Nearshore IT Staff Augmentation: Approach to Scaling Your Team

Why does your business may need nearshore staff augmentation? This approach opens up many opportunities to extend your IT team with minimum concerns regarding culture, time zone, and language alignment. You receive quick access to skilled talents in nearby countries without the long-term commitment of hiring full-time employees.

In this article, you’ll learn what nearshore IT staff augmentation is, discover what benefits this cooperation model serves to businesses needing qualified hires, and how to apply it.

Nearshore staff augmentation model allows companies to hire tech experts from nearby countries, usually within the same time zone or a few hours difference. Hiring nearshore combines overall cultural match, smoother communication options, and cost efficiency. This approach offers a quick level up for your existing team, enhanced productivity, and maintains consistent cooperation flow, all while staying agile and competitive.

Nearshore staff augmentation and nearshore IT outsourcing are both excellent strategies for hiring tech talents from nearby countries, but they cater to different business needs.

With nearshore staff augmentation, businesses can extend their in-house team by bringing in skilled professionals from nearby regions who work directly under the company’s management. This model is a perfect match for companies that need enhanced expertise while maintaining full control over the project's development processes.

Nearshore IT outsourcing, on the other hand, involves delegating entire projects or specific project-related tasks to a nearshore IT vendor who handles the development process from start to finish. This way, you can focus entirely on core operations while leaving the technical aspects to a trusted partner. The provider manages everything from team coordination to project delivery, offering a more hands-off solution while you are still involved strategically.

Summing up, nearshore staff augmentation is the best option to retain control and directly insert new specialists into your operations. Meanwhile, nearshore IT outsourcing is the better option when you want to focus on results and save additional time for your internal business tasks.

Below, you can examine a full comparison of nearshore staff augmentation vs. IT outsourcing in a more concise and easier-to-comprehend manner:

Nearshore team augmentation can definitely help your business deal with various software development challenges, like reducing project delays and streamlining resource allocation to optimize costs. Whether you're working with a nearshore team or looking for nearshore staff augmentation, this model provides benefits for businesses seeking flexibility.

Compared to offshore staff augmentation, nearshore augmentation offers cultural alignment and better communication, which are key advantages of nearshore services. By hiring a nearshore team, you can access highly skilled talent without time zone issues, ensuring smooth project management. Moreover, nearshore staff augmentation allows you to find the best talent suited for your specific technical requirements.

Let’s discuss 4 benefits of nearshore outstaffing:

Let’s say that you have trouble finding local tech specialists with specific technical skills. This process may definitely be time-consuming and overly competitive, especially in high-demand areas like mobile and website development services, data science, Machine Learning (ML), or Artificial Intelligence (AI). In this way, it may become a true struggle to locate professionals who can meet your unique project needs within your geographic area with no over-the-top price tags.

Nearshore staff augmentation aids you in finding needed experts within a broader talent pool in nearby countries. Tapping into regional expertise can offer you a quicker way to bring in professionals with tailored knowledge. You reduce the time spent on recruitment and, at the same time, ensure that the team has the proper capabilities to succeed. Furthermore, nearshore professionals are often more readily available, allowing you to fill urgent skill gaps for almost no time.

Sometimes, planning to engage offshore outsourcing software development experts may seem like the most efficient and cost-effective option. However, be prepared for pitfalls such as language barriers, cultural incompatibility, and time zone gaps, which can lead to disruptions in project development flow, delays, and miscommunication.

Nearshore staff augmentation allows you to overcome these challenges by bringing in nearshore talent. This approach provides access to top talent and specialized skill sets while ensuring your remote team is within the same or similar time zones, sharing closer cultural affinities. This setup enables faster responses and in-person meetings when necessary, all while integrating seamlessly with your existing team members. Whether you need a software developer or a broader team, nearshore staff augmentation can make a significant difference.

Cleveroad, has R&D centers in Estonia, Poland, Ukraine, the US, and Norway. We offer a diverse talent pool across multiple time zones, ensuring close collaboration seamless communication.

Budgeting and financial resource allocation are the main concerns of every software project creation. Usually, hiring full-time employees onshore can be costly, particularly in competitive markets where top IT experts demand higher salaries and benefits. As a result, high costs can strain budgets, especially for short-term or project-based needs.

You can reduce overhead expenses without compromising quality by hiring skilled software engineers from nearby countries with lower living costs and hourly rates. This staff augmentation model can also help you avoid the long-term financial commitments common for full-time hires, such as benefits, medical care, and permanent salaries.

To clarify the pricing question, examine the approximate nearshore software development specialists' rates for the most common nearshore resource augmentation variants:

In particular, if you’re business is located in Western Europe, you can consider nearshore outstaffing from regions like Central and Eastern Europe, where you can benefit from partnering with highly skilled developers, ensuring significant cost-savings. The nearshore staff augmentation model provides the flexibility and agility needed for your projects. Furthermore, the benefits of nearshore staff augmentation extend beyond cost savings to include seamlessly established collaboration and cultural alignment.

Unfortunately, traditional hiring methods are not agile when you need to quickly distribute development team resorces, as your project needs to scale up or down. Recruiting, interviewing, and onboarding full-time employees can considerably delay critical timelines.

Choosing nearshore software staff augmentation is a faster way to accomplish efficient team scaling that allows you to bring in experienced professionals without full-time hiring quickly.

At Cleveroad we perform CVs screening within 24 hours and arrange interviews with required experts within 3 days. This flexibility may assist you in staying agile and adjusting your software development team size, swiftly responding to new business opportunities.

Usually, nearshore team augmentation becomes a strategic solution for businesses in different industries. Below are four cases when nearshore team augmentation makes sense and examples of specific use cases in different industries for more clarity.

