In the past, companies turned to team augmentation services only when they had a skill gap they needed to bridge quickly. Hiring new talent takes time and costs a lot more money than hiring an IT staff augmentation company to fill your talent gap for you at a fixed hourly rate. This way, companies can resume operations without too much time and financial overhead.
However, nowadays, outsourcing is becoming an increasingly popular choice in the market. More and more companies are realizing that renting talent from an IT staff augmentation company on a project-to-project basis is way easier, stress-free, and cost-effective than hiring new, full-time talent.
Team augmentation gives companies the option to inflate and deflate their teams based on their current needs. Furthermore, when companies outsource their development work, they can focus on their core business. This is a win-win situation for most companies, which is why the IT staff augmentation market is projected to hit $413 billion by the end of 2021, according to Statista.
In recent times, many startups are also realizing the benefits of team augmentation, and in this blog, we will explore how team augmentation can help new startups and boost their success.
But before that, let’s talk a little about,
What is Team Augmentation?
For the uninitiated, team augmentation is the practice of hiring talent from a different company on a fixed hourly rate. This can also be considered renting talent as opposed to traditional, full-time hiring of talent.
It happens all too often that companies find themselves needing to fill a skill gap in their teams quickly. It can be because of an unexpected resignation or a change in the project’s parameters, like a deadline being pushed up. In such scenarios, companies seek out these IT staff augmentation companies to outsource a chunk of their work so that they can meet their deadlines. Team augmentation companies cost way less than paying a monthly salary to a full-time hire.
Whether a company needs a project manager, a UI/UX designer, a web developer, or an agile expert, IT staffing companies these days are capable of meeting any demand. Staffing companies excel at finding the right talent for the job. Furthermore, most IT staffing companies claim that they can fill a position within 1-2 weeks. This is a surprisingly low number compared to the time it takes a company to scout and hire talent itself.
Team augmentation providers offer off-shore, onshore, and nearshore options for companies, and they have various hiring models designed to fit the varying needs of their clients.
Another reason why companies opt for outsourcing these days is because of a larger talent pool. When companies tie-up with an IT staffing company, they have more options and talents from different parts of the world.
If you are looking to know more about staff augmentation, check out our blog on how IT staff augmentation can help businesses.
How Team Augmentation Can Boost Your Startup?
Launching a startup is an exciting but complicated endeavor. With so many new businesses launching every year, new startups need to carve out their identity. This requires them to be precise with their business goals, meticulous with their business design, and efficient with their resources.
Early on, startups find it hard to hire the right talent for their complicated development requirements. And even if they do, hiring that talent isn’t cheap or quick. Suffice to say that a startup has a lot on its plate during the initial, more vulnerable days of its existence. And the time and money they would usually spend on filling every single talent gap in their company with full-time employees is the time and money they can spend elsewhere.
This is where team augmentation companies come in. With their diverse range of talent, flexible hiring models, and quick talent placement, staff augmentation companies are becoming an increasingly popular choice of startups.
Given below is a list of six ways in which team augmentation can help a startup.
Six ways in which team augmentation can help startups
1. Team Augmentation is Cost-Effective
Startups are constantly working on a tight budget. Unlike more prominent corporations and fortune 500 companies, startups don’t have endlessly deep pockets. So, they need to watch their spending at all times. But at the same time, they can’t compromise on quality either. To stand out in the market, startups must prove themselves with the excellent quality of their work. So, they need quality developers, and they don’t want to pay the full price for them.
That is where team augmentation comes in. With the help of IT staffing services, startups can augment their teams with experts without hiring them full-time. Most IT staff augmentation companies operate on a project-to-project basis where you pay them an hourly rate. This rate is nothing compared to the monthly salary startups have to pay to a full-time hire.
With the help of IT staff augmentation, companies are not only getting the expert developers they so direly need but at cost-effective rates as well.
2. Team Augmentation is Time Effective
Hiring is not as easy as it used to be, especially in the post-covid era with the threat of the Great Resignation looming over our heads. Ask any HR in the world, and they will tell you how it is getting more and more challenging to fill the skill gaps in their companies.
