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Koombea: Your Staff Augmentation Partner
Every business needs a dedicated partner they can trust. Unfortunately, it is too easy to hire the wrong talent and invest in the wrong development projects in the IT world. Koombea is proud to help our valued partners augment their in-house teams with the top development talent. We have been providing world-class team augmentation services for over a decade.
At Koombea, our IT staffing services will provide your business with the top-tier talent it requires in a timely fashion. Whether you are looking for a single team member with a specific skill set or knowledge base or an entire team of talent, Koombea can help your business find the extra talent it needs to accomplish its goals.
The Koombea staff augmentation team will help your business gain immediate access to talent for your short-term job positions. While we find skilled employees like DevOps engineers and QA engineers to augment development teams, we still encourage our partners to interview candidates to ensure they are extremely satisfied with the candidate or candidates we have found for them.
If you don’t think you can build a successful relationship with the candidate we have provided, we will find you another until you are satisfied. Hiring remote developers is not an easy task, especially if you are not well-versed in the technical details of your project. At Koombea, we are development experts, and we guarantee that we can help you find developers that possess the proper combination of technical and soft skills. Our goal is to provide augmented staff that gels with your company culture and provides the skills necessary to accomplish the specific outcome your business has in mind.
The Benefits of Staff Augmentation
There are many benefits associated with staff augmentation. However, before you decide if this is the right approach for your company, you should consider the following benefits associated with staff augmentation services:
Affordable Access to World-Class Development Talent
Development talent is not cheap. Staff augmentation services allow your business to bring some of the best development talent available globally into your organization and team on a short-term basis. Most companies don’t require specialized technical development talent all the time. Instead of spending the money required to hire full-time development talent, use staff augmentation to access their skills and complete your project.
If you want to quickly integrate talented software developers into your team to increase its knowledge base and capacity, staff augmentation is the best choice for your organization. Hit the ground running and get the technical skills necessary to complete your project before reaching the deadline.
Simple Hiring Process
Hiring full-time employees is costly in terms of money and time. Plus, if you don’t know how to vet technical skills and knowledge, your business could waste valuable time and hiring resources on the wrong candidate. Staff augmentation benefits businesses that need talent to augment their existing teams because the hiring process is simplified.
Instead of figuring out whether the candidate you are interviewing has the right skills for your project, trust a staff augmentation partner like Koombea to find individuals with the right skills and experience. Then, when you interview our selected candidates, you can be sure that they have the skills and experience you need. This gives your hiring team a chance to make sure our candidates are the right fit culturally without getting into the technical minutiae that might be out of their range of expertise.
Scalability
Every business wants to be able to scale on-demand. However, scalability is often not something readily available to companies when it comes to labor. IT staff augmentation gives businesses the ability to scale their development teams as needed. In most cases, your company won’t need specialized software development personnel on staff full-time.
When projects demand certain skills, use staffing services to easily scale up to meet demand. When the project concludes, and there are no longer tasks for the developers you hired, you don’t have to keep them on the payroll. IT staff augmentation is the closest any business will get to on-demand development staffing. It can be very beneficial to companies that utilize it adeptly as their needs change.
Our Staffing Services
Koombea is proud to offer comprehensive staffing services to assist your existing project, help your company utilize new technologies and modern tools, and more. Typically, companies seeking temporary workers seek team augmentation or a dedicated team. Both approaches work well but are best suited for different things. Take a look at our staffing services to see which option is most aligned with your current needs.
Team Augmentation
Team augmentation is one of our most popular staffing services. Through this approach, your company hires one or a few candidates we pre-screen for you. These employees join your in-house development teams and are managed by your company and project manager. Companies choose this option when they need to add skills or additional knowledge to their team.
Team augmentation can help your project move up to two times faster. Of course, the team augmentation approach is not right for every business. Still, this approach is best suited for businesses with established development teams that require specific skills or additional talent to meet a tight deadline. Team augmentation is a great way to give your in-house developers a much-needed boost on a temporary basis.