When a you need domain-specific skills or technologies not readily available in-house, nearshore staff augmentation can help you achieve the desired tech knowledge.

Let’s take a healthcare company that wants to develop AI-powered diagnostic tools. They need comprehensive expertise in AI, ML and deep knowledge of healthcare regulations (e.g., HIPAA or PIPEDA compliance). By augmenting their team with nearshore specialists who understand healthcare specifics and AI, they can speed up the development, tailor it to vital legal terms, and be tech-savvy.

Here’s the review from our client in the healthcare sector on their collaboration with Cleveroad regarding staff augmentation services:

Nearshore staff augmentation is ideal when you want to reduce costs without compromising the project’s wholesomeness, quality, and functionality. The proximity of the nearshore team allows for easier communication, resulting in faster decision-making.

The business domain whose eternal concern is cost optimization is logistics. Let’s take a logistics company that wants to upgrade its existing fleet management system. They need to implement real-time tracking features, but local software experts are way out of their budget. A nearshore expert team like Cleveroad can provide top logistics software development services at a fraction of the price.

It’s common when a business needs to supplement development to meet market demand or tight deadlines. Nearshore IT staff augmentation services help businesses scale their teams quickly without the long hiring process of recruiting locally.

So imagine an online retailer who wants to roll out a new mobile app before the holiday season to enhance the shopping experience. While they need to ramp up development fast, they don't have enough in-house developers. Nearshore mobile app development services providers with extensive e-commerce software development experience can be onboarded quickly to complete tasks faster and more validly. As a result, this allows the retailer to meet the launch deadline more likely.

Keeping up with the following recommendations may help you conduct a smooth nearshore IT staff augmentation, minimizing the possibility of miscommunication and misalignment:

Clearly outlining your requirements is the primary thing you’ll need prior to diving into nearshore resource augmentation. At the very beginning of your cooperation with nearshore staff, define clear project goals and timelines to ensure both teams understand their roles, responsibilities, and the possible milestones. You should also outline Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The core KPIs for a nearshore staff augmentation may include:

• Time-to-Onboard: How quickly new team members become productive after joining
• Productivity rate: The output or work completed by augmented staff over time
• Code quality/defect rate: The number of bugs or errors found in code versus the total output
• Knowledge retention: How well augmented staff retain and transfer project-specific knowledge
• Communication efficiency: How effectively information is exchanged between team members

Note: Don’t forget to regularly review progress against these metrics and make adjustments as needed.

Usually, the main benefit of nearshoring over offshoring staff augmentation is proximity, both in terms of geography and culture. While nearshoring, time zone differences are typically minimal, making real-time collaboration more feasible. However, cultural alignment is equally important, as misunderstandings or differences in work ethics and communication styles can hinder productivity.

Select nearshore teams that operate in similar or overlapping time zones. Additionally, choose vendors whose work culture aligns with your company's values, communication style, and workflow. Conduct a cultural fit assessment to ensure organic integration with your internal team during selection.

In most cases, the success of leveraging nearshore staff augmentation services heavily depends on choosing the right tech partner. Not all IT vendors are equal regarding strengths and weaknesses, and choosing the one that aligns with your business goals and technical requests is paramount.

Thoroughly review potential vendors by assessing the following factors:

• Domain experience. Ensure the chosen partner has a deep understanding of your industry specifics.
• Quality management. It’s highly recommended to prioritize vendors with a proven track record of delivering quality work, reliability, and transparency in communication. In Cleveroad, we have ISO 9001:2013 certification, proving the consistent and high quality of our services.
• Reviews and testimonials. Look for their clients' references and case studies demonstrating their ability to deliver on similar projects.
• Regulatory compliance. Ensure the vendor has strong expertise in your industry’s regulations, if applicable (e.g., HIPAA, HL7 in healthcare, PCI DSS, KYC in FinTech, etc.).
• Strong security focus. It’s vital that your vendor knows how to properly operate with data and provide top-tier security. For example, the Cleveroad team is certified with ISO/IEC 27001:2013, meaning that our software development process aligns with the industry’s best security practices.

Cleveroad is an outsourcing software development company located in Central and Eastern Europe (Estonia). We specialize in providing on-demand IT services for over 12 years. We help businesses of various scales, from SMBs to huge enterprises, to supplement their in-house team with skilled professionals (BAs, QA engineers, UI/UX designers, DevOps, etc.) and receive high-quality software products that cater to their business’s success.

We have quite a few examples of IT staff augmentation on a nearshore basis. To prove our word, here are some of our clients' most vibrant success stories:

• IT staff augmentation case with FinTech proficiency. A Swiss bank offering online investment, lending, and trading services to B2B and B2C clients required tech specialists to build a more flexible banking system. To achieve this, they sought a technical partner, and with Cleveroad, they've build a scalable solution according to their timelines and budgeting.
• HealthTech-driven team expansion for health provider. A US-based nursing home provider, which also offers in-home patient care, required qualified developers to create robust appointment management solution. To design to automate the management of home nursing appointments. To design and develop the system, they turned to Cleveroad. We provided them with nearshore healthcare IT experts who quickly kicked into the development process.
• IT staff augmentation for a trading company. A European cacao trading and processing company needed IT experts to help them optimize internal operations by automating cocoa trading processes. They engaged Cleveroad and the company supplemented their mobile project with tailored expertise, improved internal operations efficiency, and streamlined their workflows.
• Cross-device video-on-demand platform. A Danish company providing home entertainment services, including movie rentals, primarily through video shops, needed to scale their business. To modernize, our customers needed experienced developers to build a video-on-demand platform for streaming movies and TV shows online. Cleveroad provided expert IT staff who worked closely with the client's team to create a digital solution that transformed their business model.

Here’s the review from our Danish client on staff augmentation services provided by Cleveroad for video on-demand platform development: