If you work in IT management, you’ve probably found yourself in this situation: projects accelerating, demands growing, and your current team already at its limit. Pressure comes from all sides, from the director wanting faster deliveries, from users requesting improvements, and from your own conscience saying something needs to change.
Then comes the million-dollar question: hire as an employee, bring in contractors, or seek external staff augmentation?
Each model has its advantages and pitfalls. Choosing wrong can mean months of headaches, budget overruns, or that strategic project that simply never gets off the ground. In this article, we’ll break down the three models in a practical way so you can make the best decision for your context.
Full-time employee
Starting with the basics: “full-time employee” is formal employment for internal teams, with a signed employment contract and direct ties to the company. It’s the model everyone knows where the professional becomes an official part of the roster.
The advantages are clear
You have complete control over the professional, you define schedules, priorities, and can mold them to breathe the company culture from day one. Stability also scores points: a well-built employee team tends to stay longer, building knowledge about internal systems and processes.
Now, the disadvantages can cost your budget
First, time. A global survey by Gi Group Holding (2024) found that 43.7% of Brazilian companies report difficulties finding qualified IT professionals. In practice, this means hiring processes that easily exceed 30 to 60 days before having someone productive.
Second, cost. A salary of R$ 5,000 for a developer might seem reasonable, right? Wrong. When you add up employment taxes, employer social security contributions, severance fund deposits, vacation pay, 13th-month salary, and other benefits, this cost can jump to something between R$ 8,500 and R$ 10,500 per month, depending on the company’s tax regime. It’s nearly double.
Third, and perhaps the least talked about: all people management falls on you. Onboarding, training, performance tracking, vacation management, sick leaves, occasional internal conflicts, and of course, turnover. When someone leaves, the cycle starts from zero again.
When full-employment makes sense
If you have long-term strategic positions, that tech lead who’ll be with you for years, for example, and your company already has a robust HR structure to provide support, employment is a solid option.
Contractor: The flexible model
Hiring contractors means bringing someone in as a service provider, in a commercial rather than employment relationship. It seems simple and flexible on paper, and partly it is.
The good part
Hiring is faster than employment, you negotiate, sign a contract, and you’re done. The flexibility is also real: contracts can be adjusted as needed and, theoretically, costs are lower since you don’t bear employment taxes.
The problems appear in the routine
First, legal risk. If the professional works exclusively, has fixed hours, or receives direct orders like a regular employee, you might be configuring misclassified employment. And then, if there’s a labor complaint, prepare to pay all those retroactive taxes with interest and penalties.
Second, turnover. Contractors typically accept other offers quickly, after all, there’s no formal bond holding them. That senior dev you trained for three months? They can receive a better offer and leave within a week.
Third, and this is important, management remains yours. You need to handle the entire selection process, track deliverables, deal with unscheduled absences, and make constant replacements.
When contractors make sense
For specific, well-defined demands, contractors can work. That blockchain specialist you need for three months on a specific project? Yes, that can be a good case. The question is: how many of your problems are really that specific?
Staff augmentation: The strategic model
Here we enter the model that has gained increasing popularity: allocating complete teams through specialized companies. The idea is simple, you hire a ready-made squad, the partner company handles all people management, and you focus on what really matters: delivering results.
The practical advantages
Speed is the first one. While an employment hire can take months, an augmented squad can be operational in days. No opening positions, filtering resumes, conducting five interview rounds, and hoping the candidate accepts the offer.
Cost is predictable and scalable. You know exactly how much you’ll pay per month and can adjust team size as demand increases or decreases. Project finished? Reduce the team. New project coming in? Scale up quickly.
The game-changer, however, is people management. Vacations, leaves, turnover, replacements, training, all of this stops being your problem. The partner company handles it. A developer left? The partner already arranges a replacement without you needing to stop to recruit. Someone took vacation? Another professional has already been assigned.
And the best part is that professionals arrive already experienced and tested. These are people the partner company already knows, has evaluated, and placed on previous projects.
The disadvantages (yes, they exist)
There’s a clear dependency: your team’s quality depends on the quality of the company you chose as a partner. That’s why you need to choose well, talk to other clients, and understand the company’s internal processes.
The hourly/professional cost might seem higher than a contractor, or even an employee, at first glance. However, in the augmentation model, you’re paying not just for the professional but for the complete management service. When you break down all the hidden costs, recruitment, training, replacements, HR management, the total cost ends up being competitive and often lower.
When It makes sense
If you have projects with defined timelines, need to scale quickly without increasing internal structure, or simply want to focus on strategy and product instead of people management, augmentation is the way.
NextAge, for example, works with the Staff Augmentation concept, building customized squads for each client. All people management is handled by the company, replacements, vacations, absences, and performance. You, the IT manager, focus on defining the product, tracking deliveries, and ensuring the project moves forward. Without worrying whether the dev will resign tomorrow or if the QA will take sick leave.
Focus on delivering results
In a nutshell: employment offers stability and control, but is expensive and slow. Contractors bring flexibility but with high turnover and legal risks. Augmentation delivers speed, predictability, and takes the burden of people management off your plate.
Brasscom’s “IT Talent Demand” study projects that Brazil needed about 797,000 technology professionals between 2021 and 2025, with an estimated annual deficit of 106,000 people. This shows one thing: the market is tight and will remain so. Those who can scale teams quickly without getting stuck in bureaucratic processes gain competitive advantage.
If you’re seeking speed, quality, and want to remove all the complexity of people management from your desk, augmentation is the model that makes sense. And that’s exactly where NextAge positions itself as a strategic partner.
Want to better understand how NextAge can help scale your IT team without headaches? Get in touch and discover how over 600 companies are already solving this problem.
