How Can the IT Staffing Agency Support Your HR Department?

As soon as the organization grows above 40 employees a full-time human resource staff member is necessary for its smooth running. The HR department performs a wide variety of duties and is responsible for recruitment, onboarding, employee benefits, managing payroll, training and development, and keeping employees motivated, satisfied and happy at their workplace. All of these tasks aren’t easy since they refer to cooperating directly with people who have different needs, experiences, and expectations.

The bar is set even higher for human resources specialists that work for companies that have an extensive IT department. The market of development jobs is competitive which makes finding and recruiting IT professionals challenging. They also need to take care of developers’ satisfaction since this group of specialists tends to leave for a better offer if they aren’t tied to a company. On top of that, the HR department staff have other responsibilities so it’s hard to fit all the tasks into one job. Therefore, it is worth paying attention to IT staff augmentation services.

In this article, we show how the HR department can benefit from cooperation with an IT staffing agency and make their work easier and more efficient.

How hard is it to quickly find developers?

Internet is swamped with questions and tips on how to find developers. No wonder since the demand for jobs that include programming is growing 50% faster than the job market overall and there is no sign of it changing soon. Moreover, the United States and European Union face comparable skills challenges for similar technology domains and the notion of skill gaps which means that they compete with each other to acquire IT specialists - and there are still other regions of the world that are developing rapidly.

It is also significant that supply is not keeping pace with demand. Companies in the US had about 918,000 unfilled IT jobs in only three months of 2019, according to federal employment data analyzed by CompTIA, an IT trade association. Another research shows that there are nearly 3.7 million IT jobs in the US in 2021. The EU white paper on Growth of Europe (2017) estimates a potential gap of 700,000 IT workers in the EU by 2030.

Too few specialists is one problem, the other is the lack of the desired skills that are needed to develop modern technologies. For instance, companies find it hard for applicants with adequate skills to take on roles in emerging technologies like blockchain, cybersecurity, and AI. Such positions require specific languages and skills that demand both education and proper practice to refine. Therefore, it becomes so important to establish cooperation with technological partners, which may also be IT staffing agencies.

IT staffing agency helps to obtain competent personnel for IT jobs

As mentioned above, one of the difficulties that HR specialists face is finding developers who are experienced enough in specific languages, frameworks, and technologies. Even if, the remote work revolution increased the chances of finding the right IT specialist out of the global talent pool, it’s still time-consuming and challenging because of an increased number of job openings.

52% of recruiters admit competition from other recruiters has become significantly noticeable and they also claim to find 10% fewer candidates than they need to. IT staffing agencies either recruit employees on behalf of employers looking to fill positions or they have an extensive network of candidates already built and reach out to those who align with the job offer. This significantly shortens the process of looking for an expert.

Blue House, as an example, cooperates with clients on the basis of connecting them with IT experts who are already in their community. It’s a huge value for companies because it shortens the time needed to find developers required by a project. Another benefit is that those community members have senior experience which means they managed to develop a variety of skills - also the niche ones.

Read also 4 aspects to look at while choosing an IT staffing company.

IT staffing agency saves HR’s time by delivering vetted developers

The recruitment process itself has multiple and complex stages during which often many errors occur, which lead to their elongation. Moreover, finding and hiring developers often requires more time and resources than hiring for other company roles. Besides that, searching for IT talent and later screening them may take as much time. According to Glassdoor, the average length of an interview process for a software engineer in 2017 was 40.8 days.

Often an indispensable element of recruitment processes is also the preparation and review of a technical assessment. Its main purpose is to verify how a candidate deals with the code and whether is able to express their thoughts with a particular programming language. This task also requires either tech knowledge, help from the IT department, or paying for developer assessment platforms like HackerRank, Devskiller, Codility, or others.

When a company decides to cooperate with an IT staffing agency it only needs to spend time on proper role and project description and attending about two meetings with a representative of such an agency – who is often a technical person. Then, in our case, we screen our network of developers and see who is the right fit and represents the required skills and experience. All IT experts in the Blue House Community went through an interview and tech screening process earlier. What’s more, most of them were referred by other community members. It can be said that our developers have been double-checked.

Read also an article on smart ways to measure developer productivity.

IT staffing agency offers flexibility that modern companies need

“​​One of the solutions that can allow your business to continue to grow, even when experiencing a talent shortage, is to focus on the amount of work to be done on a given project rather than the number of permanent employees. According to data collected by Gartner, 32% of organizations are replacing full-time employees with contingent workers.” It means that companies don’t need to hire developers full-time to fill the gap in the development team and accomplish key IT projects. Outsourced developers work as efficiently as in-house employees.

Such cooperation also allows not only to shorten the recruitment process but also to optimize costs. How staff augmentation service can be less costly than hiring an in-house employee? Most companies think IT staffing is a very costly solution. When in fact, what can be really costly is keeping full-time developers when there are no new or ongoing projects. Staff augmentation service offers a possibility to scale up or scale down team members depending on the demand.

Another fact is that employers pay average employment costs worth nearly 25% of employees’ salaries, and these spendings are generated annually. The price of staff augmentation service often depends on the scope of work and the experience level of a dedicated specialist. When you use a staff augmentation service, you only pay for work that IT experts do for you and for skills and experience which they already have - outsourced developers don’t require additional training.

Summing up

When you cooperate with an IT staffing agency they as your service provider also take responsibility for tech screening and guarantee that you collaborate with tech-savvy professionals who are dedicated to your project. When you sum up all the above mentioned aspects you can realize that a staff augmentation solution should be perceived as a solution that can benefit your business. Blue House is a trusted partner that has helped many companies solve their recruitment and IT project development challenges. Find out more by visiting our website.