Staff Augmentation Services
Staff Augmentation in the IT world is an outsourcing strategy of hiring additional staff from Agicent on time sensitive basis to cater to the short-term or long-term Technical and development needs. In simple words, when a company hires external talent from us to work continuously on their projects and fill the tech gaps then it is a Staff Augmentation Service that they’re availing.
Staff augmentation is the process of adding talent to your existing team through a third party. This could be anything from 10 engineers joining 10 different teams, to a single developer with niche expertise
Staff augmentation removes the overhead associated with sourcing, recruiting, training and retaining talent. It can help you meet short and long term technology goals with added flexibility and instant access to a high-quality talent pool.
Process of Staff Augmentation Services
Discovery Call
During the discovery call, we understand the skill-sets you need, the experience level (beginner, expert, senior), number of engineers needed and the lead time. Put the requirements as the clear “Service orders” and go back to our resource management team that does sourcing, recruitment, onboarding and everything else that you need to onboard the right candidates.
Prelim Shortlisting and Interview by Agicent
We source the right CVs from the inhouse resource pool or from the market within 3 days, get their details and line up them for our round of interview for the screening. Since we are a software development team ourselves, our CTO and senior Technical people take their preliminary round and establish more than 90 % matching between the job profile and the candidates before we send them to you for further screening.
In some case, we also give out technical tests or machine tests before shortlisting them for the final client facing round. We also get free trials from senior technical members just to make sure they are actually fit for the job.
An HR round is also done by us where we evaluate the candidate on soft skills and overall character in order to establish their compatibility with the forthcoming job.
Client Interview and Onboarding
We lineup the shortlisted candidates to be interviewed by your technical team and once you give a go ahead we start the onboarding process.
The onboarding process includes negotiating their notice period, their rates, working hours, relocation (if needed) and all other important aspects related to the job.
Account Management: Post Onboarding
That’s the beautiful part, no matter whether you hire one person from us or a team as large as 50 you’ll get a dedicated project manager and an account manager through out the lifecycle of our engagement. We introduce more project managers as the team size increases and put a super manager on the whole process.
So even though the team will work at your disposal all the time, you’ll still have our backup management as well as close supervision and administration to ensure that the team you’ve hired is running smoothly and delivering the intended without burning extra budget.
Billing and Invoicing Cycle
An invoice for the services will be raised at the start of every work month that you can pay using various methods (both online or offline such as bank wire transfer). We support almost all credit and debit cards and ACH transfers across the English speaking world and especially the United States of America.
Staff Augmentation Services
During the lockdown, we helped building a large team of deep tech software engineers in the domain of Telecom, DevOps, Embedded and also in banking industry for India’s largest IT Company TCS. We recruited super specialist software engineers on a variety of technologies for work from home setup and onboarded 9 of them in just a week and then added more people as the account grew.
We hired across all the cities in the country, put account manager for client’s convenience and ran the smooth process which enabled the client to release there critical government level projects on time and within budget. Our billing cycle was smooth and transparent as we only put a transparent markup on the overcall cost of the resource to us.
Our staff augmentation teams work across Telecom network projects, OTT Apps, Banking, retail, ecommerce, gaming, ERPs and Industrial and governmental projects.
We successfully managed common challenges like last minute backing out of candidates using our own recruitment acumen that involved background checks, backup selected candidates, right two party beneficial agreements and some soft skills.
Reasons Why Companies Opt For Staff Augmentation
Staff augmentation is a vast term when it comes to the profiles of professionals hired as an external source who will join the in-house team. But, precisely in case of a Tech company, staff augmentation is required under some circumstances such as –
In incorporating new and advanced technology to reach and meet the dynamic advancements rapidly and also to the market demands.
Service-based organizations cracking short-term projects, instead of hiring for the long-term full-time team, staff augmentation can enable the company to accomplish and fulfill more effectively and in an optimizing manner.
Staff augmentation provides modularity. For example, in the case of an app development company aiming to develop a multi-platform app, they can simply go for staff augmentation to build a platform-specific team.
For long term cost benefits, flexibility of operations, less management and compliance overload, and less recruitment hassles.
Sometimes, for reaching a certain time limit. For example, an app development company supposed to launch any new feature or any bug fixing requires more manpower. Staff augmentation can enable the company to meet the same, without disturbing in-house employees who might be working on other projects.
Best practices for Successful Staff Augmentation
Staff Augmentation holds the articulation between the two distinct organizations i.e. a client and a service provider and therefore this whole process requires some strategic approaches to make it successful. Some of them are:
Sweat during the screening process, get trials when possible
Proper screening, verification and validation of candidate’s experience is a must. Also, their soft skills and overall job fitment to the work as an individual is to be evaluated. If candidates are ready for that, then we should always get a trial work done in order to be double sure of their capabilities.
Strategic and Conceptual Planning
Both the service providers as well as the client should be very well planned about the project ideas and the process of integrating augmented staff with in-house teams and expected duration of the project. The goal must be clear and should be well-defined and communicated to the all stake holders involved.
Clear KPIs, regular performance follow-ups and feedback sessions
Once after the onboarding of augmented staff, the performance metrics of staff should be tracked, and constructive feedback should be provided to them. It builds effectiveness.
Confidentiality and Security
Adhering to robust methods of security and safeguarding intellectual property, and sensitive data is mandatory and considered as an ethical practice of staff augmentation.
Ensuring a productive and energetic environment
The works ethics should be clearly defined, and both the client and vendor team should work in a progressive and productive environment. The teams dedicated to the client do have to dwell with other teams as well and therefore company vide employee engagement activities, personal development opportunities, and right incentives for high performance must be there.
Source: https://www.agicent.com/staff-augmentation