What is the secret to making a business more successful? 

Approximately 45% of businesses never make it past the first five years, with the failure rate rising to 65% when you approach the decade mark. These statistics released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, further establish that only 25 in 100 new businesses witness their 15th anniversary. 

While businesses are failing due to a multitude of reasons, among the biggest ones is investing in the wrong human capital. Underperforming and ineffective workers impact your business reputation, limit your growth and profit potential; they cause workflow interruptions, diminish your customer experience, and introduce an adverse cultural bias in your organization.  

To invest in the right personnel, choosing the right staff augmentation partner is key. We suggest taking a look at how you can discern the wheat from the chaff to choose the best staff augmentation solutions. 

1. Be super specific about your staffing needs

No matter how similar two businesses are, they cannot use identical staff augmentation solutions if they want to maximize their workflow productivity. Your business is unique, and its needs are similarly distinct. Coupled with the fact that there are many options when it comes to staff augmentation service providers, it can be hard to find the perfect fit. 

However, with the right formula, it shouldn’t be a tough nut to crack. The best place to start is by assessing your staffing needs. Here’s a template of how you could approach this:

• Determine what you need, e.g., let’s say a front-end developer
• Evaluate what type you need e.g. web or mobile? 
• Determine what specific front-end work you need help eg. UI design, etc.

The point is to be thorough about your exact needs so that you only filter out the right workers. A consultation with a specific department manager where the skills gap is, and HR executives, can help shed light on this faster. 

2. Do your homework on potential staffing vendors

Once you have all your options on the table, it’s now time to get your hands dirty and find the pick of the bunch. Doing so will involve determining whether the staff augmentation contractor you’re interested in has expertise and experience in your specific niche. 

If you require supplemental IT staff for database design, you’ll want to get a staff augmentation company with a history in designing efficient and reliable databases, for example. 

In a nutshell, you want to evaluate a vendor’s track record. To map out their work histories, you can choose to: 

• Gauge client satisfaction by talking to past clients
• Review the vendors’ portfolio and credentials
• Get testimonials and reviews from their website
• Read third-party reviews on impartial sources like Glassdoor
• Time to hire, onboard, and effectively manage the attrition (re-hire) gap

Afterward, you should have a clear idea about your staffing agency’s work ethic, expertise, and experience. 

3. Assess the agency’s global and local market power

Are you going for an offshore or onshore staffing arrangement? Maybe a mix of both to create a powerful hybrid plan? It all depends on your particular staffing needs and what arrangement would best serve you at the time.

If skillsets take precedence over location, and you wouldn’t mind working with remote staff provided they are skilled in an upcoming programming language, for instance, then you’ll want an IT staffing service that has the: 

• Infrastructure to hire & manage staff remotely
• Connections to find talent around the world
• Experience in technical remote hiring 
• Right outsourcing solutions that fit in with your IT budget
• Inclusion of Talented Remote staff can boost dollars saving that could otherwise be spent in other business growth activities
• For a global service organization, remote staff can inherently bring language diversity that could aid in handling specific client needs

At the end of the day, your staff augmentation agency should be able to offer you a nice diversity of quality outsourcing plans. Moreover, they should have good internal market reach as well as consider local influence if you’re eyeing in-person staffing solutions. 

4. Review the vendor’s communication protocols

Another important fact is the agency’s communication style and structure, with communication being important for all types of business. In fact, research finds that 80%  of people today rate their businesses poorly in terms of communication. 

So you’ll want to choose a vendor with clearly defined communication protocols, as this can affect: 

• Your project’s ability to meet its delivery date
• The competitiveness of products in the market
• The general success of your project 

The ideal staff outsourcing service should have a communication protocol that has clearly defined steps. It should also be practical and transparent, taking into account any location and time zone differences. 

With a good communications strategy, it becomes easier for businesses to measure supplemental staff performance. Problem solving also becomes simple for the team as well, and the same goes for KPI tracking. 

5. Don’t forget to go through contract proposals

While one-fit-all contracts aren’t always a bad thing, more often than not, they could be an indication that your IT staff augmentation service may not be the best choice. That’s because this may hint at a possible lack of experience to handle your technical project, as substantiated by a lack of software development-specific clauses, for instance.

So you’ll want to choose an IT staffing agency offering contract proposals that:

• Are highly detailed and specific to the particular role 
• Have favorable limitation of liability clauses
• Have clear “time of performance” clauses 

All these attributes are key to ensuring your business not only gets skilled augmented staff but also employees who can meet project deadlines comfortably. The staffing company should also be able to understand your company’s development environment and create bespoke work agreements in line with your unique needs.  

Where do you find the right workers for your business?

It can be a tough and cumbersome task to evaluate agencies as you search for the best staff augmentation service. So let’s cut right to the chase, and get you a staff augmentation provider who hits all the right notes. 

DADJ Inc has been in the business of providing staff augmentation solutions to companies around the world for years. In that time, they’ve amassed a strong local and international market influence, as well as offered tailor-made staffing solutions that have ensured a 100% success rate for all their projects.

For quality staff augmentation solutions, schedule your free DADJ Inc consultation to begin your journey to the pinnacle of your business’s potential by investing in the right employees.