Dedicated Team
Do you require more than a few additional team members? The dedicated team option might be the best staffing solution for your project. Instead of supplying a few high-quality candidates, if you choose to go the route of a dedicated team, Koombea will assemble a world-class development team to handle specified project tasks and coordinate with your in-house team or partners.
Koombea provides experienced project managers to oversee and coordinate the dedicated team we supply for your project. The dedicated team approach is your best option when you are working on multi-team projects and need to control the project's overall progress.
Managed IT Services
Managed services are not quite the same as the other staff augmentation services we offer at Koombea, but they fill a need that your business might lack. For example, suppose you don’t have an internal IT department, team, or employee. In that case, your business might find it helpful to hire a custom software development company like Koombea to manage your IT infrastructure and provide ongoing support.
Our team can provide IT environment stability for your company. We will routinely monitor your IT infrastructure and manage the IT operations of your company. While this service is not exactly staff augmentation, you can think of it as service augmentation. Without a team managing your IT infrastructure, your business could be in trouble if security or technical issues arise with your IT architecture.
Scalable Staffing Models Regardless of Size
Most staffing services follow the same staff augmentation model for small and large team augmentation requests. However, applying the same model to all staffing requests regardless of size is not scalable and harmful to the end client. At Koombea, we take a different approach because we value scalability and want your project to be successful. Therefore, to meet varying outsourcing goals and scale accordingly, we use two different staffing models.
Small Staffing Model
We use our small staffing model for companies seeking to hire one or two new employees. We can apply our small staffing model to projects looking for up to five or six skilled employees but stretch further than this, and the model starts to break down and cause inefficiencies. Koombea’s small staffing model is the traditional outsourcing company model. It looks like this:
- Koombea provides your company with a few resumes to review
- Your company interviews the candidates you like the most
- If you like one or more of these candidates, a contract is created
- The candidate takes the job and begins working on your project
Our small staffing model is the same model that staffing services will use for all requests, large or small. We know this model is tried and true, but issues arise when you want to hire a large extended team.
The important thing for you to understand is that staffing companies do not have skilled tech talent waiting on the sidelines for work to pop up. These jobs are too valuable, and these professionals are too skilled to be sitting idly by. The small staffing model breaks down when you need to hire a large team because it is very difficult for recruiters to find the necessary talent to fill the request.
Remember, recruiters need to spend money to find talent. When there is a large staffing request, there is almost no incentive for a staffing service to spend the financial resources necessary to try and fill the request. Therefore, the staffing model they use is inefficient. However, instead of turning away business, these companies will subcontract the work and hope for the best.
Ultimately, this practice leads to long waits for talent and an influx of low-quality candidates. At Koombea, we have a better, more scalable, and effective approach to large team staffing.
Large Staffing Model
At Koombea, we know that the traditional staffing model is ineffective for large team requests. We have seen it time and time again. As a result, we have developed a scalable large staffing model to help fill staffing requests and build large, dedicated teams. Here is what our staffing model looks like for large staffing requests:
- Meet Koombea, get to know our executives, engineers, and project managers
- Review our development processes and augmentation playbook, get client references, and do your due diligence
- Agree to a staffing contract with Koombea upfront for a team commitment
- Review resumes and conduct interviews with provided development talent
- Choose the people you like the most; they are committed to your company from day one and report to your team directly
Trust is the primary difference between the traditional staffing model and our large staffing model. Instead of selling you candidates, we are selling you Koombea. Typically, companies don’t spend money on staffing until they choose a candidate and create a contract. This works well when you only need a few people. However, when you want to build a large remote team to supplement your in-house development team, it is far more effective and efficient to agree to a contract upfront.
We believe in the quality of our staffing services and development processes. At Koombea, we will illustrate how we operate and introduce you to our business leaders so that you feel fully confident partnering with us for your staffing needs.
