Across the country, teams are looking for ways to get more done without hiring more people. And many of these organizations are accomplishing this seemingly impossible task through staff augmentation consultants.
In fact, it’s estimated that companies will spend over $80B globally on staff augmentation this calendar year.
What’s causing this seemingly sudden uptick in staff augmentation?
Sometimes, teams simply need more skilled professionals to get a project done. And staff augmentation can help with that. Deloitte’s 2024 survey identified “access to talent” as the #1 driver for companies adopting outsourced services.
But the bigger benefits come from a strategic approach of bringing in the exact right people with the exact right skills and experience to achieve business objectives. At G2O, we call this Talent For Outcomes.
Is this approach right for you? And if so, how can you make sure you’re doing it the right way with the right partner?
Six Reasons Companies Use Outside Consultants to Augment Their Tech, Data, Experience, and Product Teams:
1) Economic Instability
Hiring consultants and embedding experts is a key part of many teams’ plans in any economic situation. But the benefits of staff augmentation become even more obvious when things are a little unstable. Whether a company is in the midst of a hiring freeze or they’re simply hesitant to make long-term investments in recruiting, hiring, and training new team members, bringing in an outside expert to help with a certain project or for a certain amount of time makes even more sense when economic forecasts are unclear.
2) Need for Short-Term Expertise
Often, teams need someone with experience in a highly specialized area, but they need that skill set for only a limited window of time. Hiring a full-time employee for such reasons would be wasteful in any economic conditions. Bringing in a consultant or embedding a temporary team member with those skills can not only get a team through their specific project, but taking this approach can also enable the existing team to learn from the outside expert and apply those learnings going forward. Over half of businesses reported improved efficiencies and quicker time-to-market by augmenting their staff with outside consultants.
3) Access to a Deeper Pool of Talent, Including Niche Players
By working with a strong partner, organizations can reliably and consistently access professionals with highly valuable, highly specialized skills. Not only are these areas of expertise skills that the team does not regularly need, but they’re also often skills that are difficult to find in a pool of typical applicants. These niche specializations could be an uncommon coding language, a highly specific type of QA or automation tool, complex data engineering, enterprise software platforms, data visualization, UX/UI, or any other skill set the organization needs right now, but might not need on an ongoing basis.
4) Need to Maintain Focus on Core Business Functions
By collaborating with a trusted partner to supply experienced consultants who fit both the technical and the cultural requirements, teams can spend less time recruiting, interviewing, vetting, and onboarding, and more time focused on their core business functions.
5) Pressures to Reduce Risk and Time-To-Hire
Hiring full-time team members requires a significant amount of time – time that teams often don’t have when pressures are high and timelines are short. And bringing on new full-time team members also brings with it the risks associated with missing the mark during the hiring process. By engaging a reliable partner, you can have the right team members working with you in days instead of months. And if, for any reason, you no longer want or need the person, you don’t have all the hassles, costs, and risks associated with letting someone go.
6) Desire for Improved Flexibility and Scalability
The biggest benefit of augmenting your team with the right consultants might just be the additional flexibility. With an experienced staffing partner that has a deep bench of diverse skills, you can quickly scale your team’s capacity to achieve almost any business objective.
Five Questions to Help Determine if Staff Augmentation Consultants are Right for You:
As you can see, there are many reasons to leverage the benefits of consultants and embedded team members. But how do you decide if and when to pull the trigger. Answering “yes” to even one of these questions likely indicates your team could benefit from a little outside help.
1) Do you have a short-term need for technical expertise?
Almost by definition, this is when you need a consultant. By bringing in one or a couple of temporary team members with skills your team currently does not possess, you can quickly and efficiently achieve a goal that might otherwise remain unobtainable.
2) Do you need to rapidly scale-up your team?
By bringing on experienced professionals who can be both hands-on team members and coaches, you can quickly, confidently, and sustainably grow your team. Then, once your team has reached the right size with the needed skills, the consultants can gracefully step aside or take on a similar role on another team.
3) Are you unsure how long a current need will last?
Consultants give you the flexibility to bring on needed skills, even if you don’t know if that need will be ongoing or temporary.
4) Do you need help reshaping processes and establishing best practices?
Many people – and even many staffing professionals – think of staff augmentation as little more than providing bodies (hands on keyboards). But that mindset is limiting. Embedded experts and consultants can also come in to improve processes, identify challenges and solutions, provide vital coaching, serve as mentors, establish best practices, and more.
5) Are you simply short-staffed?
Sometimes, the workload requires more people than a team has. If the increased need is short-lived, outside experts can help you get through the busy period and then leave when they’re no longer needed. If the need is expected to be long-term, experienced consultants can fill the gap and even provide coaching while you’re growing the team with full-time employees.
Four Tips to Ensure You’re Getting the Right Outcomes From Your Talent Consulting Partner:
1) Look for a stable team with broad expertise.
At G2O, over 80% of our associates are salaried employees, and we have experts in nearly every area of technology, data and analytics, CX, and product development – including full stack development, software QA, test automation, cloud engineering, Dev Ops, project delivery, data engineering and integration, data visualization, enterprise platforms, and UX/UI design.
2) Ensure there’s a proven talent-matching process.
Through our Talent For Outcomes process, we ensure the consultants we introduce to clients are always a strong match for both technical skills and culture. And not only is our process reliable and accurate, it’s also fast. Our time-to-fill is 30% faster than the industry average.
3) Find someone who will stand behind their placement.
At G2O, over 95% of our placements have no performance issues and no resignations (>90 days, rolling 12 months). But on those rare occasions when things don’t work out perfectly, we’ll work with you to ensure you’re satisfied – whether that means directly resolving the issue with the current consultant, bringing in a different consultant, or even providing you credit to make up for lost time.
4) Identify a partner who can provide more than just people.
While our Talent For Outcomes team is an incredibly valuable resource, it is only part of what we do at G2O. Organizations across the nation also rely on us to transform their Employee and Customer Experiences, develop technology solutions, provide robust data and analytics services, and develop new products and services. Having a single organization you can turn to for this wide variety of staffing, tech, CX, data, and product solutions saves you time, increases your efficiency, saves you money, and ensures better integration of your solutions.
Ready To Talk?
If you have a specific role (or a long list of roles) that you need filled, or you just want to learn more about how our Talent For Outcomes approach to strengthening your teams can help you achieve your business objectives during the current business and economic environment, let’s talk.