Nearshore Staff Augmentation: How It Drives Team Success Beyond Borders 

If you’re exploring talent acquisition beyond borders, it’s hard to ignore the growing popularity of nearshore staff augmentation. It’s no surprise – this approach offers greater access to specialized skills as well as lets you assemble a team at record speed and start developing instead of wasting months searching for the skill sets you need.

In this post, we’ll define nearshore staff augmentation and review its key benefits and engagement models. We’ll also dive into success stories to see how it drives success. Let’s begin!

What is nearshore staff augmentation? 

Nearshore staff augmentation involves integrating team members from neighboring countries into your existing team. It is often used to access a pool of skilled software developers, thus enhancing an organization’s engineering capabilities. Nearshore teams work on your project full-time, seamlessly blending into your company.

How does this model work?

The vendor of the nearshore staff augmentation services, like nCube, finds and pre-screens candidates based on the hard skills, soft skills, cultural fit, and English proficiency your company requires. Although the vendor recommends candidates, the final decision to hire them is always yours. The vendor also helps you integrate the chosen experts into your team, within an efficient onboarding process. After that, the nearshore development center is fully yours to manage.

What is nearshore staff augmentation in terms of other options like onshoring and offshoring?

All three models are about delegating software development to an external vendor, but grasping the key differences is essential.

Onshoring: Hiring a remote team within your own country, such as a New York-based company working with a team in Florida.

Offshoring: Partnering with a vendor in a distant country, often with a significant time zone difference, such as a US-based company hiring a team in the Philippines.

Nearshoring: A balanced middle ground, where the vendor is located in a nearby country or one with zero to no time zone difference.

The beauty of this model is that it combines the advantages of onshoring and offshoring while minimizing its risks like time zone gaps, cultural discrepancies, and language barriers. Overall, it lets you make the most of:

• Greater access to top talent;
• Reduced team formation time;
• Agile nearshore development;
• Cost-efficiency.

You can select Latin American countries like Mexico, Colombia, or Argentina as regions that align flawlessly with US time zones. If you stem from the EU, then nearshore in Poland, Ukraine, or Romania can be the go-to option. Now, let’s dive deeper into the benefits of nearshore staff augmentation.

Key benefits of nearshore staff augmentation

Greater access to specialized talent

You don’t have to scrape the bottom of the barrel, especially when it comes to hiring senior-level specialists or experts with in-demand skills. If you require a senior-level developer, you’ll notice that the demand is at an all-time high. The intense competition often extends hiring timelines by months.

Regions like Central and Eastern Europe and LATAM offer a combined talent pool of over 2.5 million software developers, ready for collaboration with US and EU companies. As experts in these talent-rich hubs, we can connect you with qualified developers in just a few days – so you can start developing instead of wasting resources on months-long in-house staffing.

Cost efficiency

In 2023, 69% of tech leaders in the Americas said they were expected to achieve more with tighter budgets when it comes to adopting new technologies. This means that they have to look for cost-effective ways to develop software. If you face similar constraints, nearshore software staff augmentation is worth considering. The cost difference between your home-based and nearshore development can be drastic. By leveraging services you can save up to 70% due to lower rates in talent-rich regions like Latin America (LATAM) and Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), according to Accelerance.

Source: Accelerance’s 2023 Global Software Outsourcing Trends and Rates Guide

Proximity and time zone compatibility

Nearshore software staff augmentation typically involves countries with similar time zones, which eliminates the challenge of collaborating across borders. The benefit of (almost) real-time collaboration lets you manage projects, resolve issues, and meet deadlines as if the team members worked within the walls of your HQ. Such an alignment lends its hand to more profound teamwork and better results as compared to outsourcing to far-off locations.

Cultural alignment and communication

Many countries (for instance, nearshoring Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Mexico, Colombia, or Argentina) share similar cultural backgrounds. Moreover, these locations offer pools of technologies with a solid understanding of Western business practices and high English proficiency. At nCube, all the engineers we provide have full professional English proficiency, which you can personally evaluate during the interview process. We deliberately prioritize culture fit, so your nearshore and core teams communicate without a hitch.

3 types of nearshore staff augmentation models

When exploring nearshore staff augmentation, one of the key decisions you’ll face is selecting the right partnership model. Currently, there are three main options: Project-Based, Time and Materials (T&M), and Dedicated Teams.

Project-based

This model assumes a predefined budget, project scope, and an exact time frame when the provider must wrap up the work. Here’s how it goes: The client and the vendor analyze the business requirements and agree on the project scope, tech stack, tasks, and deadline before the team starts development.

Overall, companies choose this model for high levels of predictability, clear contractual obligations, and a defined budget.

Time and Material (T&M)

Another approach worth considering is Time and Material. This one is more flexible than the Project-Based, given that it lets companies tie their spending to labor costs. It means that you can pay for augmented staff based on the number of hours invested in your project, which is cost-effective. For instance, you can hire a provider of nearshore staff augmentation at the hourly rate of a software engineer.