We know that you want to control the talent you hire to augment your team. In our large staffing model, you still have control over every candidate you bring on. Plus, by agreeing to a contract upfront, every candidate you like will immediately be committed to your company.
At Koombea, we understand that upfront contracts are rare in the staff augmentation industry. However, we do this to guarantee the quality of every candidate we present to your business. We don’t work with hiring subcontractors because we can’t guarantee the quality of their candidates. So instead of focusing on every position you need to fill, find a recruitment partner like Koombea that can send you quality resumes and the top development talent to fill your company’s open positions.
IT Staff Augmentation Warning Signs to Be Aware Of
If you’re reading about our IT staff augmentation services, chances are you are shopping around before you make a decision. Unfortunately, there are a lot of recruiters that utilize less than reputable tactics to secure business. At Koombea, we pride ourselves on offering quality staffing solutions in a transparent and collaborative manner.
However, not all companies operate in the same way. Therefore, if you’re looking for IT staff augmentation and come across any of the following warning signs, you should strongly reconsider the staffing company you are working with.
Yes Is the Only Answer
It is great when your needs can be met in minimal time, but unfortunately, things don’t always work out this way. If the staff augmentation provider you are speaking with answers all of your questions with yes, you should be concerned about the quality of the candidate they will provide you.
For example, suppose you ask for five Ruby on Rails developers that can start next month. If your staffing service partner says yes, they can deliver this; you should be skeptical. Yes, this company may know of five Ruby on Rails developers that just became available, but no staffing service has talent sitting on the bench waiting for your call. Remember, talent does not sit on the sidelines.
In all likelihood, when you ask for five Ruby on Rails developers to start next month, the staffing company furiously starts contacting subcontractors to fill the role. Ultimately, this will lead to poor results. The truth is in almost every instance, you will need to recruit to fill a role, but this is why you choose a skilled staff augmentation partner like Koombea. We will handle the heavy lifting associated with recruiting and send you resumes to review.
Bait and Switch
The bait and switch staffing tactic is far too common in this industry. If you are not familiar with how this works, a staffing company will send you the resume of a highly skilled individual. Your company will review the resume, fall in love with the candidate, and you might even get to interview this person. However, when it comes time to ink a contract and hire, this person will have just been hired for another job.
In place of the candidate you liked, the unscrupulous staffer will send you another candidate with a similar skill set but less experience, fewer qualifications, etc. The replacement person might be skilled in their own right, and they might be a great fit for your project and team. However, the replacement candidate will never be as good as the candidate that originally got your attention.
Why would a staff augmentation company do this? Companies do this to get your attention and gain your trust. In all likelihood, the candidate with the resume that impressed you was probably never available. Yet, since you saw one quality candidate from this company, you think they will be able to deliver similar results even if the candidates they send to you never live up to this reality.
Lack of Understanding
If your company is augmenting its staff with technical talent, the recruitment partner presenting the candidates to your company should understand your needs better than you do. After all, if you had a firm understanding of the technical details, you wouldn’t need a partner to help you augment your staff with the right talent.
If your staffing partner doesn’t understand your needs or your project, they will never be able to deliver a candidate that meets them. We understand how difficult it can be to interview and vet skilled developers. How can you test their proficiency and skill when you lack the skills you are hiring for?
Make sure that the IT staff augmentation services your company employs fully understand the needs of your project. If you feel like your staffing partner doesn’t understand your needs, they likely don’t.
Some of the Brands that Trust Us
About Koombea
We have been designing and developing world-class websites, apps, and other digital solutions since 2007. We have worked with some of the most innovative brands in the world, from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 companies. In addition to our development services, we also provide staff augmentation. Our experience developing a wide range of different digital products informs and drives our staffing services.
We would love to learn more about your business, operations, and current staffing needs. Contact us today to speak with an experienced staff augmentation partner about your vision and technical needs. We understand how difficult it can be to find the right people for your team, and we want to help. At Koombea, we want to be your IT staff augmentation services partner.