4 ways resource augmentation can benefit your business

To keep up with the pace of change, organisations need tech professionals who can facilitate digital transformation and embrace emerging technologies. It can, however, be difficult to predict which specialist skills will be needed for each project and even harder to find and employ permanent employees who have all these skills. This is where resource augmentation can help…

Resource augmentation (RA) is a recruitment model involving the hiring of external tech talent on a contractual basis for specific projects in order to close skills gaps within teams. Employers can access niche technical skills as and when they need to, making it an economical, flexible and scalable method of sourcing tech talent.

Here are some of the ways in which adopting a RA model can benefit your business:

• Providing access to specialist skills
• Promoting scalability and flexibility
• Improving cost-efficiency
• Mitigating risk

Providing access to specialist skills

Our Technology Contractor Day Rate Guide 2024 shows that nearly three-quarters (74%) of organisations have struggled to access the talent they need to deliver key projects, with demand being even more acute in the public sector. RA can help to close skills gaps by providing access to tech professionals who have the specialist expertise that may not be available internally.

The creation of more accessible routes to skills has been a key driver for the rise in the adoption of RA, since it can be used as a vehicle to gain agile tech talent quickly and cost-effectively, while also broadening the skills pool available. In fact, our guide reveals that access to project-specific technical skills is the top reason that employers engage with tech contractors.

Here are the specialist skills that are most in demand among contractors:

1. Cloud
2. IT infrastructure
3. Architecture
4. Data and analytics
5. Projects and change management

Promoting scalability and flexibility

Meeting peaks in demand and ensuring flexibility in staffing costs are two key reasons that employers engage with tech contractors. One of the key benefits of RA is that it enables you to scale your workforce rapidly and efficiently, based on demand.

Instead of hiring full-time staff, you can integrate a team of skilled tech workers to deliver critical projects at short notice. The deployment of RA is faster than traditional recruitment methods because the adoption of dynamic onboarding processes means there’s a shorter time to competence for the specialised team.

Improving cost efficiency

Adopting a RA solution can improve your cost efficiency. By leveraging external tech talent at critical moments of your projects, you can avoid the traditional costs associated with hiring and maintaining full-time employees, including the money spent on recruitment, training and providing company benefits.

Through the RA model, tech contractors can be classified as part of your capital expenditure (CapEx) rather than your operating expenditure (OpEx), helping you to gain greater control over your budget and optimise your operational efficiency. Moreover, this is an effective way of building your tech team without increasing headcount, allowing you to overcome budgetary constraints and hiring freezes.

Mitigating risk

It’s important to mitigate risk wherever possible to ensure the success of your projects and RA achieves this by diversifying the source of expertise in your team, while reducing the legislative risk of long-term reliance on contractors.

Instead of solely depending on full-time internal employees to deliver projects, where the number of filled roles can be impacted by talent shortages and market fluctuations, RA allows you to access in-demand talent on demand, whenever you need additional support.

The structure of the RA model means that you can still take a leading role in managing contractors and the work given to them, to ensure team cohesion and the delivery of successful outcomes. You can utilise the contractors’ specialist skills in tasks where they’ll have the greatest impact and allow your internal teams to instead focus on your strategic initiatives and core business activities.

To find out more about the benefits of resource augmentation and how you can secure top tech contractors in your organisation to increase your capacity and capability, take a read of our Technology Contractor Day Rate Guide today.