In Europe, the demand for tech jobs drastically increased starting from March 2020, according to The State of European Tech. Spain and Portugal were leading the charts by the number of IT professionals searching. 

The report states, it is majorly because some of the global IT companies are opening their offices in Europe. On the other hand, local companies are going through the digitalization process. The speed of changes surged since the pandemic started. Apparently, all of these businesses need more and more IT professionals.

And if you turn to this report and pay attention to the percentage of software engineers sought-after in comparison to all job positions – they were not that high across the continent in 2020, from 2 to 6% only. 

Why then hundreds of articles on Google search address the issue of the programmers’ shortage globally?

There might be a few reasons for that:

  1. There is definitely a shortage of fast-moving and fast-learning talents with experience and innovative mindset, rather than IT specialists in general.
  2. In the face of the crisis, business owners and recruiters don’t really understand who, exactly they need to hire. Job descriptions often do not correspond to the real need of their IT infrastructure and business processes or the team size and data set. 
  3. More companies need high-level ICT consultants to figure out how to navigate their business further in the digital era.
  4. When global companies open their branches in other parts of the world, be it Europe, Israel, or emerging markets, they tend to hire the top engineers on site. So, the locals start feeling staff hunger in terms of choice and salaries they can offer. FAANG always paid more.

What should the locals do in response in order to keep a strong house team?

They should look for software team augmentation in Europe – but in another part of it. 

What does staff augmentation mean in Europe?

If you are a business owner or CTO, you have probably faced the digitalization process when the pandemic started. We all were there.

And not only that we needed to upskill our team members, but we might have probably also turned to outsourcing software development because of the lack of IT professionals in our company.

Other businesses have augmented staff with the offshore development teams. How does that work? 

In comparison to giving away the creation of software programs to outsourcing companies, they preferred to use IT staff augmentation services. In Europe, it’s becoming more and more popular. They started collaborating with the special consultancies or platforms that provide staff augmentation services. What do they do? 

They provide a list of candidates based on your needs and with desired programming languages proficiency. You pick up the ones you liked and get to interview them.

But it’s not that you have to go through the whole interviewing process, no. These staff augmentation firms have already filtered out the best ones for you, so you just need to find your fit and have one call with them to make a decision. Then, these firms sign a contract with you and handle all the other matters with the developers on their own.

You pay with one invoice per month to IT staff augmentation agencies in Europe, no matter how many developers you would hire via them in the end. Your business is growing, your demand is also increasing – that’s OK, you don’t have to spend another $3,000-4,000 to source and hire a good coder. Your partners can handle this.

Popular destinations for finding offshore staff augmentation in Europe

Take a look at the picture. These are the companies originating from Eastern Europe. You probably thought they are from the US, or Western/Nordic Europe, or Asia. 

The truth is that Eastern Europe has historically had a very strong pool of ICT and engineering talents. Space and technology companies open their R&D centres in Ukraine. Autonomous tech startups launch their factories in Romania and Slovenia. Google and Microsoft invest billions of dollars into the Polish ecosystem. Investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital invested in startups from this area.

This creates an even better environment for the booming ICT sector in the region.

Benefits of IT team augmentation in Europe

  • Eastern Europe partly consists of the post-soviet union countries, some of them are already in the EU. But they all are still deemed as emerging economies. This is why it’s a perfect place to look for a good price-quality ratio.
  • The pricing both for the engineers hired and for the partners’ – the staff augmentation IT companies’ services will be comparatively low. 
  • Almost all of the CEE countries are just +1 – maximum +4 hours from the UTC time zone. There won’t be much of a time difference between you and your outstaffed developers.
  • Access to the international diverse talent pool, with an opportunity to find the narrow, niche specialists – for Medtech, fintech, banking, retail, basically any industry. 
  • Your team augmentation team provider can also build a fully-equipped dedicated team for your projects, and replace the missing professionals when needed. You don’t really risk if any of the employees leave. And again, you avoid most of the recruitment stages. Your partners already have the collaboration process in place, with all the necessary documents, legal advice, and financials covered.

Outcomes

Working with the offshore staff augmentation firms will give you:

  1. flexibility with your digital project’s development and maintenance, as well as employees’ education
  2. outstaffed coders are usually focused on your project only and quite hard-working – which is another plus of Eastern European talents
  3. your IP is well secured inside your company
  4. you can request any new professionals up to your business needs and plans
  5. time saved on sourcing and recruiting, as well as budget
  6. a good cut on the operational costs
  7. quality assurance provided with the best attention to detail – as your partners would like to keep your relations for longer

What functions you can outsource to the augmented developers

There are particular tasks that you can easily put on someone else’s shoulders. Among them:

  • Business intelligence and analytics
  • Software development (CRM, e-commerce, CMS etc.)
  • Mobile app development (iOS, Android)
  • Website maintenance and management
  • Technical support
  • Cloud computing
  • Database development and management
  • IT infrastructure establishment
  • Employee education – digital skills, no-code development etc.

Some of the top augmenting team companies in Eastern Europe

Check this list to find your partner:

To summarize, each company has its own culture and hiring rituals. You might be going through the digital transformation or total renovation now. You might want to outsource software development to other vendors or hire in-house engineers. 

But when IT is not your primary focus, or you get overwhelmed by the routine job that should be finally automated, or need to do something with the big data you’ve collected – IT resource augmentation in Europe might be your best solution. 

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SmartBrain.io – outstaffing platform providing top developers of Middle + / Senior level for the IT development projects of any complexity. Hire the best engineers starting from $40/hour.