How a Texas Startup Cut IT Hiring Costs by 70% with Staff Augmentation

Building a startup from the foundation is not without its challenges, and choosing the right team is the biggest of all. If you are a startup founder struggling to hire an IT team that works with expertise and commitment, you have to think beyond traditional hiring. This case study gives you a great direction to strategically hire senior IT professionals while saving your hiring costs, through a real-world case.

Executive Summary

A startup founded in 2023, in Texas struggled to expand its IT team beyond core members with expertise and commitment. Since they had a small hiring budget, they couldn’t afford senior developers and hired new-grad freshers. However, their inexperience and need for training offered more disadvantages, like training cost, delayed deliveries, and so on. By partnering with SayOne, they gained a team of expert developers with diverse expertise and minimized their burn rate and time-to-market.

Challenges

Talent Shortages and Competitive Hiring Market Shortage of experienced full-time engineers having niche skill sets, especially in roles of AI engineers, DevOps experts, and full-stack developers.

Rising Tech Salary Expectations

With the rising demand for AI tech talent, expert professionals are demanding high salaries ranging from $100,000 to $200,000, which is beyond startups’ hiring budget.

Long Recruitment Cycles and High Hiring Costs.

Traditional hiring is expensive and slow, taking beyond 52 days on average and costing thousands of dollars in terms of job boards, agency fees of around 15-20% of salary, and onboarding costs of $1,500–$7,000, internal HR efforts, which exceeded up to $30,000 per hire. For freshers, in addition to onboarding, training added another $5,000-$10,000. The hiring took 2-4 months, further increasing the time to market.

Need for Rapid Scaling to Meet Deadlines

App development often requires hitting tight launch deadlines to capture market windows, and building a team from scratch delays sprints, as internal staff juggle hiring and coding.

Overhead of Managing Full-Time Employees

Managing full-time staff involved significant overhead, including payroll taxes, health benefits, HR compliance, and IP agreements. For a lean startup with 10-20 employees, this diverted resources from the product focus.

The Solution

By choosing SayOne’s IT staff augmentation services over traditional hiring practices, the startup experienced the following advantages.

• The company was able to onboard pre-vetted tech talent in just a week without any expenses on job boards or HR efforts.
• Flexible contracts allowed startups to scale teams without long-term commitments.
• Resource augmentation offered cost-effective talent at hourly rates, preserving capital for critical areas like product iteration or user acquisition.
• The service provider dealt with payroll, compliance, and HR, freeing startups to focus on product and strategy.

Results

• Time taken to hire a tech team was reduced from 3-4 months to 7 days, and gained the opportunity to evaluate performance through a 2-week free trial, before onboarding.
• Project milestones were completed 42% faster with technical staff augmentation, improving time-to-market.
• Hiring costs were reduced by 70% and additional expenses like recruitment fees were completely avoided.
• Training sessions were eliminated entirely since the onboarded team had 14+ years of experience and niche expertise.

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