Five Scenarios Where Staff Augmentation Overcomes Direct Hiring

There are many types of companies out there, and what works well for one does not necessarily fit all. While many different companies and industries can benefit from staff augmentation, not all cases will succeed if the scenario in the company is not suitable for such services. For this reason, I decided to write a short list of five different situations where staff augmentation can create significant advantages:

Organizations with great IT teams often have talented, loyal staff dedicated to keeping systems running, adding features, and maintaining existing systems. However, this can consume all their bandwidth, making it impossible to explore new technologies, innovate solutions, or create new software for others in the organization.

A San Francisco-based firm dedicated to facilitating platforms for organizations in education and training through digital tools started a new long-term project requiring tremendous innovation in user experiences for both educators and attendees. They needed to provide capabilities unexplored and nonexistent in their new mobile apps, adding the challenge of providing a classroom experience within the small size of a smartphone. Their team of more than 20 engineers, designers, and managers was already overwhelmed with maintaining current clients, making modifications to their web platform, refining content, scaling infrastructure, and more. Asking them to work on new mobile apps was simply impossible due to workload and time constraints. They decided to reorganize their team, allocate strategic managers, and assign some senior engineers as tech leads to embrace the vision of performing staff augmentation in Costa Rica. Since 2021, they have been working with Akurey on these brand-new apps, building a whole team as one, joining forces, priorities, and business vision to get the job done in record time, less than seven months mvp. We are still working together on other branches of the products.

Why didn't they opt for direct hiring? Simple: timing. The project required a team of 12 engineers, including software developers, quality assurance, UX designers, a project manager, and DevOps. Interviewing and hiring 12 new members might have taken 2 to 3 months, then, what would they do after finishing the project? Fire them all? Keep some of them? They had no idea, but time was crucial. Akurey assembled the priority part of the team in two weeks and the others in the next four weeks.

A healthcare digital company in Ohio developed a platform to help families keep an active eye on a family member who needs extra care regarding medication, companionship, exercise, psychology, and more. They made a great prototype, receiving $2M in the first investment round. However, investors asked for many changes, integrations, and a tight deadline. Their team realized the need for more temporary hands to achieve the expected results, the amount of work was overwhelming. 

Our UX team started working immediately to create the Figma designs, and then QA and development started working on the web application and both iOS and Android apps. The final version was completed and launched to market two months later than the required date. However, by deciding to work together with Akurey, they not only added software engineers but also benefited from our management capabilities, our architects provided help in design strategies to speed the process, and senior engineers significantly reduced the potential bugs arriving to QA. Because of the agile methodology, we were able to provide demos to investors month to month, softening the requirements and making investors very happy with the final results, resulting in no blockers despite the delayed launch to market.

The Costa Rica software development department of a large international manufacturer of medical devices decided to go global, meaning they communicated to all their offices worldwide their openness to provide digital solutions globally. Initially, this team of seven people was skeptical about the reception from other offices, aware that many other countries have their IT departments. However, the demand for software, data, and AI solutions was already high resulting in many requests coming to Costa Rica unexpectedly to this seven-person team.

They managed to hold and not absorb everything. However, to provide efficient service to the other offices, they came to Akurey looking for staffing in data engineering, machine learning, Microsoft Power Apps, Snowflake, and Python for data analysis using Pandas and Numpy. We initially provided them with two engineers, and nowadays, we have allocated up to eight. The wide skill set of the engineers allowed them to embrace other projects with different tech stacks, working with previously met people who already knew the organization's culture and standards, without the need for onboarding new staff often. Meanwhile, the company is adding full-time employees but with no rush. They count on us to deliver worldwide while doing the internal bureaucratic diligence of opening specific positions.

Hiring tech-savvy people is hard. Don’t blame your HR department for taking so long or bringing on an unexpected person, It’s just hard; how do you meet and test a professional of 32 years old in an interview process that takes just hours? Alina a friend, came to me saying, “Hey, I need help. It’s been two months already, having up to six interviews per week, investing my time and the time of tech leads and occasionally the CTO, and we haven’t been able to find the person. Your kind wants to be hired just because they’re seniors, asking for high salaries and benefits. This is painful.”

That is a common problem. High-end engineers receive many offers from companies, feeding their “ego,” making the hiring process a bit complicated. As a software engineering and staffing company, we speak their language. We have clear limits, benefits, salary ranges, career paths, time and holiday management. We have solid procedures, policies, and standards that people understand from the first contact until hiring. As a staffing company, part of our business is to hold the engineers returned by a client when the project or the need finishes. This gives us the chance to have available people to jump into clients’ projects almost immediately. When this is not the case, our headhunting procedures, tools, interview process, voting mechanisms, and our vast network of engineers in the country (more than 3K) allow us to handpick and contact those who best suit the job, not only in technical but also in communication and other soft skills when required.

This last scenario is very important and is somewhat related to point #4. Sorry, but this might sound a bit unpleasant to read. I know you’re proud of your organization, but it might not be the desired place to work for a tech-savvy engineer, making your hiring harder.

What a software engineer dreams about a job:

• Working remotely from any place in the world
• Competitive salaries and perks
• Flexible work times
• Health insurance
• Career path and professional growth
• Mentors, working with other experienced engineers
• A work environment with software development standards, procedures, clear management of tasks and estimations, processes with clear stages
• Dreaming about working at Google, Facebook, OpenAI, or famous software companies in the world

 

"...your company might not be the desired place to work for a tech-savvy engineer, making hiring harder...

A worldwide logistics company came to us because they were experiencing problems hiring for a very important role for their IT needs. They offered a good salary and stability, but engineers viewed this company as unattractive because it did not speak their language. Since their core business is not software development, they risk being treated as another production employee, requiring surf around to get a course, take one day off, or maybe have to work with an inexperienced project manager in agile and software. Another problem is the risk of getting stuck in a legacy technology stack for years without learning edge technologies. This is important for us as software engineers, consider this: every month, a bunch of new technologies arrive on the market.

We ended up providing the IT person required for them with a special rotation plan that allows us to have another person relieve the other after 1.7 years, giving us the chance to pull out our engineers, refresh their mentality on another project with another set of technologies, preventing burnout and lack of technology updates. At the same time, we are in charge of getting this person involved in training, architecture sessions, team-building, certifications, salary increases, and the opportunity to discuss many other technical aspects together.