One of the largest skill gaps growing businesses face is around technical talent. Finding, hiring, and fully onboarding new staff can often take months through the normal hiring process. Existing staff can become fatigued, and deadlines can be missed.
Many businesses are moving away from traditional hiring processes because of the pressure to stay competitive and deliver product roadmaps on schedule. By using flexible hiring processes, businesses can quickly bring in specific skill sets. This can be achieved by using Staff Augmentation Services. They allow businesses to increase their development capability at low costs.
Benefits of Staff Augmentation
Staff augmentation is a type of outsourcing. You add qualified technical experts to your organisation from an external vendor. You will be directly hiring the augmented staff. This is different from full project outsourcing. The augmented staff will fit in with your processes. They will take part in your daily stand-ups and will work alongside the tools and systems you have.
This gives businesses visibility into what is happening with their projects whilst still maintaining control over them. It helps fix one of the main issues with traditional hiring.
As a software development business, you will often need to change the number of people working on your project depending on the stage of the product. Perhaps you need 4 extra front-end developers to help with a big platform update, but after it has launched, you only need to maintain it. Leadership can quickly increase or decrease the number of staff.
Typical Issues With Software
Managing a software business can come with many challenges. By using staff augmentation services, businesses can overcome many of the issues they are facing.
- Reduce Long Hiring Times: Finding a senior developer within the local market can take between 2-3 months. We can’t afford to lose several weeks of platform features. Partnering with a reliable provider means qualified engineers can be hired within days, keeping your vital projects on track.
- Fill The Gap With Specialised Skills: Often internal teams don’t have the skill set in new tech stacks, unique cloud set-ups, data engineering, and niche mobile environments. It doesn’t make sense to hire a permanent full-time employee to do a short-term specialised task. Hiring development-focused staff will allow you to get the right people with the right skills for the right amount of time.
- Help With Developer Wellbeing: With increasing demand for your product, your on-the-ground engineers often get pushed into unsustainable hours. Tiring your key people causes attrition, poor code quality, and tech debt. This gives your internal team some breathing space to focus on the core of your products; the extra temporary staff will take on the extra workload.
Choosing The Right Staff Augmentation Services
This is only true if you are partnering with a reliable staff augmentation service. Security can vary between vendors.
Ask yourself:
Ask your vendor how they vet candidates before sending them to you. We carry out live coding tests, background checks, and soft skill tests with our top partners to ensure our candidates are ready for production. Culture and Time Zone Fit. Communication issues often outweigh the benefit of having more staff. If you need real-time collaboration, look for vendors with staff that have a good level of English and work at the right times.
Ensure that the vendor can provide you with good NDAs and IP transfer agreements. Experienced partners like Qubetech have bespoke staff augmentation solutions that can easily be used by tech leaders. They allow you to source pre-vetted individuals who will match your tech stack and project goals. This will help you with any capacity issues you have without affecting the quality of your software.
Best Practice When Hiring Augmented Developers
Getting more technical knowledge is half the battle. To get the most out of your augmented staff, they should fit in well with your business. Give them early access to documents, communication channels, and repositories. Good onboarding practices will help reduce ramp-up time.
Ensure your documentation is in place. Remote and augmented engineers will need clean task boards, user stories and code bases. Having updated documentation will help eliminate any queries.
Don’t lock them out. Augmented engineers will take part in strategy meetings, code reviews, and team meetings. External specialists will feel like they are making a difference with the project and will produce better quality code. They will be more likely to support the long-term goals of the team.