What is Staff Augmentation and How Does It Benefit Your Business?
There comes a time for a business when it needs a few more—skilled—hands on deck.
Of course, hiring the needed-talent is one way of going about bridging the gap in headcount, but when you have a mission-critical project looming ahead and a deadline to fulfill, the process can be too long and unhelpful.
Besides, if it’s only one project that you need the additional human resource for, opting for the traditional hiring route can also be a big budget buster. What happens once the project is complete? Surely, you wouldn’t want the new hires to be on the payroll when you don’t need their services anymore? But, that also doesn’t mean that you can just fire them.
So, you need a more convenient solution.
Enter staff augmentation…
What is staff augmentation?
First, the technical definition:
“Staff augmentation is the allocation of human resources, commonly nearshore and usually for the technical department, hired as nearshore extensions of in-house teams on flexible or fixed hiring terms.”
Some lovely jargon in there.
Now, to make things easier for you:
“Staff augmentation is the process of hiring contractors, usually nearshore contractors, to address an immediate gap in talent.”
Wait, that’s not all…
It’s not you who does the hiring work; instead, it’s a staff augmentation service firm that does the advertising, screening, interviewing, hiring and payroll for you.
As the beneficiary of the service, all you need to do is brief the agency about what your requirements are in terms of skill and job description.
In fact, in some cases, even this is done by the staff augmentation provider.
They will assess your existing team and the project for which you want additional human resources, and then identify where your team is lacking in profile.
Is there anything about staff augmentation that you’re better off knowing?
Yes; the agency only does the recruiting on your behalf, and you still must manage and supervise the contractors on your own.
However, this is also good, since you’re in complete control of your staff.
What are the benefits of staff augmentation?
Well, most benefits would be pretty evident to you from our discussion above, like:
- Reduced hiring hassle
- Reduced employment-related liabilities
- Immediate access to a wider, more skilled talent pool
- Easy compliance with aggressive project deadlines
Other benefits include easy and seamless integration of additional staff, and reduced burden for your existing staff as their workload is now shared. Plus, whenever you want, you can conveniently scale up or down your human resources, and replace a contractor if they don’t meet your requirements.
If you’re interested in extending your in-house team with a Nearshore staff augmentation base in Costa Rica, get in touch with us today; we’d be more than happy to help you.