How to Innovate and Grow Amidst a Shrinking IT Talent Pool
In the aughts of 2000, US-based multinational companies turned to offshoring to help trim their budgets. IT companies in particular moved many jobs to countries like Brazil, China, India, and Romania, in favor of their lower-cost resources. But, lower cost doesn’t always mean that it’s a good deal if the communication, cultural fit, and technical competency aren’t there.
While On-Demand Group’s focus is supporting our clients with local onsite technical resources, we realized an opportunity to help our clients when onshore wasn’t an option (i.e. skills gap in the market or budget constraints). In addition to these factors, recent H1B scrutiny has made a tight market even tighter. Read on to learn why companies trust us to handle their offshore needs and how we help them achieve their goals.
A Need for Qualified Skills on a Limited Budget
To keep running, companies need the right staff, whether onshore, remote, or offshore, with the right skills. Our clients seek our offshore services for the following reasons:
- Unavailable resources. The Twin Cities has an incredibly tight IT market now. With negative unemployment for many IT roles, we often don’t have enough skilled people for the jobs that are available. To help fill that gap, our clients use our offshore services to help them find the skills they need to achieve their goals.
- Limited budgets. Companies are continually pressed to increase profits and decrease their overhead expenses. When faced with the challenges of reducing staff or inability to add headcount, offshoring enables them to complete the projects they need to get done at a price point they can afford.
- Competitive market poaching. An inability to increase salaries and provide career advancement has the local talent pool keeping their eyes and ears open to new opportunities. A better paying role, better location, sexier industry, or technology will always be just around the corner, leading to heavier than normal attrition. Plus, long hiring processes make it painful to mitigate.
Although our core services provide local candidates for contract, contract to hire, and direct hire needs, sometimes they aren’t an option. By choosing our offshore services, you can engage this option with ease and trust in On-Demand Group.
An Affordable, Flexible Solution to get the Work Done
For our offshore services, we chose the Philippines for its US influence and cultural focus on family and community, which aligns well with our own company’s family values. This focus is evident in the stability of our teams and how they support each other professionally and personally. Providing a good career roadmap and training program ensures our team members are excited to grow with us, mitigating attrition.
Our offshore services are available in the following models:
- Flexible schedules. With a follow-the-sun approach, the offshore team is fast at work while we sleep. We can adjust their shift based on your project needs. For example, schedules can overlap to attend scrum, agile, and DevOps meetings in the morning. Or, when a project begins, the team might work the same shift as the US team to ensure thorough knowledge transfer.
- Onshore/offshore. Often times, we can bring offshore team members to meet your US-based team. For example, if you don’t have anyone internally to manage the offshore team, we can bring an onsite technical lead, project manager, or purely technical resource to lead and manage the work that is sent offshore.
- Rotation. To help the offshore team better understand your company, we can arrange a site visit. These site visits, which are rotated among the team members 3 to 6 months at a time, allow them to see and experience your company and meet the people they are supporting and working with.
The model that works best for your company depends on the work that you need to get done.
Satisfied Clients with Much to Gain
Offshoring services from On-Demand Group appeal to a broad range of industries, including healthcare, banking, financial, manufacturing, retail, and travel. Our teams have expertise in Greenfield development, integration, maintenance, migration, and QA testing. They also provide legacy support and Salesforce development or administration.
A True Partner
What makes On-Demand Group stand out from other companies that provide offshoring services is that we are more like a boutique firm. We’re family-owned, run on the Rotary Four-Way Test, and offer a high-touch service. We ensure that everything flows onshore and offshore.
A unique attribute is that we offer due diligence on every project. Before we sign off on a project, we have a project lead do a one to two week assessment to ensure that our plan is accurate and aligns with the proposal that we agreed to or pivot and resubmit our proposal. By doing our due diligence, we ensure that no surprises pop up during the project.
Another quality that makes us stand out is our team members. Many offshoring companies do not let you choose the candidates for your project. They can pull, move, switch, or fire team members at any time with no advanced notice. Because of our smaller company size, we can control the on-boarding and off-boarding experience, adhering to our standards for quality and the experience. The bigger a company gets, this ability becomes more difficult to do.
Why On-Demand Group is the Right Company for Your Offshoring
Whether you need offshore resources for Greenfield development (such as Java and .NET), maintenance, QA, or a more specific need, On-Demand Group can help you achieve your company’s goals. We know how important it is for you to have an offshore team with the right skill sets that fit your culture. You also need an offshore team that can comfortably say when they don’t know something and can work as part of your team, not just take orders. We don’t just fill an open position with a technical skill set. We make sure we match the right team member to the right job. When you need to fill the gap in your resources, choose offshoring services from On-Demand Group.
