How to hire an IT specialist for the Time and Material format

How to hire an IT specialist for the Time and Material format

Digital transformations require skilled personnel. Due to the high demand for such specialists, it is often difficult to find a competent and valuable employee in the market.

The search can take months, causing stress, delayed deadlines, missed business opportunities, and financial loss.

Further in the text, you will find out who should hire an outstaffing company and what advantages this cooperation model has.

Outsourcing and outstaffing of technical specialists is one of the possible solutions with which you can quickly get the missing resources to help move your project forward. And the popularity of these destinations is only growing.

What’s the difference?

The concepts of outsourcing and outstaffing are often interchanged as synonyms. This is fundamentally not true.

Both terms are about working with external specialists, but there is a significant difference between them in terms of management and the format of interaction.

With outsourcing, you hire a separate company to develop the required solution based on your requirements. Your outsourcing partner is responsible for the project workflow and manages it from A to Z.

The manager does not need to worry about the selection of people in the team, equipment and resources.

He can focus on other business processes while the outsourced solution is assembled, tested, and eventually ready for use.

With outstaffing, you hire a dedicated team or one qualified professional who work remotely or locally on a project under your control.

Using the outstaffing of a special team as a service, the company, in addition to good qualified personnel, can also gain access to quite rare specialists, who are extremely few in the market.

In most cases, outstaffers work directly with your in-house team members to strengthen and expand the current project.

The manager or team leader manages the productivity and workflow of external programmers, analysts and other specialists and assigns tasks to them in accordance with the needs of the project.

An IT company that provides outstaffing services, in turn, takes responsibility for finding the professionals you need, hiring and administering them.

The combination of in-house developers and outstaff specialists is now extremely popular, especially among technology companies.

This often helps to reduce the time to market of projects without losing profits, and as a result, this type of workflow organization turns out to be extremely cost-effective.

Using the outstaffing of a special team as a service, the company, in addition to good qualified personnel, can also gain access to quite rare specialists, who are extremely few in the market.

However, organizing this company model requires strong technically savvy managers who are able to control the workflow, assign tasks to outside specialists, and ensure open communication and productivity between all participants in the process.

It is also worth considering the issue of technical security on the project, because a third-party specialist will need to be given access to certain data, processes and infrastructure.

Advantages of outstaffing over full-time employees

Outstaffing specialists are a progressive response to the business demand for solving narrow, highly technical, but not permanent tasks.

Why keep a specific analyst and developer on staff, if you can turn to his services as needed? In addition, the outstaff model does not require additional costs for recruitment, maintenance, insurance, taxes and other social benefits.

As a result, with highly qualified third-party specialists, almost any project will develop faster and the team will become more flexible.

What are the difficulties of introducing outstaffers?

Basically, there are two of them: communication and motivation. Since outstaffed team members often work in a different location (city or even country), sometimes there is a lack of communication between them and internal managers and programmers. You also need to be aware of cultural differences, weekends or time zones.

A lack of communication also leads to a decrease in motivation, because in order for an employee to join the team, even for a while, he needs additional communication in order to stay in the know, understand the general direction and focus on the project.

Managers and team leaders need to be ready to work with these issues and help external employees feel like part of a common cause.

How does outstaffing work?

When a company signs a contract, the partner it cooperates with takes over all legal, organizational and search processes. He helps at such stages as:

Recruiting

The outstaffing partner provides the client with talented IT specialists from his staff, and then, after the interview and approval of the candidacies by the client, he forms job offers to the finalists.

Onboarding

A partner can help you quickly dive into the process, provide all the tools you need to communicate and schedule tasks, such as an external employee’s time tracker.

Communication

The partner helps with tracking the precise fulfillment of obligations, conducting regular reporting, recording all actions and calculating the actual working time of an external IT specialist.

Processing feedback

The partner regularly collects feedback on specialists, processes it and solves any problems that may arise during the work of the customer and the outstaffer.

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