Technical Team Augmentation: Best Practices with Outstaffing Approach

There are so many factors to think about when scaling the tech team — how will the professionals collaborate? What are the communication tools? How to set up all the IT processes correctly? These are just a few of the questions that have to be answered during software development team augmentation.

What is tech team augmentation?

Tech teams augmentation, also known as IT staff augmentation or IT outstaffing, is the processing of outsourcing the hiring process to a third party — an outstaffing partner, a recruitment agency, or professional headhunters. It is usually used by the companies that want to tap into new job markets or save resources on time- and effort-consuming hiring processes.

When is tech team augmentation right for business?

There are several points in time, when tech staff augmentation becomes the best decision for businesses:

• Your in-house team is overloaded

• There is a tech talent shortage in the market already covered by the business

• You need to cut down on hiring and operational costs

• You need to cut down on hiring and operational costs

• Looking for new tech professionals becomes too much to bear

• You want to fully control your project, as the main staff augmentation vs. consulting difference is in levels of control you have over a project. When you opt for staff augmentation, you get specialists who are the extension of your own team and manage them directly, flexibly changing the project scope if needed. When you collaborate with a consulting firm, you tell them what to do and wait for a result. In such a case, more rounds of approval and signing of additional contracts may be required.

Apart from making the hiring process easier, software team augmentation has numerous benefits.

Benefits of Outstaffing as a Tech Team Augmentation Approach

Companies that reap the benefits of IT outstaffing model, typically, become more competitive and their chances to increase ROI become more appealing.

Flexibility

96% of professionals say they need flexibility in their workplace. Businesses are no different — from a small startup to a unicorn enterprise, they want their conditions of tech staff augmentation to be flexible, swift, and efficient.

In this case, tech recruitment and staffing services can become a perfect solution because HR experts providing such services can:

• Relieve their client from looking for and interviewing countless candidates

• Look for different candidates simultaneously without feeling the pressure

• Deliver results as fast as needed

Partnering up with an outstaffing or a recruitment partner is one of the best practices of developers team augmentation, as it allows companies to expand their teams without losing resources.

Access to unique knowledge

We are sure you’ve faced recommendation algorithms on Facebook and YouTube. You can already review the products in virtual reality on the Apple and Lamborghini websites. The AI market is growing by more than 20% each year because businesses are actively incorporating AI in their operations. Along with that, the threat to privacy and the demand for niche specialists are growing.

Video game combat designers, ethical hackers, data modelers, and geospatial technology professionals — these are unique tech professionals that require unique skills and knowledge. Regular developers, engineers, or designers simply will not be successful in these positions.

Attracting candidates for tech team roles, including unique and complicated positions, will benefit from the tech team augmentation approach.

If you have a reliable HR partner, they:

• maintain a talent base full of candidates with innovative skills and ability to deliver commercial results;

• seek candidates from different countries, as it is a proven approach to find the one who ticks all the boxes.

This way, tech teams augmentation provides some of the best candidates on the market.

Cost control

One full-stack developer in the USA can cost up to $116 thousand a year. The same specialist, hired with the help of the recruitment agency in, for example, Eastern Europe, can cost anywhere from $48 to 80 thousand per year.

By providing global candidate sourcing, technical staff augmentation agency can help businesses save a colossal amount of funds and reach the desired results in the shortest time.

Loyal team

The main rule of a smoothly running team is to engage specialists with matching soft skills. Different soft skills for different teams.

In an R&D team tasked with exploring novel solutions, team members need to think outside the box. While in a technical support team, creativity and innovation may be less critical than a skill to follow the established procedures and stress-resistance. There are teams, where you need to be sociable because everyone is sociable there. In other teams, teammates who prefer written communication are valuable.

If you take people’s characters into consideration and hire specialists with the right soft skills, they, most likely, will like everyday project life and stay with you as long as needed. So, we always clarify which kind of humans not only specialists our client look for and bring such humans to a client’s team accordingly. Moreover, we arrange milestone talks with hired specialists to sync with their vision of a project life as it can change over time.

Reduced administrative burden

Many business owners would say that this benefit of IT team augmentation is the greatest one. Managing tax accounting and payrolls or processing vacations for specialists takes a lot of time and requires special knowledge. It’s especially burdensome if your team is international, and you need to stick to custom HR protocols for different countries. Here, professional staffing comes in and takes over all the administrative routine as if by magic.

5 Working Tips for Successful Tech Team Augmentation

1. Set clear reasons for software development team augmentation

First and foremost — the business needs have to be clear. There can be no ambiguity and doubt. Answer the following questions:

• What do you want to achieve by augmenting the team?

• How many people do you need for the team to be complete?

• What is the team’s budget?

• What milestones does the team have to hit to be successful?

Clear goals are a must for any project. But when it comes to expanding your team with new members and professionals, the answer should be formed clearly.

2. Scale the team as needed

Tech staff augmentation best practices can efficiently scale your team. So, do not hesitate to use it to its fullest — be sure to scale the team when needed. This way, your project will never fall behind, and the goals will always be hit on time.

3. Research recruiting agencies

81% of consumers research the product they want to purchase online prior to buying it. With team augmentation being more important than buying a new smartphone, businesses need to be as dedicated and diligent towards choosing their recruitment partner as the regular consumer would be to an online shop.

For an IT staff augmentation process to go by smoothly:

• Ask for references — a professional recruitment agency with a squeaky-clean reputation is likely to provide you with their references themselves.

• Do not hesitate to request a call with the CEO — professional Chief Executive and Integration Officers will gladly take you through the processes to make sure every client is ready to stay with them.

• Find the right balance — do not rush the decision-making process and do not stall either. Find a sweet spot between a thorough research and a just-on-time decision.

Proper research is one of the most crucial steps towards a proper technical team augmentation.

4. Prepare to communicate your needs

“I need a developer” — this is not a clear and helpful request to present to a recruitment agency or an outstaffing partner. To properly communicate your needs, assess:

• Project goals and deadlines

• Exact list of specialists needed to achieve success

• Necessary hard skills, aka tech stack, for each specialist you’re planning to engage in your project

• Preferred soft skills, aka attention to detail, ability to explain complex concepts to a team or to deliver results without micro-mentoring, etc.

• Possible tweaks the team might require along the way

• Full- or part-time team involvement.

5. Think architecture, not headcount

To make the most of technical team augmentation, focus on structured workflows, scoped sprints, and clear quality metrics. Lock in budgets around deliverables, not hours, to stay in control and scale smoothly.

Embrace the Best Practices for Developers Team Augmentation With Outstaff Your Team

Requirements Clarification

We at Outstaff Your Team know how to communicate with both businesses in need of tech teams and the candidates for the jobs correctly. We know how to ask the right question and like to dive deeper into the business needs to find just the right fit for any position. This helps us fill tech positions of any difficulty with ease and right on time.

International and Personalized Hiring

We seek candidates within 30+ locations to spot the most matching skill sets for our clients’ projects. We conduct unique interviews for each position we need to fill. This is key to smoothly running team.

Systemic Updates

We provide the necessary reports about candidates for team roles. We are always online to help our tech teams integrate to our clients’ projects with ease. It is like having a first-class HR department at hand.

Ongoing Talent Management

We provide full-cycle HR services, from handling payrolls and vacations to milestone talks. This removes an administrative burden from our clients’ shoulders.

Interested? Connect with us via [email protected], and we’ll be happy to help you select the best tech candidates for the job.

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