The hidden cost of hiring individual contractors
When companies need extra development capacity, the default move is hiring individual contractors or freelancers. It's straightforward: post a job, screen candidates, onboard them individually. But this approach has a cost that doesn't show up in the hourly rate.
Individual contractors don't know each other. They don't have established communication patterns, shared coding standards, or experience working as a unit. Your internal team spends significant time coordinating people who've never collaborated before.
Outsourcing a complete team — developers, QA, a tech lead, and potentially a PM — solves this. The team arrives ready to work together because they already have been.
Three reasons complete teams outperform individual hires
They skip the forming stage
A group of individually hired contractors goes through the classic forming-storming-norming-performing cycle. That takes 4-8 weeks before they reach full productivity. An established team from an outsourcing provider starts at the norming stage on day one. They've already figured out how to divide work, review code, and resolve disagreements.
They bring their own process
Complete teams come with tested workflows: how they run standups, how they break down tickets, how they do code reviews, how they handle blockers. You don't need to invent a process for them. You align their process with yours, which is far faster than building one from scratch.
Quality control is built in
A team that works together regularly has internal quality standards. The senior developer reviews the junior developer's code before it reaches your team. The QA engineer knows the typical failure patterns. The tech lead catches architectural issues early. This internal quality loop means fewer bugs reach your integration environment.
When complete team outsourcing makes sense
You need to move fast. Hiring 5-8 people internally takes 3-6 months. A dedicated team from a provider starts in 2-4 weeks.
You have a defined scope. If you can clearly describe the product or module the team will own, they can operate semi-independently. They report progress; you provide direction and feedback.
You need specialized skills. Your project requires React Native, Go backend, and DevOps expertise. Finding and hiring that mix internally is hard. A provider assembles the right combination from their existing bench.
You need temporary scale. The project runs 12 months. After that, you need 2 people for maintenance, not 8. An outsourcing arrangement flexes naturally; laying off internal hires doesn't.
The hybrid model
The strongest outsourcing arrangements we've seen combine European and Israeli talent. European developers (particularly from Eastern Europe) bring disciplined engineering practices, thorough testing habits, and strong architectural thinking. Israeli team members bring product instinct, direct communication, and comfort with ambiguity.
At Globalbit, most of our teams are hybrid by default. A client gets the quality rigor of European engineering with the agility of Israeli product culture. This combination has been particularly effective for enterprise clients who need both speed and reliability.
The math
Consider a project that needs 6 developers for 12 months.
Internal hiring: 3-month recruiting period, ~$15K per hire in recruiting costs, 2-month ramp-up time, plus salaries, benefits, and office space. Total effective cost: 15 productive months of work squeezed into 12 calendar months.
Outsourced team: 3-week onboarding, productive by week 4. All 12 months are productive months. Even at a higher hourly rate, the total project cost is often comparable — and the delivery timeline is 3-4 months shorter.
Frequently asked questions
Will an outsourced team care about our product as much as internal employees? Honestly, it depends on the provider. At commodity vendors, probably not. At providers that invest in long-term client relationships, team members become genuine stakeholders in the product's success. We've had team members on client projects for 3+ years.
How do we manage an outsourced team day-to-day? The team should integrate into your existing tools and ceremonies (Slack, Jira, daily standups). The tech lead on the outsourced team manages internal work distribution. Your product owner sets priorities. It should feel like managing any remote team.
What happens to knowledge when the outsourcing engagement ends? This is a real concern. Good providers build knowledge handover into the contract from the start. Documentation, recorded architecture decisions, and overlap periods between outgoing and incoming team members are standard practice.
If your next project needs a team that can start producing in weeks instead of months, let's talk about how we'd structure it.