Are Staffing Companies Effectively Addressing Your Temporary Software Testing Needs?
Do you work through staffing companies to hire temporary resources to meet your short-term or specialized skillset needs? Do you think you get real value from those staffing companies? For many, the reality is that they have to spend a lot of time filtering resumes and interviewing candidates because the staffing company recruiters simply don’t have the required background and skills to screen candidates properly.
I think the key issues here are knowledge and experience. You need both to effective understand requirements, filter resumes, and effectively interview and qualify candidates. People with relevant technical knowledge and experience may not be interested in working for a staffing company. They likely want to apply their skills. Even if they are interested, recruiting and staffing, for a lot of companies, is a sales and numbers game. Do highly skilled technical people want to do this, or can they even? Of course there are exceptions, but I think the answer is “no” more often than not. As a result most staffing companies have non-technical recruiters who really don’t have deep software knowledge or experience. They don’t understand their clients’ specific technical needs and they cannot go beyond matching technologies and skills terms. And therein lies the problem.
So why not fix the problem? Even if generic IT staffing companies wanted to invest in building in-house technical skills to improve their service it would be difficult because most have a pretty broad domain focus (ie IT Staffing). There are so many technologies and so many different aspects of software deliveries (design, development, testing, deployment, etc.) that one single company cannot have expert-level knowledge of everything, and things change constantly.
The solution here is pretty clear, and it’s already happening. More and more companies are embracing a multisourcing strategy, where they work with multiple specialist partners as opposed to a single generalist partner to meet their requirements. Temporary staffing is going to get caught up in this shift as well. Just like the project side, temporary staffing is going to move to the realm of niche players that are experts in specific domains, like software testing. These specialist companies, through their focus and internal experience and capability, will be able to deliver a better service in the form of better qualified, right-fit candidates consistently and quickly.
We just recently announced a formal expansion of our staff augmentation service for software testers. Our primary focus is outsourced projects, so why did we move down this path? The simple answer is that our customers asked us to. As part of our engagements, we routinely provided temporary onsite resources. Our customers were consistently happy with the qualifications and capabilities of the resources we would put onsite, and we started getting more and more referrals and requests. The rationale from our customers was we know you’re going to give us good candidates that meet our needs, and we’re not going have to spend huge amounts of time interviewing and qualifying. I can spend more time getting work done, and less sifting through resumes and interviewing.
Why is this … are we some kind of staffing geniuses? Not at all. We are simply a specialist company that focuses on one thing …. Software testing and QA. Functional testing, performance testing, test automation, security testing, etc is how we make our living. It only stands to reason that we should be pretty good at understanding software test and QA requirements, and finding and hiring people to exactly match those requirements. We’re just making that capability available to our clients.
I believe that temporary staffing and staffing augmentation for technical positions is and will continue to move to the realm of specialists, and the specialist niches will become more and more focused. We think we do a great job for software testing, but are there some esoteric software testing requirements that we don’t feel we can address. Yes, there are, and when we see those we’ll be the first to tell our client that they need to look for another partner that specializes in that particular area. This is where staffing and staff augmentation is heading I think … specialist, niche providers that get it right consistently and quickly, and don’t require you (the customer) to waste time and resources interviewing and qualifying candidates.