Businesses of every kind are moving toward more innovative and flexible approaches to hiring talented professionals. The emergence and growing popularity of “hybrid teams” that integrate full-time and independent workers represent one of the major developments in this shift. Succeeding in key initiatives by taking advantage of this flexible workforce trend means your company is no longer committed to outdated modes of hiring.
Experts often refer to these approaches as “staff augmentation,” and the advantages of these strategies have generated particular interest in certain fields. Understanding the pros and cons of staff augmentation can protect your business during uncertain markets. The ability to bring on or let go of talent in a seamless, pre-established way equates to substantial cost savings.
One area where staff augmentation can be especially helpful is in IT, where skill requirements and talent competition are typically quite intense. Below you’ll find a review of an IT staff augmentation strategy and the benefits it can deliver for virtually any organization.
Staff augmentation strategy: Flexible access to technical talent
The widespread need for tech talent has inspired companies to find creative and fluid ways to hire IT talent. In a field experiencing increasing immediacy as more and more companies embrace remote work tactics, competition for qualified tech talent ramps up every day.
Depending on your company’s explicit needs, any number of the diverse staff augmentation approaches gaining traction in the tech sector may serve your business best. Many companies outsource technical functions or utilize staffing agencies. However, remote talent platforms such as Upwork provide a more flexible and cost-effective option.
Upwork is in a unique position to provide a source of global IT talent that can mold any company’s existing team setup or even serve as the springboard on which to build new teams. In the following section, the benefits of IT staff augmentation will be explained in more detail.
The benefits of staff augmentation for your IT team
Never before has the success of most businesses rested so powerfully on agility. The ability to adapt, pivot, and meet client demands as rapidly as they change is now the calling card of survival through and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.
Time is the most critical factor that impacts a project, so the typical three-week turnarounds associated with traditional outsourcing models like staffing agencies will not cut it. Going digital with staff augmentation means cutting out the middleman and allowing for growth, even where margins are lean.
The following represent some of the key benefits of IT staff augmentation.
Reduce training and payroll costs
As any business leader knows, the expenses associated with screening, hiring, and training new workers can be astronomical. Many companies now find themselves in need of talented tech professionals but are working with hiring funds diminished from previous years.
Choosing digital staff augmentation as an outsourcing model eliminates these costs and the substantial and equivalent time costs that usually come with onboarding new team members.
As independent tech professionals typically work on a contractual basis, this means your company saves whatever funds would have been earmarked for full-time employee benefits.
Accelerate the hiring process
With the remote work landscape and project development processes changing daily, no one has time to waste when it comes to hiring. You can accelerate the onboarding of qualified professionals when you get rid of the time it takes to search for them.
Letting Upwork find skilled talent for you means that your new IT team member arrives pre-vetted and can add professional insights to current projects in the time it used to take just to create a shortlist of candidates.
Access specialized talent for current projects
Maybe your business was not even passively digital before the changes brought by this unprecedented year, and now you find yourself in need of IT staff augmentation in professional categories you’re unfamiliar with.
Do you have a sudden need for a graphic designer? Finding and hiring that worker in a simple and efficient manner means current projects don’t stall out, potentially costing you customers and revenue while you search.
One of the major perks of a flexible staff augmentation strategy is that it allows you to seek the perfect worker for a given job. And neither they nor you must commit to any longer-term collaboration. Ultimately, this allows a management team to build a group of professionals they want for each project.
Locating and freely utilizing flexible team workers who have long histories or high degrees of specialization in a given area lends your whole project a more elevated work atmosphere. That elevation tends to show in the finished product. The time you would have spent training someone in those areas of specialization can be dedicated to more innovative or productive tasks within the business.
Look beyond local talent
When geography is no longer a factor in determining who can join your ranks, your company’s possibilities for everything from productivity to client reach increase. The collaborative evolution in how companies locate tech talent represents a major boon to your business’s IT lineup.
Let’s say your company specializes in deliverable telecommunications, and the impact of COVID-19 means that all of your local competitors absorbed the available IT talent in your area. Being able to cast a global net fostering an instantaneous connection to IT talent everywhere keeps your company on the cutting edge and relevant.
Hiring globally can also mean that your company runs longer hours, faster shipping, or more engaged customer service because your remote team workers will likely not all live in the same time zone. Having team members in various parts of the world keep the lights on, so to speak, when it comes to time frames that once only represented dead time. This allows you to get ahead in productivity and, likely, bottom-line metrics.
Scale up or down swiftly
As the vacillations of the market swing drastically from day to day, the ability to meet those changes with expediency translates directly to your company’s stability. You may find yourself in need of five new coders on a Tuesday and not require any of them a month later.
Having the capacity to scale up or down swiftly in staff augmentation means the worry of where to find people and how long you have to keep them is gone. Likewise, if you’ve never hired remotely before, you want to avoid common pitfalls by having knowledgeable oversight guiding you through the process.
Reduce overhead and equipment costs
Of the many silver linings to be found in this new digital normal is the erosion of overhead and equipment costs that used to be a foregone conclusion for most businesses. When it comes to cost comparisons between augmenting your IT team the traditional way and achieving your initiatives via a flexible workforce model, you stand to save big money by hiring independent workers.
Where a traditional IT staff augmentation might include providing laptops, headsets, modems, etc., flexible tech talent tends to come with their own materials and supplies.
As your company is also not supplying Wi-Fi and office space for these workers, you can expand your staff and productivity while alleviating expenses associated with in-person work.
Augment your IT team with Upwork
IT staff augmentation in unpredictable times does not have to be rife with uncertainty or fear. Utilizing a structured plan for how and whom to hire alleviates lag time, concerns about professionalism, and your company’s ability to pivot quickly.
