5 Steps Towards Successful Cooperation With IT Staffing Agency
If you want to beat the competitors you need to build your product with experienced IT experts who know how to implement innovative solutions. If your team is missing such members an IT Staffing Agency can help you with this task. However, choosing the right one may be challenging mainly due to the large number of such companies that offer staffing services. There are at least several aspects worth looking at while searching for the perfect IT staff provider, as for example carefully reading the reviews and case studies.
Unfortunately, signing the contract with the prominent IT Staffing Agency who gathers vetted IT experts, and cares about the quality of their work doesn’t guarantee you that the cooperation will be successful. You need to properly prepare your company and your development team to use the full potential of staff augmentation service. According to research made by Glassdoor companies with a strong onboarding process improve any new hire productivity by over 70%.
Another statistic that refers to the importance of proper communication procedures at work shows that miscommunication can costs companies with 100 employees an average of $420,000 per year. This article contains information about 5 steps that should be implemented before and during the cooperation with an IT Staffing Agency so that nothing interferes with the effective work of both parties.
How do IT Staffing Agencies work?
Companies that need IT specialists reach out to IT Staffing Agencies and pay them for the service of finding the right employees. In this case, most often it will be developers who have the required skills, experience, and expertise. Such service doesn’t require any recruitment process from the client-side and it’s based on permanent hiring. However, this model of cooperation may vary.
For example, Blue House offers two types of services:
- IT staff augmentation – augmenting the client’s internal development team with professionals who are in our IT Community already,
- Dedicated team – building the entire/temporary team of IT experts required by the project who cooperate with the client until the completion of this project.
Typically, the IT Staffing Agency is responsible for paying the selected candidate to work for the client’s company. The client signs a contract with an agency, not with a specialist. Most of the IT Staffing Agencies make their money by taking a percentage based on the contractor's salary or charges the client an hourly rate for the developer's work. Also, the professional IT Staffing Agency takes responsibility for the chosen expert, stays in touch with the client, and monitors the cooperation.
IT Staffing Agencies have several ways of building their workforce. Job seekers apply to specific open jobs through the career page or simply contact them through the open position form. Such companies can also use the help of their recruiters to find the proper candidate for the client or they take advantage of their contact database and reach out to specialists who took part in their recruitment processes in the past for a similar position.
For Blue House referrals are the most important source of applicants. When an existing Blue House Community member recommends another specialist we know they have been working together and verified each other's skills on a project. We verify the skills of each new person who wants to join us anyway, even the recommended one, but it significantly speeds up the entire process of searching for an experienced IT expert.
What to remember when deciding to cooperate with an IT Staffing Agency?
Your outsourced developer (or the development team) hired through IT Staffing Agency will act as a part of your company. Therefore, it’s important to share all the project documentation and way of working in the company with them. You should also treat IT Staffing Agency as your partner not only as of the provider you contact once or twice. Consultants who work there care about the positive outcomes of this cooperation, and have a lot of business and technical knowledge which they willingly share with you. What else can positively impact the cooperation?
1. Assigning roles and responsibilities
Even if you are a decision-maker and decide about using a certain service, it doesn’t need to mean that you are also the one who leads the project development. The best idea is to delegate a Project Owner who will help you build a transparent workplace where a dedicated team is aware of who has all the information required to move forward with specific tasks. You may also need a Project Manager who will act as a link between the various team members, so nobody is confused about the workflow and priorities.
2. Trust in the service provider on choosing developers
IT Staffing Agencies have developed vetted processes of acquiring and tech screening specialists. They make sure that the people they recommend will represent their company in the best way possible. The same rule applies to assigning a project to a developer – they take into consideration aspects like required experience, seniority level, and personality traits. They gather all the necessary information before they propose any IT expert to you. Based on data they make a decision about who fits your project and take that burden off of your shoulders.
3. Setting up communication workflow
As mentioned earlier, both sides need to work as a single team to maximize the use and efficiency of both external and internal company members. Whilst the service provider is matching the right professionals with your project, you should use that time and check if the external team has the necessary privileges to handle dedicated tasks. Provide the access to digital tools used in the company, software, and documentation that describe your system architecture and product features. Create a dedicated channel for inter-company communication.
4. Properly onboarding your contractors
It’s true that skilled and experienced IT experts can start working on a project within days. However, it’s a mistake to leave them to fend for themselves. They need to understand the business domain you deal with and get to know the infrastructure implemented in the company. They can read the product documentation but nobody will explain it better than a Project Owner. Take some time to explain responsibilities and workflow – you don’t want to create unnecessary blockers for your outsourced specialists. Inform outsourced developers about the vision and main goals of your product. Be clear about what is their role in the project.
5. Staying in close contact and tracking progress
IT Staffing Agency with no access to measurement in place has little commitment to deliver on the project’s success. However, with the right measurement businesses can partly share project risks with their service provider and together look for the most suitable solution. Many factors can be taken into account when evaluating a developer's productivity. A good approach is to focus on the work outcomes instead of lines of code produced or hours worked. The product being deployed should be evaluated for stability, delivery time, and deployment frequency.
Summing up
Working with IT Staffing Agencies is a wise business decision, as it can help companies acquire their IT workforce and ensure the right mix and numbers of staff that represent the right skills and experience in a rapidly changing business environment. Using staff augmentation service eliminates the need for permanent hiring, reduces the time you spend screening resumes and conducting preliminary interviews, and gives you access to professionals who otherwise might not be available. Moreover, if you put some effort into the proper preparation of your company for cooperation with an outsourced professional and staffing agency, you significantly lower the risk of failure.
Connect with Blue House – an IT Staffing Agency with a passion for tech – to grow your business with a trusted hiring partner.
You may also want to read:
Don't miss out on any content that will help you to achieve desired outcomes and smoothly run IT projects.
