your development team.
