IT staff augmentation can be a haven for startups looking to access IT professionals at a relatively cheaper cost. IT staff augmentation is when a company partners with augmentation firms like MaybeWorks to access remote staff from different countries. While IT staff augmentation can thoroughly cut operational costs and expenditures, improve profit margins, and catalyze business or software development from ideation to launch and management, the process must be handled carefully. This article explores the nuances of IT staff augmentation services and how a company can leverage a global workforce.

IT Staff Augmentation Services: How it Works

IT staff augmentation at face value is incredibly simplistic:

1. A company realizes that it has roles that can be handled by remote staff.
2. The company reaches out to an IT staff augmentation services partner.
3. The augmentation partner studies the structure of the company and suggests augmentation direction.
4. A deal is made, and the process begins.

While staff augmentation may sound like a simple process with a few steps, it can quickly become a nightmare.

Steps and Strategies for IT Staff Augmentation

Identify your start up needs

One thing every startup lacks is sufficient capital. Even if your company has bagged considerable investment, you should be able to utilize money well. If not, you will lose more and more equity to investors. Launching your startup without relinquishing so much equity is a business flex. Even better, pushing your startup to profitability and an IPO is a bigger flex. IT staff augmentation is a crucial element in achieving these goals. It’s important to understand the needs of your startup. What roles should be filled? Are the roles long-term or short-term?

Pro tips:

• When hiring for your startup, hire core staff locally. Core staff are people who coordinate the business’s operation.
• Hire supplement staff through remote means.
• Set up proper collaboration and communication channels between core staff and remote staff.

For example, core staff could include full-stack developers, HR, admin head, and operation manager if you are building software. Supplementary staff can include React JS specialists, quality assurance specialists, intermediate developers, and UI & UX specialists. The idea is to hire remotely for short-term jobs and tasks not core to the business and hire ground for long-term positions and roles that are core to the business.

Identify the Country You Want Remote Workers

Identify the country in which you want to hire your supplement staff. Factors to consider when identifying countries include:

Availability of talents

It’s easier to pull talents from a pool where talents within the particular industry are surplus. For example, Eastern Ukraine countries are known to have a surplus pool of developers. You can get endless video editors and designers in India and Pakistan. You can also access many HR professionals from African countries. Leverage a pool where a particular skill is common, and you will be able to negotiate cheaper prices for world-class talents.

Cultural synergy

Consider time zone differences, language, and potential cultural barriers. For example, hiring a full-stack developer from China as a US company can pose some serious cultural issues. First, the role of a full-stack developer goes beyond technical expertise. A full-stack developer must be able to communicate ideas and tasks, relay information to clients, organize other developers and create collaborative systems, convey meetings, set deadlines, monitor the performance of other developers, and supervise the development part of the project from start to finish. The full stack developer is also the personnel that communicates the development needs of the development team to other teams like HR, admin, and legal. Hiring a developer who does not have a native or, at the least, conversational command of the English language might result in miscommunication. And communication is good for business.

Onboarding

You should consider how easy it would be for remote staff to integrate themselves into your company’s systems. For example, are they proficient with the communication software your company uses? Will time zone differences pose a problem? How early can they reply to emails? Is your business such that emergencies must be fixed within the hour? For example, a newly launched software that is becoming popular will have bug issues. This is because scaling, more than always, reveals vulnerabilities in software programs that would be missed if a certain number of people do not use the program simultaneously.

Choosing the Right Augmentation Partner

Your IT staff augmentation company or partner is crucial to accessing talents in unfamiliar countries. Let’s explore how to choose the best IT augmentation partner for your company.

1. Experience: Choose a partner who has demonstrated experience accessing and filtering talents in your industry.
2. Hiring process: Partner with an augmentation firm focusing on rigorous hiring and interview processes. The essence of having an augmentation partner is to be able to delegate some part of the hiring process to them.
3. Understands the industry: Work with an augmentation partner who understands your industry. An augmentation partner with experience in the software development industry can easily identify and recommend qualified software developers.
4. Fee: It’s important to choose a budget-friendly collaboration partner; after all, the primary purpose of remote hiring is to shed operation costs.

Why Your Startup Needs Software Development Staff Augmentation

• Remote hiring is cost-friendly. IT professionals have varying hourly rates and salary expectations. For example, an intermediate software developer in India might charge less hourly than a beginner-level developer in the United States.
• With remote hiring, you don’t have to worry about office space, utilities and overhead costs, equipment, relocation costs, employee benefits and perks, and medicals.
• Scaling: With remote hiring, you can easily scale up when demands increase. You can also scale down operations. A company with 50 remote workers can seamlessly scale down when profitability is negative, unlike a business that has to consider decommissioning office spaces and equipment or incur losses on utility payments and employee liabilities.

Conclusion

Launching a startup can be overwhelming. As a CEO, the startup’s success boosts your credibility as an astute entrepreneur. However, failure can lead to many consequences, including reputational damage, relationship damage, debt, and negative impact on personal lives. More than ever, the world is seeing an astronomical rise in startups. There is a high chance that ten different startups will also implement your idea. It’s a consistent and painful race to the top. IT staff augmentation services ease some entrepreneurs’ pains when launching a startup. With IT staff augmentation, you access global talents within a competitive budget, releasing budgets for other important aspects of the business, like marketing.

Further Reading

Streamlining Absence Management: A Guide for Businesses
Elevating Workplace Dynamics through Rewards Systems, Collaboration, and Communication
A Strategic Guide to Shifting Departments