IT staff augmentation allows businesses to focus on core software development tasks rather than on lengthy recruitment efforts. It’s also a great way to achieve flexibility in scaling your team up or down as required. A provider such as DEVTALENTS ensures the availability of top software development talent on demand, helping you choose future team members based on individual bios and guaranteeing quality through careful vetting, an effective matching process, and ease of replacing developers at any point during the cooperation.

The advantages of IT staff augmentation

The simple truth about staff augmentation is that it’s often a superior model, especially when compared to internal hiring. Augmenting your IT team through a provider has fewer risks, lower costs, much more flexibility, and guarantees access to top talent.

Some of the major advantages of team augmentation include:

• Fast & easy hiring - you receive a selection of developer profiles and pick the ones you like, then start onboarding,
• No administrative hassle - issues like contracts, paid leave, accidents at work, employee benefits, etc., are handled by the provider,
• Access to top talent - team augmentation providers hire their own highly skilled and experienced teams, and supplement them by building extensive talent networks,
• Freedom to focus on your core business - one, the provider handles the busywork for you, and two, you can keep your internal team engaged with core tasks while the additional team members handle all the smaller issues when they arise,
• Efficient scaling - you can downscale or upscale your team pretty much at any time and at no cost, which means that you will always have the right number of experts onboard,
• Low operating costs - you don’t need to provide your new developers with hardware or office space, and you don’t have to worry about employer taxes.

Team augmentation vs internal recruitment and full development teams

In our experience, team extension is faster, simpler, and particularly suited to scale-ups and enterprise clients. It allows businesses to build teams with precision and adjust them to changing circumstances. Traditional recruitment, by comparison, is costly, time consuming, and inherently risky. Working with a full development team, on the other hand, can be great when the team will be handed a somewhat independent project (such as updating your business website’s CMS). It’s also best for more entrepreneurial initiatives, such as creating the MVP for a startup.

	DevTalents	Regular recruitment	Digital agencies
Time to find top talent	48h	2-4 months	1-2 weeks
Recruitment costs	$0	$20k+	$0
Guarantee of quality
Risk of failure	Very low	High	Low
Established vetting process
Termination costs	None	High	Often high
Talent quality	Best experts from around the world	Limited access to top talent	Usually localized talent
Onboarding	Fast and smooth process	Potential for delays	Sometimes complicated
Additional benefits	Top industry practices and know-how		Full project delivery
Employee of record

The challenges of IT team extension

Though it is a highly efficient cooperation model, team extension does come with a number of challenges.

You are responsible for onboarding

While the developers joining your team through staff augmentation will be experienced in this and very proactive, it’s still crucial that you arrange training and knowledge-sharing sessions between your existing team and its new members.

A lack of internal knowledge

Similarly, developers new to the project and your business will need access to a lot of information. Ideally, you should prepare for training or workshops, and have a robust knowledge base that’s well-structured and easy to access. This is especially true for larger companies and projects. On the flipside, your new team members will bring in a lot of valuable know-how and experience, often from projects in the same industry as yours, which they will be more than happy to share.

Some workflows may require adapting for a new team composition

If your company has never used team augmentation before, it might be necessary to adapt certain workflows to the needs of a dispersed, remote team. This is rarely an issue post-COVID, however, as most businesses have experience with working remotely. An additional benefit of using staff augmentation is that your provider’s remote work processes are guaranteed to be highly efficient and bulletproof, which can create valuable learning opportunities for your team.

How to get started with augmenting your team

The road to reaping the benefits of team extension is very simple. The following steps might offer you some inspiration on where to begin.

1. Identify skill gaps in your current team

The main goal of staff augmentation is to fill in expertise gaps for the client. So, the first step is to determine where those skill gaps are, and what kind of expertise is needed to patch them up. You should also consider how many developers (or other experts, such as QA specialists or project managers) you will need, and what their seniority level should be.

While it’s not worth it to hire junior developers for complex tasks - they’ll work much longer than senior-level devs and can make costly mistakes - sometimes, all you need is a simple implementation. If you’re not sure about what’s required for the tasks you have planned, a provider like DEVTALENTS will be happy to advise you.

2. Find a trusted provider

Many software houses provide body leasing and team extension, often as a supplementary service beside full team development. In these cases, make sure that your provider is actually able to meet your needs and has a large available talent pool. Another important criterion is culture fit: you’ll be bringing in new people into your team almost as though they were employees. To get the most value out of staff augmentation, these developers need to be able to match your existing team’s culture and processes.

3. Go through hiring and onboarding

Hiring via team extension is as simple as picking from a selection of developer profiles. Onboarding, on the other hand, requires effort on your internal team’s part. While providers like DEVTALENTS prepare their developers for this process, making sure they have the soft skills to fit in seamlessly with any team, there will be information that they’ll need from you to begin work.

Ready to try team extension? Get a set of developer profiles in 48 hours

The DEVTALENTS team is built to be flexible, adaptive and to fit seamlessly into any work environment. With over a decade of experience with clients from various industries, we’ve collected a wealth of know-how that we are happy to share with our partners. We know that time is of the essence, so we provide a fast hiring process and deliver a selection of developer bios in 48 hours. If you’d like to find out whether we’re the right partner for you, let’s get in touch.