We empirically figured out that only two engagement models work smoothly for our clients: On-demand Team Extension and Fully Managed IT Services. Let us address the most popular misconceptions about applying two of those, and explain how we at Blackbird exactly utilizing them.
You get a wealth of our experience from actively working on miscellaneous client projects that your in-house teams would not probably collectively have.
Regardless, of the hiring model you choose, we will always make sure you are aware of all possibilities and potential pitfalls in advance of making your final decision.
While you are provided with a professional team that does both meet all of your hard/soft skill requirements, you will also get the allies that treat your product and company as their own. However, you have all the controls on you, so the team recommends alternative but, eventually, does what you tell.
You are in charge of the direction and clear goal management. We handle absolutely everything else as a turnkey service.Just grow your product or business with zero worries about day-to-day IT issues or emergencies. Any goal you set or an outcome you seek will be accomplished. Period.
Which one works for you?
You may want to start a project as soon as possible, and, well, nail the competition behind. We share the same aspirations.
To put those aspirations into action, we carefully rethought every step of our market-fastest onboarding approach and created our own framework out of it. We also built our recruitment & screening process to surround our clients with people not only technically skilled but also mentally interested in their product success.
So the time it really takes from a kickoff meeting to a completed onboarding and actual project start is cut in half to what both global and Western European outsourcing market could offer you.
If the talents you need are on a bench, you may start an engagement (namely interviewing candidates) in less than 3 days. However, if there is a lack of some talents we will still start with people we have and add the requested talents in less than 3–4 weeks. No delays ever
There is almost no Recruitment & Screening lag, so it’s quite instant jump to the onboarding stage and actual project work shortly after it. Once we agree on terms, it takes less than 5–7 days to kickoff.
Which one works for you?
Onboarding is probably one of the biggest and toughest challenges that new partners usually experience in the beginning.
We designed our own onboarding frameworks for both of the engagement options. It doesn’t matter what project management stack of tools you use, we cover them all with our stellar process.
Either it’s an Employee Handbook or other new employee onboarding material hosted inside an HR tool of your choice, we make sure that remote onboarding goes smoothly. We also care about security and your intellectual property. For instance, as one of the steps of our onboarding framework, we make sure that all the sensual information handoff is conducted via both your and our security policies. More info on intellectual property protection is down the page.
Sometimes, it may take months while your on-site team finishes code splitting and other important project info like a Confluence space will be also ready for a safe hand-off. This is when you will definitely enjoy our full service. Not only we assist your in-house team in the process of hand-off, but we also provide them with well-outlined doable tasks to relieve stress and to bring clarity. As well as to cut transferred project assets into actionable work-ready pieces. Even if months of in-house work is required to do a complete handoff, we are always able to move your project forward with a small stack of starter assets.
Which one works for you?
You probably already confused by trying to compare all the recruitment processes of all potential outsourcing partners. From a freelance recruiter to a large outsourcer, they all claim that their recruitment process is the most unique.
Meanwhile, it's fair to say that the majority of market players have a decent screening process for hard skills. However, they actually fail at developing a business founder or an ownership mentality in their employees’ heads.
The founding team of Blackbird came from classical outsourcing with all its cons and built our company around principles of an ownership mentality instead. We are engineers and technicians who do not appreciate stretching a project for longer than it really needs to be successfully done.
If it’s people on a bench, you’ll be able to interview them in less than 1–3 days. In other cases, it takes from 2 – 4 weeks depends on the skillset you need and the readiness of a candidate to adopt the ownership mentality. Regardless of the above scenarios, you’ll have a great talent pool to ramp-up human resources quickly.
If you like to set big outcomes and watch them achieved without thinking about whom to hire for a job, you will enjoy this cooperation model. You will never have to think about day-to-day IT problems, product development, and support. HR duties, any operational, and managerial risks are also not your problems anymore. You are fully covered.
Which one works for you?
24×7×365 support and personal manager to assist makes it easier to foresight and solve any situations as they may happen along the way. This manager is an independent professional that oversees your off-site employees or a dedicated team with a project manager(-s). He’s usually invisible one but always makes sure that Blackbird executives are aware of how things are going.
We are not monstrous enterprise, and we are always picky about choosing a client we work with. Once we become partners we want our partnerships to be fulfilling and profitable for both sides.
Which one works for you?
Different timezones are solved by mandatory 3–hour overlap with your and your team timezones. 3 hours is the minimum availability threshold for all Blackbird employees.
We also make sure that you understand every Blackbirder you work with. All of our employees are obligated to have a minimum of 3 individual business English lessons per week. We fully cover the tuition.
Which one works for you?
Your NDA is backed-up with our localized NDA version that is tailored to local laws of involved parties.
We have complete control over things people install on their corporate devices. Blackbird maintains an accurate and up-to-date inventory of all its networks, services, servers, and employee devices.
All new hires are required to attend the security awareness training as part of their onboarding. And all employees are required to attend the annual security awareness training. Blackbird engineers are required to attend an annual security training designed specifically for engineers. Read more on our intellectual property protection effort.
Everyone from your extension team members signs it before he starts working with any sensitive information you share. You will receive localized NDA and its notarized translation shipped right to your post box.
The same level of security is applied to this particular cooperation model too.
Which one works for you?
As our favorite client, you will be able to forecast your monthly, quarterly, and yearly expenditure on IT services regardless of a cooperation model you choose.
Even planning your annual budget around outcomes will get easier with Blackbird since IT risks are on us. You will also save a lot of that budget via passing your IT duties to us in comparison to creating a comparable team in-house.
One thing is for sure: if IT is not your primary money-making product then your in-house team will always be behind people who have to regularly deal with challenges and emergencies of multiple clients’ products, services. All such a wealth of experience will be always available for you whenever you need it.
Plus, you will be able to focus your people's energy and resources on things that matter the most for your company growth.
We also have trial periods, so you could try out an individually gathered team of specialists and see what they are able to do for you. If you are not satisfied with the whole or certain team members, we will replace them at no extras until you are 100% happy.
Our fee ranges from $25 to $65 USD/hour. The number of hours is estimated based on certain parameters and project goals and resources that are required to achieve them
Resources that will remain a part of your deliverables are on you. For instance, it is such things as hosting, monthly subscriptions for 3rd party services that are required to build and maintain your product, etc. All the essentials like code environments, essential software, and hardware are on us.
Which one works for you?