Manpower Group’s 2022 report shows that 75% of companies have reported talent shortages and difficulty hiring, the highest rate in 16 years. According to the report, IT and Data are the most sought-after roles by employers globally. As the talent shortage crisis continues to grow, businesses need to make crucial decisions regarding their operational and strategic agility to stay competitive. This talent scarcity has led many companies, especially large enterprises, to explore tech talent abroad to ensure efficient delivery of the product roadmap.
This blog explores the nearshore opportunity and demonstrates some benefits organizations can tap into by working with a nearshore partner during the product development process.
Bringing Great Products to Life with the Right Nearshore Partner
Companies of all sizes across many industries have come face to face with problems surrounding the talent shortage crisis. According to a Korn Ferry study called Global Talent Crunch, the current talent shortage could create 85 million unfilled jobs and close to $8.5 trillion in unrealized revenues if unaddressed by 2030. Working with a nearshore partner can mitigate these challenges.
When it comes to hiring the right product development team and expanding your company, proximity matters, nearshore collaboration allows companies to focus on their core business needs while simultaneously saving time and money. You need a nearshore partner that can provide more affordable services while providing high-quality work, optimize your business’s cost structure, and decrease the time it takes to tackle new challenges or unresolved priorities.
Considering hiring outside talent or shifting away from your current team structure? Here are some key benefits of working with a nearshore provider:
Consulting Mindset
Think of nearshore partners through the same lens as a consulting agency. Instead of an employee/employer relationship, collaborating with a nearshore company is centered on a mutually beneficial partnership, which can help businesses uncover opportunities and address previously unmet needs. When demand reaches a certain peak, you will need more resources. Rather than redistribute in-house resources to processes and operations they are unfamiliar with, you can partner with a nearshore company housed with industry experts to provide the necessary support and power for your company to reach its goals.
Resource Optimization
Product development can take a lot of effort, money, and time. Partnering with a nearshore company allows you to scale up and down on a per-project basis, on demand. Whether you need to support an individual project or an entire development portfolio, a nearshore company can provide the necessary personnel pieces that allow you to create a balanced workload while saving money and increasing productivity.
Cross-Functional, Diverse Teams
Companies need to hire people from all walks of life to get a broader perspective. Diverse companies are 70% more likely to capture new markets and have a 35% performance advantage over their homogeneous counterparts. Diversity is a huge benefit of nearshoring. As a company that operates globally, you need a nearshore partner with diverse teams that allows them to see what problems their clients face and then provide solutions based on the views they are privy to — ideas that may differ from your in-house team.
Skill/functional diversity is also essential, as multi-disciplinary teams of engineers, testers, architects, designers, and writers are required to build competitive digital products. In-house teams can only provide so much, which makes sense because we hire and train for what we need. However, when those needs eventually change or grow, your in-house team can no longer sufficiently meet them.
Continuous Learning Culture
You need a partner that places a high value on education. Talent development should drive tangible business results; therefore, upskilling and reskilling your teams should be top priorities. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report indicates that 50% of all employees will need to reskill by 2025. Keeping your teams up to date on the ever-changing, in-demand, and specialized skills required to keep up with the latest technological advancements is vital to your company’s success.
Education never ends at Wizeline; we believe in fostering innovation through education. With Wizeline Academy’s programs for the community and Wizeliners and our Digital Skills Accelerator program for customers, we prioritize learning and development for all parties in our ecosystem. With the valuable tech skills we teach, we can unlock the potential of all students, equipping them with skills to solve the challenges of tomorrow. As your nearshore partner, we help you become an adaptive organization.
Access New Technologies
Improving business processes is a goal across all companies. However, in many cases today, businesses can only accomplish this by also implementing new technology. Once the technology behind current processes changes, businesses will either need to train new or existing staff on utilizing the latest technology or outsource projects to companies that thrive on staying up to date on new technology.
Ensuring your staff can access the new technology, become familiar with it, and effectively use it can be time-consuming. Partnering with a nearshore company gives you continuous access to new technologies like super apps, 3D Reconstruction, or intelligent automation while allowing you to experiment and see what works before making a total investment.
Cultural Compatibility
Culture dictates a diverse mix of practices around hierarchy, meeting culture, responsibility, and more. However, when you work with a company that is in tune with your culture and knowledge about common business trends. You need a remote team that understands your culture to avoid associated challenges.
Furthermore, miscommunication due to language barriers can prevent the implementation of new processes, limit necessary feedback on ongoing projects, and negatively impact productivity metrics. You need a vendor that will provide highly-skilled professionals with high proficiency in English to avoid misunderstandings.
Cost Efficiency
When you need to begin new product development and time is of the essence, and your current staff doesn’t have the required skillset, hiring a full-time employee may seem like the obvious choice. However, that notion comes at a cost. The SBA says the rule of thumb is that a new employee costs 1.25 to 1.4 times the salary. In addition to salary costs, hiring new people to join your in-house team will add labor costs, such as equipment costs and health and benefits packages.
Outsourcing product development personnel has advantages over hiring a full-time employee because you avoid onboarding costs, payroll taxes, health insurance, and other benefits. However, outsourced development rates vary, and the hourly pay can range in the hundreds of dollars in Western countries like the US, Canada, Norway, and Belgium. This practice doesn’t leave room to maximize your budget.
Working with a nearshore partner with teams in places like Mexico, Colombia, Spain, and Vietnam can dramatically decrease development costs because there are no costs associated with in-house recruitment or the higher hourly rate that some outsourcing partnerships demand. Furthermore, having an extended team nearby means more timely communication, reducing overall development costs.
Time Zone Similarity
10- to 14-hour time zone differences take a lot of work to overcome. Working across different time zones can lead to slower feedback and decreased productivity. However, when companies can utilize remote teams in nearby countries, it opens the door to working in very close time zones allowing for quick and effective communication.
Decreased time zone differences allow companies and clients to blend teams and collaborate more conveniently. Whether via conference calls, email, video conferencing, or instant messaging, a time zone difference of fewer than four hours allows for little to no delays in response.
How Wizeline Can Help with Your Digital Product Development
By working with a nearshore partner, you can unlock faster, more agile, and more innovative product development for your organization. The right partner should provide you with the benefits of collaborating with a nearshore company and implementing best practices to architect technical solutions and scale business operations.
Wizeline’s strength is nearshore collaboration and digital product development. By blending our onshore, nearshore, and offshore talent into a centralized delivery model, we offer a flexible framework to meet the continuously shifting demands of your business, leverage time zone proximity, and align resources based on cost and quality.
Check out our guide to nearshore product development, which examines the current product development landscape and demonstrates key factors of success in product development in addition to what was covered in this blog.
Learn more about how we can work with you to optimize costs and improve productivity while managing the introduction of new technologies to transform your business here, or contact us at consulting@wizeline.com to get started.
