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Nearshore Staff Augmentation
Hire Top IT Talents at an Optimal Cost
A Texas-based company with a full-scale development center in Mexico, ScienceSoft can ramp up your team with all the necessary competencies to quickly bridge the project’s skill gap. Nearshore staffing with ScienceSoft helps cut project investments by 2–4x due to budget-friendly rates and deep technical expertise of our talents.
Nearshore Staff Augmentation: Summary
Nearshore staff augmentation is a way to temporarily expand a company’s IT team with the needed competencies via hiring tech talents in a neighboring country. This outsourcing model aims to provide fast access to the sought-after IT expertise, speed up development, and balance labor expenses.
Key steps to hire nearshore IT talents
- Plan the project and define resource needs.
- Decide on a nearshoring location.
- Select a trustworthy nearshore vendor.
- Shortlist and interview the candidates.
- Sign the cooperation documents.
- Onboard the hired nearshore talents and move on.
An IT staff augmentation company with 35 years of experience, ScienceSoft is ready to augment your team with our top nearshore experts. We help define the skill gaps, compose the optimal team for your needs, and integrate our specialists into your development process.
Benefits of Nearshore IT Staff Augmentation
Attractive and predictable cost
Compared to the US-based talents, LATAM experts have 1.5–4x lower rates, which makes nearshore staff augmentation a go-to way to cut development expenses. Since you bind to the expert’s pre-agreed rate and pay only for the actual efforts, you enjoy full cost transparency and can confidently plan the budget.
Easy workflow coordination
Nearshore talents typically have zero to few hour difference with your time zone. It means you can easily align your team members’ working schedules and promote frequent real-time communication. This enables more effective collaboration and problem solving compared to offshore outstaffing.
Cultural affinity
Tech experts from neighboring countries usually have a similar cultural background, akin business ethics, and adequate understanding of the US companies’ specific needs. This helps them smoothly fit into the team and avoid cross-cultural misunderstandings that offshore staff may face.
Hiring Nearshore IT Professionals: Key Process Steps
Below, ScienceSoft’s consultants share a sample roadmap to hiring nearshore IT talents and describe our major activities and deliverables at each stage to help you understand what to expect from a responsible nearshore staff augmentation provider.
1.
Resource needs analysis
Start by thoroughly planning the development goals, scope, timelines, and resources required to complete the project. This way, you can quickly spot missing internal competencies to cover particular tasks and meet the expected release pace — the gaps to fill with the nearshore staff.
Our team can assist with accurate project scoping, team composition, and defining the skill gaps to prevent hiring redundant staff. We help compile technical and soft skill requirements specifications to ensure informed candidate shortlisting and a high-value choice. We can also audit your existing project flow and work breakdown patterns and suggest investment-free ways to remove the resource gaps, e.g., via optimizing your team’s workload.
2.
Selecting a nearshore location
The best-fitting nearshore location is the one that hosts the competencies you lack, aligns with your time zone, meets your cost expectations, and offers a good cultural and business fit.
For your convenience, ScienceSoft’s consultants prepared a comparison table showcasing the specifics of LATAM’s popular nearshoring hubs:
Sources: Accelerance (2022, 2023), YouTeam, proprietary market research by ScienceSoft.
ScienceSoft
3.
Choosing a vendor
You may skip this step if you opt for in-house hiring. However, in this case, candidate screening, first-round interviewing, and, most importantly, all the legal paperwork lie on your HR department, which may be troublesome due to different nearshore employment frameworks.
In managed hiring, the nearshore staff augmentation vendor — like ScienceSoft — remains an official employer of IT talents. Thus, relying on a vendor frees you from vetting efforts and legislative hassle. Make sure your vendor provides the needed project roles and software competencies and has a proven track record of nearshore services backed by positive customer feedback.
ScienceSoft
4.
Candidate screening and interviewing
Having decided on a nearshore vendor, send a request specifying the required number of FTEs, their technology and communicative skills, expected time to start, and engagement duration. The vendor will analyze your staff augmentation request, check the availability of its nearshore resources, and provide the CVs and rates of the best-fitting candidates. At ScienceSoft, we usually handle the flow under one business week.
After you approved suitable candidates, schedule the interviews with your project manager (PM) and tech leads to check the candidates’ hard and soft skills. We recommend conducting 2–3 interviews, each dedicated to a particular skill aspect, to attend to all critical competencies and simplify assessment.
A tip for your interviewers: apart from the nearshore candidate’s tech savviness (adherence to software engineering standards, ability to deal with non-standard issues, etc.), pay attention to the general attitude — openness to cross-cultural collaboration, focus on progress, and eagerness to follow guidelines. It helps differentiate a good team player willing to share knowledge, pursuing continuous growth, and able to drive the team’s positive dynamics. Also, make sure the candidate has a good command of English to support smooth day-to-day communication with your stakeholders.
5.
Contract signing
The key cooperation-related document to expect from your nearshore team augmentation vendor is a service contract fixing the agreed task scope, deliverables, and hiring terms. If you want to safeguard your sensitive business data, consider signing additionally a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) limiting the vendor’s right to publicly use your company’s information.
ScienceSoft legally protects the client’s quality expectations from the very beginning of cooperation. In addition to the core contract, we sign an SLA that includes a set of KPIs tailored to the project specifics to control the efficiency of our resources and identify the areas of improvement. We are ready to sign an NDA before the introductory call to alleviate your security concerns.
6.
Onboarding and kick-off
Accommodating new specialists and building proper communication between the team members takes time, and the timeframe depends on the hired expert’s flexibility and the maturity of your onboarding processes. In vendor cooperation, onboarding typically moves fast since pre-vetted talents are trained to quickly dive into the working process and use various collaboration tools. If you seek an urgent team ramp-up, consider hiring via a vendor.
Thanks to a mature collaborative culture and strong technology background, our Mexico-based talents can meet you wherever you are and fully adapt to your regular workflows in just 5–7 days.
Explore ScienceSoft’s Staff Augmentation Success Stories
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What Makes ScienceSoft a Reliable Nearshore Staff Augmentation Partner
- Proficiency in modern software architectures (SOA, microservices, serverless) and advanced techs (AI/ML, big data, blockchain, and more).
- Established Lean, Agile, and DevOps cultures to ensure fast and consistent deliverables.
- Quality-first approach based on a mature ISO 9001-certified quality management system.
- Robust security management supported by ISO 27001 certification.
- Trusted by global market leaders: IBM, Baxter, Walmart, NASA JPL, Leo Burnett, eBay, Nielsen, and more.
- Focus on long-lasting, mutually beneficial collaboration — 62% of our revenue comes from the customers we serve for more than 2 years.
IT Competencies Available for Hire at ScienceSoft’s Mexican Development Center
Experts to handle the entire SDLC
- IT consultants
- Project managers
- Software architects
- Software developers
- UX and UI designers
- Data scientists
- Quality assurance experts, incl. test automation engineers
- DevOps engineers
- Cybersecurity experts
- Compliance consultants
- L1–L3 support specialists
Experts in advanced technologies
Experts in leading cloud platforms
- Dynamics 365
- Power Apps
- Power BI
- SharePoint and Office 365
- Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento)
- ServiceNow®
- Salesforce
- Pimcore
Other technology skills we hold
How We Drive High Value of Nearshore Staffing Services
Flexible cooperation
We are ready to provide any required number of talents (from 0.5 to 150+ FTEs) for your preferred cooperation term (from 1 month to 10 years). We can rapidly up- and downscale the resources to accelerate development pace when needed.
Consistent reporting
We regularly report the pre-agreed KPIs to make sure you always stay updated on the cooperation progress. Our nearshore IT specialists have experience with various collaboration and reporting tools and can quickly adopt your preferred software.
Ongoing skill growth
ScienceSoft offers internal and external trainings to help our talents deepen their expertise and master advanced tech domains. We nurture cross-cultural sensitivity and continuous soft skill improvement to ensure positive nearshore collaboration experience.
Our Customers Say
ScienceSoft’s C++ developers have been assisting Supponor in the ongoing development of the software for the past 11 years. ScienceSoft’s experience in cross-platform, real-time systems, and computer graphics helps to ensure consistently high performance and wide compatibility of Supponor’s products.
The quality they deliver is consistently high. Given that the whole project team is international, we have no communication problems, and the reports are on time. What we appreciate is their ability to work independently, with no need for our careful guidance.
ScienceSoft offer reasonable rates for their IT talents’ levels of experience. They also address and resolve any communication issues in a highly professional manner and always provide activity reports according to the agreed schedule.
ScienceSoft is a highly skilled and uniquely capable firm with multitudes of talent on-board. We have collaborated on a number of diverse projects over the years all of which have been utmost success for both us and our clients.
We relied on ScienceSoft to reinforce our in-house team working on the evolution of our operations management system. Their experts managed to fit in with our teamwork smoothly. We got biweekly feature releases and were able to complete the design and implementation of the required functionality in less than 4 months.
We have been working with ScienceSoft for 6 years and they have become our long-term technology partner. ScienceSoft professional and knowledgeable staff has the willingness to endeavor best efforts to ensure project success.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are part-time engagements possible?
We offer both full-time and part-time roles with different engagement levels (several hours per day or even per week are possible).
What is your pricing model for nearshore staffing?
We employ a T&M model that implies billing based on the scope of accomplished tasks and an expert’s hourly rate.
What KPIs do you use for tracking nearshore service quality?
The KPI set depends on the specifics of the outsourced tasks and is defined individually for each client. Here, you can find some examples of the metrics we employ in our nearshore arrangements.
What nearshoring destination would you recommend?
Mexico stands out from other nearshoring hubs due to its geographical proximity and close cultural and economic ties with the US. IT staff rates in Mexico are 2–4x lower than onshore and up to 30% lower than in other prominent nearshoring locations like Chile, Panama, and Costa Rica. With the LATAM’s second-largest talent pool, Mexico offers a variety of skilled IT experts to handle the entire SDLC. Explore other advantages of nearshoring to Mexico here.
Are there any other nearshore outsourcing models to consider?
At ScienceSoft, we can augment your team with our best Mexico-based talents, provide a dedicated team to partially take over development tasks, and assemble a nearshore team managed by our American PMs to outsource the project end to end. Explore our outsourcing model comparison table to learn the specifics of each approach.
Nearshore Team Augmentation Costs
The cost of nearshore staff augmentation depends on the chosen nearshoring location, hiring model (vendor-managed or in-house), the number of experts, their specific competencies, seniority level, and duration of engagement.
Want to know the rates of our Mexico-based talents?
About ScienceSoft
ScienceSoft is a global IT consulting and software development company headquartered in McKinney, Texas. Having full-scale development centers in Mexico, the Gulf, and the EU, we offer nearshore staff augmentation services to help non-IT enterprises and IT companies reduce project costs. In our nearshore engagements, we rely on robust quality and data security management systems backed by ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 certifications.