The biggest beneficiaries of the T&M model are businesses that face a significant degree of uncertainty regarding the required resources.

Dedicated Team

This approach merges the strengths of Project-Based and T&M approaches, which lets businesses establish a sustainable software development team for long-term collaboration. Located in a nearshore region of your choice, a Dedicated Team can operate autonomously or seamlessly integrate as an extension of your in-house unit.

Nearshore software development teams can work under your direct leadership or through a designated project manager. Nearshore partners take care of recruiting skilled developers and conducting internal interviews to ensure they align with your project requirements. Payment typically includes the monthly salaries of team members plus a vendor fee.

This model is ideal for long-term, complex projects with evolving requirements.

Here’s a brief comparison of main models:

	Project-Based	T&M	Dedicated Team
Budget	Fixed	Flexible	Monthly salary of team members + vendor’s fee
Time-frame	Fixed	Flexible	Long-term
Scope of Work	Fixed	Flexible	Adaptable
Control	By vendor	By client	By client
Ideal for	Short-term projects with clear, predictable requirements	Projects with uncertainty in required skills	Long-term, complex projects with unforeseen needs or requirements

Who can benefit from nearshore staffing services?

Startups | Small businesses

Small companies tend to prioritize reducing project staffing costs. Nearshoring is a cost-effective solution, as it provides access to affordable talent in nearby regions and removes the need for costly permanent hiring. Moreover, this approach supports the rapid growth of startups, giving them the flexibility to adapt to market demands.

Enterprises

Large companies use nearshore staffing services to increase development capacity without the challenges of in-house management. By adding skilled external professionals, tech leaders can meet the challenges of evolving markets while keeping the bar of quality high.

Tech companies

Tech companies can leverage external talent to accelerate product development. It provides access to specialized engineers, supports real-time collaboration, and enables faster deployment cycles.

Non-tech businesses

Companies stemming from fields like finance, healthcare, retail, and manufacturing benefit from this model, as it gives them access to in-demand talent, including Data, AI/ML, Cloud, Cybersecurity, and more. It helps them automate operations, improve efficiency, and implement digital transformation without investing in an in-house IT team.

Staff augmentation nearshore: Success stories by nCube

Nearshore outsourcing for Flightright

In a fast-evolving market, Flightright, a Germany-based startup specializing in air passenger rights, faced a significant challenge with the local tech talent shortage. With their core team based in Berlin, finding skilled software developers proved difficult. Turning to nCube as a nearshore partner, they successfully established a nearshore development team in Central & Eastern Europe. Notably, the first hires were onboarded within just two weeks of the initial call. Building on this success, Flightright has since expanded its nearshore team to include 8 experts.

Staff augmentation nearshore for Life360

nCube partnered with Life360, a family safety app, to build a complete nearshore development unit in Eastern Europe, tailored to their specific project requirements.

Nearshore staff augmentation for Qcify

For this industrial automation company, nCube played a pivotal role in assembling a nearshore team of full-stack developers and QA engineers to support their advanced quality inspection systems.

Nearshore software staff augmentation for Netreo

As an IT Operations full-stack monitoring and AIOps company, Netreo needed developers skilled in .NET and Azure. nCube quickly provided the required talent, with the team starting work within just one week of the initial call.

Nearshore staff augmentation: Our approach

Bringing in skilled developers fast can accelerate your time to market without compromising on quality. However, the key lies in choosing the right provider. Here’s what sets us apart:

Best European and Latin American talent

We provide access to the top 1% of IT experts in both regions, carefully selected for their exceptional technical expertise, relevant experience, and strong backgrounds. Out of every five candidates we interview, only one meets our rigorous standards to proceed to client interviews

Customized to your needs

We go beyond simply providing on-demand talent – we create nearshore software development branches that align seamlessly with your unique goals and project requirements.

Cost-effective nearshore staff augmentation

Our talent-focused approach delivers the expertise you need while cutting down on expenses tied to teams located on-site. We fully cover such costs as employee bonuses, retention programs, payroll, office management, and more.

Full integration into your operations

The team we provide becomes an extension of your core team, with engineers adopting your culture, workflows, and best practices.

All decisions are yours

You maintain full authority over the project, task assignments, and the daily workflow of your engineers. As a provider of nearshore staff augmentation services, we’ll ensure everything aligns with your vision.

Focus on domain expertise

We’ll help you add experts with proven experience in your field: You’ll work with developers with a track record in similar industries and expertise in nearshore collaboration.

Wrapping up

Overall, nearshore staff augmentation can be your gateway to skilled tech talent – an approach that lets you operate during the harsh times of tech talent deficit. It also lets you trim unnecessary expenses and achieve real-time collaboration with a team based in a nearby tech hub.

At nCube, we have over 17 years of experience in LATAM and Eastern Europe staff augmentation and are well capable of building skilled tech teams in these regions. Contact us to discuss your needs and let’s see if our approach is suitable for you.