What Benefits Can Outstaffing Bring to Your Company?
Outstaffing is not a new kid on the business block, but for some reason, it is still confused with outsourcing. Beetroot doesn’t enjoy these — we think both of them remove focus from individuals and from the ambition of fully integrating them with the in-house team. At the same time, this terminology is well-established in the industry, so there’s no easy way to avoid it reliably over time.
Before we jump into the discussion of outstaffing services, let’s see how it differs from outsourcing.
It starts with the realization that you need to hire a dedicated development team abroad, outside of your country. This decision is usually backed by lower costs and talented professionals that neighboring countries can offer.
If you need project-based help, you’d most likely go for outsourcing. Within this model, you’ll hire an outsourcing company and they will forward your project to a team of developers. This team can simultaneously work on several projects for different companies. You’ll never know it because you won’t have a chance to talk to your developers directly.
If you need more dedicated cooperation, outstaffing is a better option. Within this model, you will also hire an external contractor who will build a team for you. But, unlike an outsourcing team, this one will be totally dedicated to your project and responsible for its quality. Basically, the team would become an extension of your in-house crew, only working from another country. You’ll talk to your employees regularly, discuss your projects and their performance, and do everything that it takes to become a tightly bonded team. Only, in this case, the outstaffing company will take care of all recruitment and administrative issues instead of you.
Apart from chatting with your programmers’ squad on a daily basis, outstaffing can be beneficial in other ways. Here are five advantages that outstaffing can offer:
Better control over the project
Since there is only one project (or one company’s projects) on your team’s plate – and it’s yours – you can expect that your outstaff team will focus on it solely. The outstaffing model allows you to avoid miscommunication and delays, which can happen when third parties are involved. Too many chefs spoil the broth, as they say. You can always get in touch with your team directly to discuss features, edits, and improvements. This leads us to the next point:
Better quality
We’re not saying that the quality of outsourced projects is worse – it can be quite good, indeed. But being solely dedicated to one project allows developers to spend more time on learning its inner workings, and polishing it to its greatest. As a result, you can expect your remote team to add a lot of value to your company beyond the core software delivery.
Better prices
Let’s be honest – building a team in another country is a tough business case to make if there is no financial incentive. Luckily, outstaffing tends to decrease expenses while also doing a pretty good job of preserving output quality. The thing is, popular outstaffing countries, like Ukraine, have considerably lower salaries and maintenance costs. On the other hand, Ukrainian software developers and other specialists have experience and skills that rival or exceed many companies’ home markets. Adding these two factors up gets you a win-win.
Team flexibility
We all want to see our projects grow and prosper. Sometimes we succeed to scale our business to the highest heights. But sometimes we need to put projects on the back burner just to stay focused. In any case, outstaffing gives you better flexibility to change the size of your team as need dictates. You can add new developers or reduce the team to just one person, easier and faster than with other models. With the outstaffing model, you can more pragmatically act out team-related decisions or strategies that are tailored to your сompany’s well-being.
Thorough recruitment process
There is a lot of fish in the sea, as they say. In order to find the best candidates, you need to spend some time on the recruitment process. Together with hired HR consultants, you will be able to review the candidatures of your future dedicated developers and talk to them in advance. This is different from more traditional outsourcing models, where people are simply provided to you – whether they’re good cultural fits or not. By spending time on hand-picking team members, not only will you build a better understanding of their skills and experience but also of their personalities and values. Ans this is essential for building a great team in the long term.
Of course, outstaffing has some drawbacks. You’ll need to invest your personal time, resources and leadership in order to end up with a truly good team of developers. But nothing that is worth doing is easy. If you have decided to strengthen your in-house team with external capacity, outstaffing is a strong contending route to take.
