6 Benefits of Employee Augmentation

Employee augmentation is a strategy where businesses temporarily hire additional workers with specific skills to supplement their existing team. This approach allows companies to address project needs or skill gaps without committing to long-term employment.

Many companies struggle to find and hire skilled software developers to join their team. The hiring process takes time and effort, especially when trying to find engineers with specific skillsets. Once hired, there are HR and payroll responsibilities as well. For small and midsize companies, this can become an administrative burden.

Employee augmentation provides a solution by allowing you to "augment" your team with dedicated software developers without formally hiring them. Here are some of the key benefits of employee augmentation:

1. No Hiring Headaches

With employee augmentation, you can add developers to your team without going through the tedious hiring process. Avoid job posts, interviews, background checks and all the associated overhead just to find qualified candidates. Augmentation providers handle the hiring and provide you with pre-vetted engineers tailored to your needs.

2. Dedicated Team

The developers provided through augmentation work as a dedicated extension of your team. They are not split across multiple clients or projects. This allows them to focus solely on your projects and codebase for maximum efficiency. You can have weekly sprints, daily standups and ongoing collaboration just as with normal employees.

3. No HR/Payroll Overhead  

Since augmentation developers are employed by the augmentation firm, you avoid any HR or payroll management. The provider handles comp, benefits, taxes, time tracking and offboarding. This removes administrative burdens from your plate.

4. Hire On-Demand

With augmentation you can scale your team up and down as needed. Only pay for the roles you need right now instead of hiring full-time. Avoid over-hiring for future needs. This flexibility and ability to "hire on-demand" helps optimize costs.

5. Access to Top Talent

Recruiting top engineering talent on your own can be challenging. Augmentation providers maintain large talent networks and recruitment infrastructure. This gives you access to skilled developers you may not be able to reach or attract on your own.

6. Cost Effective

By leveraging their hiring volumes and networks, augmentation providers can package teams at very competitive rates. The economies of scale make augmentation a cost-effective way to grow your software team versus hiring each role individually.

Employee augmentation takes the headaches out of hiring and managing developers. It's a flexible, cost-effective way to scale your engineering team and accelerate development. If your company needs additional software talent, consider augmentation for plug-and-play teams tailored to your needs.