But while more prominent companies have the luxury of spending months trying to fill just one position, startups, on the other hand, don’t. They can’t spend months headhunting and scouting to fill a skill gap in their team. Along with money, startups are also on a tight schedule.
Most team augmentation companies fill skill gaps within a matter of a few weeks.
Furthermore, once you reach out to them and give them your requirements, they take over a profile of the type of person/team you are looking to hire. It is now their responsibility to find the right talent and place them in your company. This not only makes the hiring process a lot quicker, but it also frees up time for startups to focus on other stuff.
3. Team Augmentation Allows Scalability
The business world is full of uncertainties. From needs, requirements to market trends and demands, the parameters of businesses are constantly changing. And companies have to adjust according to these changes.
In modern times, companies need to be able to scale up and down according to changing situations. This includes their IT infrastructure and their IT and development staff.
While bigger companies can afford to maintain big teams and pay them monthly salaries during downtimes, startups don’t have that kind of money. Startups have to be efficient and to be efficient they need to be able to scale up and down very quickly.
IT staff augmentation companies offer flexible terms of hiring, which means startups can terminate those services whenever the business is slow and rehire the talent when the business picks up.
Furthermore, they can hire talent to support their development team while their HR works on hiring a permanent talent of their own. This way, startups make sure that the lack of a skilled employee is not holding up the project. This ease to increase and decrease the size of their operations makes IT staff augmentation so enticing to startups.
4. Team Augmentation Gives More Choice
Startups usually work with niche technologies: IoT, AI/ML, AR/VR, etc. These are comparatively newer technologies, and so talented experts for them are hard to find.
When bound by geographical borders, companies struggle to fill skill gaps for such new technologies. With team augmentation, however, it is way easier to find experts on niche technologies these days.
Staffing companies offer a global pool of talented experts for startups to choose from. When remote working is an option, startups can reach talented people who are situated far away from them. And with advancements in remote working tech brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, collaborating with remote teams is easier and more efficient than ever.
5. Team Augmentation Brings Operation Costs Down
When you hire full-time resources, you have to pay their monthly salaries and provide them with IT resources such as PCs, internet, etc. Furthermore, employee expenses such as employee benefits, electricity, healthcare, etc., are also on you.
But with team augmentation, you don’t have to worry about any of that. The company plugging the skill gap for you is responsible for employee expenses and benefits which takes an enormous load off your pockets.
Furthermore, if you choose off-shore team augmentation or remote working, things like electricity are further eliminated.
These overheads can be significant as a startup, and team augmentation gives startups a way to circumvent them and still be operational.
6. Team Augmentation Allows Startup to Focus
When you are not constantly worrying about bridging the talent gap in your team, you can focus on your core business. With the development taken care of by their team augmentation service provider, startups find the time and money to fine-tune their products, business goals and make future plans.
This also gives startups time to market their products. With the development side running like a well-oiled machine, the marketing side can get the focus it needs. An effective marketing strategy is just as vital for a product’s success as the product’s quality. So with an outsourcing team taking care of your development, you can focus on marketing your product.
Conclusion
Team augmentation is the panacea for startups facing staffing problems. With a limited budget and time constraints, startups struggle to deliver quality results. And when you add talent gaps that take months to fill and the cost overhead for hiring a full-time employee to the equation, things get way direr.
Team augmentation brings scalability and flexibility to startups. With various hiring models, IT staff augmentation companies fit every budget. Furthermore, they also enable startups to hire experts who otherwise would have been unavailable due to geographical constraints.
Remote working is on the rise, and with tools like JIRA, Slack, and Zoom, it has never been easier to maintain a hybrid team of in-house talent and remote workers. Experts of various fields can be hired on per hour costs for a fixed period of time. This brings cost and time efficiency to startups.
If you are a startup looking to augment your team, Matellio has an almost vast pool of talented experts to fill any talent gap in your company. From web and mobile developers to agile experts and AI/ML maestros, no matter your skill needs, Matellio can provide.
To know more about our team augmentation services, please get in touch with our experts and get a free 30-minute consultation.
