Too often, organizations consider outsourced staff in a reactive rather than proactive fashion. They begin Googling outsourced virtual assistants, customer service representatives, or eCommerce specialists when they simply can’t handle the demand in-house, or when operational costs have gotten too high to bear. At Extend Your Team, we encourage organizations to incorporate outsourced staff into their business model proactively, because we’ve seen this model propel companies forward much faster and much more efficiently than they could have achieved through a traditional recruiting and hiring approach.
If you’re considering outsourced staff already, or even if you aren’t, look out for these 4 key signs that it may be time to bring offshore talent into your organization.
1. Increased Demand
Growth is a good thing, but it can also break organizations that aren’t prepared to handle it. If your numbers have been trending up, with revenue closing at a fast pace and your in-house team taking on more projects than they can handle, it’s time to look into outsourcing your administrative and customer service functions sooner rather than later.
Similarly, if you know you have to increase demand in order to hit your growth goals, outsourced staff can play an important role in business development functions, or in taking over manual tasks that are preventing your business development team from hitting their targets. Sales teams are often plagued with various CRM and manual follow-up tasks that can be done by an outsourced team member at a more cost-effective rate, so your sales people can focus on revenue-generating activity.
2. Employee Well-Being
Employees that are spread out too thin across multiple projects will get burnt out eventually. Burnout typically occurs when there is a shortage of labor on the team, and can actually lead to lower levels of productivity, lower quality output, and high employee turnover. Studies show that 77% of employees currently say that they are experiencing burnout, and 32% say they’re looking for different work opportunities to achieve a better work-life balance.
Outsourced staff fills the capacity gap to allow your in-house team members to focus on the jobs they were actually hired to do. Best-in-class outsourcing partners like Extend Your Team can fill your most important roles with high-quality talent, at an affordable rate, much faster than you can achieve on your own.
3. Operational Costs
According to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), outsourcing can help companies reduce an average of 15 percent of their costs. While these cost savings are certainly a plus, the time savings you would have spent on recruiting are often an even bigger draw. Organizations are facing a talent shortage at the moment, with jobs remaining unfilled for months and HR departments spending over $4,000 per hire.
Providers such as Extend Your Team can not only provide outsourced staff at an affordable rate to decrease your overhead, but provide access to a streamlined, high-quality recruiting and talent pool. This way, you can rest easy knowing that you’re filling seats with top-notch professionals instead of sacrificing on quality in order to cut corners.
4. Gaps in Industry Knowledge or Technical Skills
Whether you’re expanding into a new area or simply looking to level up, your in-house team isn’t always going to have the knowledge and skill-level you need to make your growth aspirations possible. From digital marketing, to accounting, to graphic artistry, and more, there are countless areas of expertise that an organization may have a sudden or increased need for. The more specialized the role, the more difficult it is for your in-house team to simply “put on another hat” and learn to do the job in real time.
Partners like Extend Your Team are able to provide you with outsourced staff members with specific skill sets and backgrounds, such as bookkeeping, eCommerce store management, or business analytics, in order to fill whatever capacity gap you are seeing in your internal team.
Conclusion
If you’re experiencing any of the signs mentioned in this blog, it’s time to seriously consider outsourced staff. At Extend Your Team, we’ve worked with organizations big and small that were new to, and even skeptical of, the outsourcing model. They soon found that the cost savings and time savings associated with outsourcing represent only a fraction of the overall benefits. Extend Your Team is most excited about helping organizations leverage outsourced talent to achieve growth aspirations by adding new skills and capacity to their in-house team.
If you’re considering outsourcing for the first time, schedule a free consultation with Extend Your Team to learn more about our approach and talent pool.