Staff Augmentation Solutions: Best Practices to Achieve Business Goals in 2022

Any tool is only as good as the hands that wield it, and that rings even truer when it comes to recruiting staff augmentation services and business personnel overall. Many businesses today have a wealth of qualified human resources at their beck and call, and even quality staff augmentation solutions at the ready to help during workflow overloads.

However, it remains the bitter reality that many organizations are not truly harnessing the full potential of their workforce, augmented or otherwise. In fact, going by a Lorman survey, 74% of workers today feel that they aren’t hitting their full strides at work. This is contributed to by a myriad of factors, including managers who aren’t making the most of their teams.   

So here are a few staff augmentation best practices to ensure you squeeze the most out of staff augmentation and ultimately achieve all your business objectives this year.  

1. Get a good staff augmentation vendor

Let’s start right at the most important part: your staff augmentation vendor. There’s certainly an abundance of options when it comes to considering staff augmentation service providers. Nonetheless, this makes it even harder to decide who to trust. 

With the right checklist though, picking out quality should be easy. You’ll want to look out for: 

• What past clients are saying
• The depth of services offered
• If there are any hidden costs
• If they offer customized solutions

Typically, you can schedule a consultation to find out all these and gauge whether your potential staff augmentation partner is a suitable match. The best staff augmentation vendors, such as DADJ Inc, always offer bespoke outsourcing solutions as opposed to generic hiring strategies.

2. Prioritize quality remote hiring solutions

While in-person hiring services do have their merits, they come at an added cost to your business. Some of these expenses come in the way of: 

• Individual work equipment
• Extra utility charges (expanded software plans, etc.)
• Office space and more

There’s no doubt that remote hires still also add to your operational costs, but at a significantly lesser cost in comparison. 

What’s more, staff tend to be more productive when working remotely. Research by the Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology substantiated just as much in a 2020 study. Researches established that 60% of workers were more productive while working remotely than in the office.

Typically, this improved performance stems from a good work balance that such a staff augmentation model provides. 

3. Determine the specific skills gaps to fill

It could be that time of the year when the tax season is right around the corner, for example. As a result, you may think it wise to bring on new accountants to help shoulder the burden of processing heaps of financial data. 

In this case, you’ll want to get seasoned tax accountants with specific knowledge and experience on: 

• Local tax legislation for your business type
• Tax policies in your region
• How basic SMB operations work

You may not be adequately served by an investment accountant, for instance, in this case. In a nutshell, it’s vital to comprehensively define what type of expert you need, and the specific skill sets they should bring to the table. The devil is in the details.

4. Use staff augmentation to test-drive hires

A staff augmentation service is also a great place to trial possible job candidates without having to explicitly set up interviews and a hectic and expensive hiring process at large. Approximately, 74% of hiring managers opened up to a CareerBuilder survey, attesting to hiring the wrong candidates, thereby losing a staggering $14,900 on each poor decision. 

That’s where good staff augmentation services step in as a useful, try-before-you-buy talent outsourcing solution. You can figure out: 

• If your augmented staff fit in with your company culture
• Whether you’d need to create a new position to add skilled staff
• If they are team players and are open to a full-time role

Remember to let your vendor know beforehand though so that you get matched with candidates willing to transition into a permanent position. 

5. Set a clear strategy to guide your project

Often, a business will look for an IT staff augmentation service because of a shortage of expertise and the need to solve a particular problem. However, many businesses make the mistake of not defining the destination. In other words, augmented staff now have a starting point and could veer off in many possible directions. 

 

So be sure to: 

 

• Define the problem
• Establish your goals
• Set possible paths if possible

 

This way, you don’t leave it up to chance but eliminate the endless variations that influence possible solutions. If you can, draw two dots (problem and goal) so you only have a straight project line. 

6. Get a staff augmentation vendor who chips in

Does your staff outsourcing service provider offer post-hiring help to manage these new workers? Success should be a priority for both parties, and as a such, you’ll want to also ensure that your vendor does their part. So you should not only regularly check in with your new recruits but also their superiors.

To this effect, you’ll want to ensure that the vendor you eventually settle on also has: 

• A shared interest in your growth
• Performance tracking procedures
• Course-correction solutions

The best staff augmentation companies hold your hand all through your project’s lifecycle and even after. 

7.  Ensure Knowledge Transfer for Seamless Transitions

If you’ve hired an IT staffing service to help with database design, for instance, as you expand your infrastructure to the cloud, you’ll want that when the temporary staff leaves, your in-house workforce can still keep things running smoothly. It is therefore important to make arrangements to ensure this knowledge transfer. 

Some of the things you could do include: 

• Planing early so that the process isn’t a rushed, last-minute affair
• Determining if your vendor offers contracts with knowledge transfer clauses
• Encouraging your in-house staff to be inquisitive & hands-on during the project

Keeping backups of important project information for reference is also a great idea. 

The Bottomline

So remember to set a clear project strategy, determine your skills gap, and prioritize quality remote hires.

Ultimately, the key to success and achieving your business goals also largely boils down to the staff outsourcing service provider you decide to go with. Choosing a proven staff augmentation partner like DADJ Inc is essential to finding competent hires, and to also getting a company that’s invested in and truly cares about your business achieving its goals.