Thinking about hiring an IT Staff Augmentation Company for 2023? Are staffing agencies worth it? Here’s what you need to know:

What exactly is IT Staff Augmentation?

IT Staff augmentation outsourcing is a scalable solution that allows companies to bring highly skilled IT talent onto their team without assuming the risks and downsides of hiring and onboarding full-time employees, like healthcare, taxes or compliance.

Now that we’ve refreshed the meaning of staff augmentation, it is time to learn why and how this model is different from other talent outsourcing methods, the benefits IT staff augmentation can bring to your organization, and what you need to keep in mind when choosing a hiring partner. 

IT Staff augmentation company vs traditional staffing agency: what’s the difference?

Although these concepts might look alike in some ways, and have overlapping aspects, there are also many differences we will be going through in this article that can help you determine if staffing agencies are worth it, and what you should consider before picking a provider. 

How they source talent

The majority of staffing agencies tend to find team augmentation resources in the same places everyone else would, job boards, professional platforms, and any other source where job seekers might be available. 

Just like any other recruiter would, agencies conduct several interviews, check cultural fit and present the best candidates to the employer. Based on that information, the employer is the one in charge of making a decision, while the agency takes care of allocation. On the other hand, BEON.tech takes care of all areas concerning the developer. This includes talent motivation, mentoring, and all the paperwork required by each country. Although the offer might be great, agencies sometimes struggle with reach, and even if they manage to contact a high volume of developers, they might lack the trust or reputation sought-after developers are looking for before moving on to their next project, so it is a highly-volatile market. 

At BEON we know the success of any project that relies on staff augmentation lies in the talent discovery process, that is why we are always on the lookout for the top IT experts and have an evergreen -and exclusive- pool of candidates with proven experience, and outstanding skills ready for their next big challenge.

Not only do we select the cream of the crop of Latin American engineers, but also cater the opportunities to their needs and wants, which makes them voluntarily stop listening to other offers. 

How they structure the recruitment process

Typically for agencies, a candidate selection process would be like this:

Employer or company reaches out, the job description is created, candidates are recruited, filtered, and selected, the employer approves the decision, the offer is sent, signed and the onboarding begins, or that is how it should go…

Considering how competitive things are in the development market, skilled candidates often receive several proposals at the same time, and without proper induction, they are not to blame if they accept a more attractive offer. The opposite scenario, where the candidate signs an offer immediately but it is not what the company expected, can also happen. 

Considering that the staff augmentation model is often used to ramp up the current capacity of the hiring company in little time, we have been consistently refining the process to make it ASAP, as smooth as possible. 

We start by creating a realistic, descriptive, and attractive job description, and see if there are any profiles on our already-vetted candidate pool, or the waiting list, that would be a potential match. If so, which happens 99% of the time, we share about the project and sell it to the candidate.

Only once we have ensured compatibility, and created interest on the candidate’s end, can we proceed with the interviewing process. Another must during this process is to include a technical assignment or coding challenge, which allows us to put specific skills to the test. We tailor our assessments for each client to ensure their effectiveness and relevance.

What they consider success to be

The highest cost of an employee? Replacement. Imagine you have invested time and money in a technical staff augmentation process. Everything seems to have turned out great, the resource finally gets the gist of your platform’s code but, all of a sudden, they hand in a 15-day notice. This is, in fact, more common than we think.

---

The highest cost of an employee? Replacement. A Latin American developer gets 17 job offers per month on average, so retention is key.

---

Hiring agencies don’t tend to consider many factors that contribute to retention, as they focus mainly on filling a position, not what happens after. This approach can turn what seemed a successful win, into a headache, due to incredibly high turnover rates, and, instead of saving the company some bucks, it forces them to repeat the process over and over again. In the end, not assessing  will cost more than having hired a full-time employee in the first place. 

On the flip side, we’ve worked with top-tier talent for the past 10 years and from that experience, we were able to capture and outline their reasons for leaving a workplace and came up with actionable strategies to prevent that:

Top issues why developers quit

• Intermediaries get the biggest chunk of the paycheck making talent susceptible to offers on Linkedin.
• Not making progress in their careers.
• Lack of feedback in both directions.
• Not having the chance to work in areas of interest, creating a loss of motivation.
• Being burned out, working overtime, and having a poor work-life balance.

