“Great vision without great people is irrelevant.”
- Jim Collins, Author
The above quote clearly captures the importance of having the right team. Without it, even the best of vision will not see the light, let alone the long-term success.
It is like having the right ingredients in the right amount. Too little of a key ingredient or lack of it, and there goes the taste. Too much of it and it goes to waste. You need to have the perfect balance – easier said than done. You need to have thorough information on the topic, before making the decision.
For this very reason, we have come with this blog to provide detailed information and settle the staff augmentation vs body shopping debate once and for all.
We will cover the concepts with easy-to-understand examples to give you clarity on when and how you can tap into these hiring models. So, let’s get started.
Staff Augmentation – Quality Oriented Approach for Business-Critical Projects
Staff augmentation is a talent hiring model where you onboard external professionals integrate them into your existing team. The keyword here is “specialization”. Hmm, let me explain, it all starts with you having a requirement for a specific skillset or an experienced talent to fill gaps in your team and meet project demands. Staff augmentation is for these types of specific requirements only – completing the puzzle.
Then second, once you hire resources from a staff augmentation company, there will be hardly any difference between a full-timer in your team and the augmented talent. Reason, they will try and fit into your business whether it is the culture and the strategic alignment with your objectives.
So, if a tech company needs expertise in blockchain technology for a new project and is not sure whether they would need the resource post that project. They can avail staff augmentation services to temporarily hire blockchain specialists.
The resources would work alongside their in-house team to tap the full potential of the blockchain technology for their new project, ensuring success without unnecessary long-term commitments.
Body Shopping – Quality Oriented Approach for Voluminous but Important Tasks
Now imagine if you need to complete a lot of work like making data entries in volumes, which does not require a very high skill set but demands time. You need 15 people to do this job. So, now, you will not hire developers in India for this. Anybody with minimal skill can do this job; all that is needed is to dedicate time and energy. Hence, you need body shopping for some ‘body’ to be there – quick and cheap.
The body shopping firms supply manpower with a clear focus on volume rather than specialized skills. Now, the important thing to note here is that body shopping is of a transactional nature i.e. you fill in the roles faster, get the tasks done and move on.
There is no deeper integration with your in-house team, nor alignment with your business goals. They might not even know why they are doing their task in the first place. All they know is that they need to enter ‘F’ into the ‘Gender’ column of the sheet.
By now you might have got a fair idea of what staff augmentation and body shopping are and how they differ. However, you are a decision maker, you need details. So, here they come.
Staff Augmentation vs Body Shopping: Detailed Comparison
Specialized Quality vs. High Volume Quantity
When you hire staff augmentation, your priority is to fill a specific gap in your team whether in terms of experience or in terms of a new technology or both. You need specialized expertise who can bring value to your project, complete it in time and ultimately, meet the desired project and business goal.
Just as in the above example, they needed an experienced blockchain developer to guide them in the new technology and successfully achieve the project and business goals.
Body Shopping is all about getting a task of large volume completed in time. You need a considerable number of workers, potentially with generic skill sets, to do this job. There are no such things like specialization or overall business goals that exist in this task.
So, if a retail company needs 30 customer support agents during the holiday season when customer queries are flooding in, they turn to body shopping firms. The focus is pretty straightforward and clear quick onboarding, manage surge, and part ways on the season-end.
Deep Integration vs Business Assistance
One of the goals of staff augmentation is also to offer resources that perfectly gel with your team. They integrate and become members of your team and align with your business strategies and its culture.
In fact, the integration and the resulting collaboration is so deep that the team will even forget that they are not part of the same company. The deeper integration not only reflects on a professional level but also on a personal level.
So, when you hire app developers staff augmentation services, they will join stand-ups, collaborate-closely on tasks, and share ideas as if they are a natural part of the company.
Circling back to the retail business example, the customer services team hired through body shopping will be focusing completely on offering quick resolution to customer queries and may not align with your business’s strategic goals, such as building long-term customer relationships or strengthening brand loyalty.
Moreover, they will be working completely independent of your in-house team and will focus primarily on the task at hand with little to no connection to company goals.
Long-Term vs Transactional Relationship
The staff augmentation business itself thrives on values and relationships. The services providers aim for long-term partnerships with their client by adding value to their business whether it is in the form of talent, skills, expertise or collaboration.
On the other hand, body shopping is more of a transactional arrangement with a focus on immediate staffing needs, to get routine or short-term work done.
