Top 7 Mistakes and misconceptions when hiring offshore developers through staff augmentation services.

If you ask, what are the best staff augmentation companies? It’s a tricky question to answer. Because the answer is subjective to the kind of project you have, project requirement, budget, management style, company culture, industry and many other reasons. So we will outline the common mistakes you have to avoid when hiring nearshore or offshore developers through staff augmentation services.

1) Lack of research

Even though staff augmentation sounds effortless compared to hiring to than hiring in-house or using staffing recruitment firms, you need to be thorough when selecting a service provider. You need to decide a country or a region where you want to hire your augmented staff. This decision will be basedbase on the timezone agility, language fluency cost and overall quality and reputation of the county as an offshore destination. Then you have to evaluate a service provider, and the following are a few criteria you need to keep in mind:.

• Is it a hiring firm or a software development company
• Do they offer end- to- end software development services including UI/UX, Quality assurance, hosting & maintenance
• Have they been involved in international software projects in the past
• Do they have the assets required to get the job done
• How reliable are they
• How long were they in business (most software startups fails within 2-5 years)
• What industries have they served
• Level of management and consultancy that they can offer
• Independent reviews from the past clients on B2B platforms such as Clutch & Good Firms.

If you can find a positive answer for all of the above, you can then evaluate their developers’ technologies and skills.

2) Not considering the organisation culture

When you are expecting results from your augmented staff, you need to make sure that your staff augmentation service provider has practiced a healthy organisational culture. For example, if their culture focuses on flexible work hours, their employees must be focused more on getting the job done. If the culture is about strict work hours, they must be committed to a time based rather than actual outcomes. It would be best if you consider all the other employee-related metrics such as compensation, growth opportunities, education and mentorship. This culture must reflect on the employees you hire. You can evaluate this factor by looking into their Glassdoor profile or Great Place to Work statistics.

3) Not choosing the suitable engagement model for each task.

Block Hours and Full-Time Equivalent are the most common engagement methods, and there are misunderstandings around them. There are no hard and fast rules that the Block hours are for short term, ad hoc requirements, and FTE is for the long term. You need to evaluate the tasks, resources and cost of each model when hiring. Finding a service provider experienced in project placement is key as they are a solution so that they will determine your requirements and allocate resources most efficiently.

4) Level of project management

Hiring an offshore developer(s) and assigning a task doesn’t mean they will carry out the job 

flawlessly. Both your in-house and augmented teams have to be managed to get the expected project results. If your service provider offers project managers through their FTE services, investing in a project manager to coordinate with your in-house team and the augmented team can provide you with better outcomes.

5) Focus only on the short term

When hiring a developer for a short period, you may not think thoroughly about the long run. When you have to go through an update or a troubleshooting, if you can’t find the same service provider to do that due to;

• Developers who worked for you resigned.
• The service provider went out of business.
• They don’t have the capacity to provide your requirements

Then you will have to start over by evaluating staff augmentation services, screening candidates and a considerable ramp-up time with transferring knowledge to the new developers. So even when you hire for a short period, consider hiring from an established service provider. This may cost you a bit extra since they are established, but the long term value they create is worth the cost.

6) Scaling the project team to fast track development

There’s an optimal number of developers for each software project. Even if you want to fast track a project with offshore developers, you need to understand that this won’t work for some projects and could even result in extra time. Ramp up time of new members, communication overheads and indivisible software tasks are few reasons why doubling your software team won’t linearly affect your development time. If you don’t invest in staff augmentation without this understanding, you might think of it as a failed model.

7) Evaluating the cost rather than the value

When given a choice, most company executives will think about the bottom line and choose the cost-effective option. This results in many project failures, which is why you need to consider the value for money. The best way to balance value and cost is to hire top talent from an affordable country where the cost of living is lower. This is why Maytech provides a hybrid module of staff augmentation services by utilising our Australian governance and project management skills and our delivery centre in Sri Lanka. According to Startup Genome, Sri Lanka is ranked among the top 20 global ecosystems that provide bang for your buck.

While outsourcing your IT services, you shouldn’t have to sacrifice your IT skill sets or communication skills. This can be accomplished by sourcing your technology delivery teams and services from Sri Lanka, where you can find exceptional IT employees with good written and verbal English abilities. Have a chat with one of our business consultants to find out how you can leverage your operations by utilising our hybrid staffing solutions.