This post is sponsored.
The IT industry has known a huge growth over the past 10 years. Every small company, every startup needs a certain level of IT skills. Recruitment or outsourcing, whatever one may choose, everybody needs services of IT experts, even if it’s only to initially setup their computers network, or to develop the company site.
Which one is better: recruiting your own personnel, or outsourcing IT projects to freelancers or third parties?
Recruiting
- Advantages:
- you have the people in-house, thus being able to better supervise the projects development
- you have less work with managing contracts with third parties
- Disadvantages:
- if you don’t have a workload which pays for it, having your own IT employees can be too expensive
- you have to buy additional office equipment
Outsourcing
- Advantages:
- you can get good quality work for reasonable prices. This applies specially to UK, where local prices are higher than in other European countries, not to mention Asia.
- you can handle many project at once, by hiring as many freelancers as you need
- if you don’t have projects all year round, you don’t have to pay for IT
- Disadvantages:
- you take the risk of working with people you don’t know and you can’t control. After you find some steady suppliers, the process will run smoothly, but in the beginning you may have unpleasant surprises in terms of quality of work.
- you give the security of your network in unknown hands
How about the UK market trends? Taking into consideration the recent rise of sterling against euro and US dollar (source: Reuters), and the fact that many startups cannot afford hiring too much auxiliary staff, it is predictable that the outsourcing market will gain momentum against recruitment in the IT industry. However, time will tell the truth.