Our solutions

• Win-win framework based on transparency and visibility. We only charge a small, fixed fee. Engineers get the biggest chunk of the paycheck, apart from full ownership of raises, bonuses, and benefits. 
• Bi-directional feedback is encouraged, and a must, to make sure expectations on both ends are being met and satisfaction levels are as high as they can be.   
• Aside from standard benefits like a new Macbook pro, psychotherapy, English lessons, and unlimited access to courses in Udemy, we fly our devs to the office to start building a relationship with them and make them feel part of something bigger.
• We have a Talent Experience Management Program in place which is dev-focused. A career coach designs an evolution path to keep developers learning and motivated. 

---

Implementing mentorship, cultural, and retention strategies made us achieve an average retention of +2 years for our senior tech talent in 2021.

---

This last point is one of the main differentiators. Our Talent Experience Framework helps us proactively address attrition problems by focusing on the growth and wellbeing of our developers, which in turn improves their motivation and performance and ultimately benefits the company as a result.

As businesses tend to have little to no time to come up with a challenging and rewarding career plan, and actively enhance the cultural aspects at the same time, we take on those responsibilities. We achieve this by assigning a TEM (Talent Experience Manager) to each developer from day one, and presenting them with a flexible 6-month agenda that consists of:

• Onboarding support and closure
• Feedback loop
• Bi-yearly reviews 

We work with people, and people’s interests and desires are subject to change, the key is knowing how to adapt to those changes while still being productive, and shaping them into a future that excites developers.

How they ensure the expectations will be met

At BEON.tech we pride ourselves in the quality of our developers, and it is no coincidence that our clients agree on that being one of the points that’d make them choose us again as their onboarding partner. We can achieve an outstanding level thanks to a process we’ve refined year after year. 

First of all, we count on a wide pool of qualified candidates, and due to the company’s positioning they often come looking for opportunities, we don’t have to reach out every time we get a new position to be filled. 

This  is a competitive advantage when compared to other agencies, which rely on organic outreach to find the best candidates, which allows us to find specific skills and secure talent.

From these already qualified candidates, we only hire the top 3% of talent. Some may say this is too selective, but for us, it is what sets us apart and ensures that we consistently achieve exceptional results rather than settling for less.

The following are the keys to keep bringing the very best to the table each time:

Talent mining

We have a dedicated team of HR experts actively looking for profiles with experience and sought-after skills. In 2022, we sourced 360,000 profiles, vetted 6,000, and introduced 600 to clients.

Inbound candidates

The talent-oriented focus we have been preaching since day one -investing in wellbeing, career plan, motivation, and productivity- has finally paid off, now being the company that engineers dream of working for.

Hiring pipeline

Not only do we look at technical skills, for which we require an assessment completion in order to identify “keepers” but also for communicational, problem-solving, leading & team-building skills, in other words, cultural match. We see the potential and are able to immediately determine if the talent is the kind of engineer we are looking for to grow our pool of highly-qualified workforce.

So…what’s the best solution for me?

For all the above mentioned reasons, and more, you should bear in mind that an agency might be the default option but not the best. A hiring partner that understands and actively focuses on improving the experience of clients and developers, working as if we were all in the same team, which is what actually happens, and aiming for long-term fulfilling relationships might be what you should be looking for.

BEON.tech is a software and HR company that connects the brightest Latin American talent with the most innovative and disruptive U.S. companies. We provide dedicated teams and staff augmentation as your nearshore software development partner. 

One of the reasons we stand out is that we recruit the best talent from 20 countries across Latin America with superior academic levels and English fluency. Engineers & developers ready to start working and help you meet your business goals.

We thrive to understand the company’s needs, culture and expectations to provide quality talent quickly. And as if that was not enough we onboard developers to your company, take care of cultural integration and mentorship so you can focus on growth. Contracts, payroll, labor costs, vacations, replacements, and employee retention all rest with us as your software development partner.

Not sure yet if it is us who you’d like to work with? Book a discovery call with one of our matching experts today or register to get free access to our customized mine of talent.