Opting for staff augmentation services is like adding a seasoned chef to enhance your restaurant’s menu. In contrast, body shopping is akin to hiring temporary waitstaff for a large event.
So, in what business scenarios do their respective qualities fit in? To answer this question, we have added the next section. Hop on!
When to Choose Staff Augmentation Services?
The staff augmentation setup is best for business scenarios with complex projects. Hence you need specialized skills with experience and need to be well-integrated within your own business set up i.e. its culture, team, and overall business object, on par with a full-time hire.
The following example would make it quite clear.
In industries like healthcare and finance, data security is given a very high regard. Reason being, they need to collect a lot of data from a lot of people. And all this data is of a very personal nature and hence very sensitive. That is exactly, governing authorities have also put in place very strict laws and regulations for data handling and storage for businesses operating in this space.
Now, imagine a healthcare provider who is already under-staffed, what do you think, how much data security experts can they afford full time? The answer is no. So, is body shopping a good option? No way, they need high level expertise.
Security is a complex topic and not only needs expertise, but it needs regular upskilling to stay ahead of the perpetrators. So, what they can do is reach out to a staff augmentation services provider and ask them for resources on a part-time or hourly basis.
The resources will help them comply with strict regulations for data protection and not only avoid serious cyber-attacks, but also heavy fines imposed by authorities for non-compliance.
When to opt for Body Shopping?
Building over the above example scenario only, let’s understand when and where the option of body shopping would have been better. Now, imagine the same healthcare provider is sitting on a large backlog of patient records and to comply with regulatory requirements they need to digitize it.
The task here involves scanning the hardcopy of the documents, making data entries manually when needed, and organizing these files in a secure system.
While important, the task doesn’t require specialized data security expertise as it was in the previous scenario.
In this case, the healthcare provider would be well off with body shopping. This will help them quickly onboard the temporary staff to handle the manual, repetitive work that the digitization and organization of records is. This approach will ensure that the task will be completed in time efficiently and cost-effectively. And save the staff-starved healthcare provider from the overcommitment of resources for long-term.
With this example, you can understand that body shopping is best suited for situations that demand rapid scaling of the workforce for short-term, high-volume tasks.
It is also best suited for businesses with cost constraints and the task in question has less to do with their strategic alignment.
However, there are some ethical and legal considerations of body shopping, let’s touch on that.
Ethical and Legal Considerations
Due to the fact that body shopping seems just the trade of humans and not of skills, many question its stance of treating humans as a commodity.
On top of it many body shopping firms have been found to either be underpaying or not paying at all. They may not provide the benefits and the needed social and professional security to the resource, essentially amounting to the exploitation of resources.
Hence, it is advised to go through the legal aspects related to employment practices in both models, especially body shopping as it can lead to legal scrutiny and damage your reputation.
Conclusion
Hope we have covered the topics in the needed depth and with an example that can help you understand and differentiate the two types of hiring models.
While staff augmentation is more about bringing expertise and blend it into the organization without taking the long route of full-time hiring and the associated commitment, body shopping is best suited for tasks that are important but voluminous, are lighter on skills but heavier on time.
So, choose as per the suggestions given and your very own business requirement and you will easily sail the tide. Best of luck!
For those interested in further digging deep into such comparisons check our blog on staff augmentation vs outsourcing.
FAQs
Q1. What is the difference between staff augmentation and body shopping?
Staff augmentation vs body shopping is a key comparison. While staff augmentation bring you specialized talent and integrates them into your team just like a regular full-time hiring. Body shopping is more about volume hiring for routine or short-term tasks.
Similarly, while staff augmentation is more about addressing your specific project needs and meeting overall business goals and objectives, body shopping has little to no connection with your business objectives.
Q2. Why should I choose staff augmentation to hire developers in India?
When you hire developers in India with staff augmentation you get high-quality output with deep integration with your team. The best part is cost-effective solutions and doctored to meet your specific requirement.
Q3. Can staff augmentation help when I need to hire app developers for a short-term project?
Yes, staff augmentation is an excellent choice to hire app developers for a short-term project. You can onboard skilled professionals as per your project needs and scale your team up and down without the long-term commitment of full-time hiring.
Q4. When is body shopping a good option to hire ecommerce developers?
Body shopping is ideal when you need to hire ecommerce developers for high-volume, repetitive tasks such as bulk product uploads or simple backend updates. You will get the job down with developers toiling day in and out.
