By Russell Glass, CEO of Bizo

As hiring professionals, we’ve all been there. Your teams need support, but you don’t have the budget or resources to hire the desired people. Perhaps you find yourself in a hiring position, but can’t find the candidates that fit the bill. The difficulties of being a hiring manager are not characteristic of one particular industry or field. Everyone, from President Obama to the store owner next door, is faced with the difficult decisions that surround job creation and hiring.  So what do we do?

Location is Not a Barrier

As the CEO of Bizo, a fast growing company in the technology industry, I have a simple solution, “in-shoring.” Here at Bizo, we not only hire the most highly-skilled people, but we also hire them just about as fast as we can find them –wherever we can find them.  Bizo is just one of the tens of thousands of businesses that are in the same position.  We realized early on, that to successfully build our company, we needed to hire only the best people. However, hiring people solely based in the local San Francisco Bay Area was a significant limitation—and sacrificing quality talent was just not something that we were willing to do. At the same time, we didn’t feel that we could build the right tight-knit culture we wanted by off-shoring to countries like India, Belarus or other far-away lands.  The solution? Again, a simple one: use powerful, effective and inexpensive collaboration and communication technologies like Skype, Google Docs, Dropbox, instant messaging, and web conferencing to manage our company’s remote workforce and “in-shore.”

What does it mean to “in-shore”?

In-shoring is a simple idea that offers a plethora of significant benefits to everyone. At Bizo, we’ve built a culture that enables our teams to work together efficiently. By doing so, we’ve managed to:

• Build an infrastructure to hire incredible talent regardless of where they live in the country
• Lower our average cost per employee so we can hire more of them
• Establish networks around the country that fuel our ability to hire more great people

Today, our 45-person company is represented in 10 states around the country, including one person in Hawaii. It is my belief that better companies are built with a diverse foundation, and “in-shoring” has the potential to alter the landscape of this country’s job market.  If the laid-off auto worker in Detroit, the high school student in Little Rock or the former textile marketer in Greensboro, sees that there are jobs available to work for high growth Silicon Valley technology companies if they only had the right skills, they will go out and acquire those skills.

Bringing Jobs to the People

Job seekers need to believe that if they take the initiative to get new skills, there will be a job available to them.  This way, they will have the incentive to acquire the relevant skills they need to be successful.  Leading a technology company in Silicon Valley, I believe that I and others in a similar position have a responsibility to do our part to create and fill jobs in this country. This is simple economics.  If the economy thrives, we will be more successful and our children will be more successful. Ultimately, that’s why we all work in the first place, isn’t it?

With expanded education opportunities, a focus on “in-shoring” and continued innovation and next generation technologies, we can overcome the structural challenges that we face today and lead the world in high technology job creation for decades to come.

So what does “in-shoring” look like for your company?

Russell Glass is CEO of Bizo, a business-to-business marketing firm. Glass is a serial technology entrepreneur, having founded or held senior positions at four venture-backed technology companies. Other than business data, Glass’ passions include golf, anything in high def, and Duke basketball. Follow Glass on Twitter at https://twitter.com/glassruss.

Although the recession has been hard on many industries, the health care industry is one that has managed to thrive. Since the recession’s start, the health care industry has added 631,000 jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and has consistently added headcount each month. CareerBuilder’s annual health care hiring forecast indicates that this hiring momentum will likely continue into 2010. The survey was conducted between November 5 and November 23, 2009, among more than 240 health care employers.

Hiring in 2010

• More than one in five (22 percent) health employers said they plan to increase the number of full-time, permanent employees this year, up from 17 percent last year.

• Ten percent of employers said they had plans to increase the number of part-time employees at their organizations in 2010, in order to help meet demand.

“While most industries struggled with headcount since the start of the recession, health care was and continues to be one of the strongest industries for hiring,” said Jason Ferrara, vice president of corporate marketing for CareerBuilder.

“Forty percent of health care employers, by far the highest among industries we surveyed, have open positions for which they can’t find qualified candidates. This shows that there is high demand for qualified health care workers across a variety of areas; everything from medical assistants to records specialists to nurses.”

Five Health Care Recruitment Trends for 2010

1. Replacing Low-Performing Employees

Health care employers are taking advantage of the current labor pool’s large number of highly qualified candidates to strengthen their work force. Forty-three percent of health care employers say they plan to replace low-performing employees with higher performers in 2010.

What do health care employers really think of their employees’ performance? When asked to grade their current work force, 18 percent rated their employees an “A”, 68 percent a “B”, 13 percent a “C”, and less than one percent a “D” or “F. Whew.

2. More Flexibility

Flexible work options continue to be important to health care employers. Over a third (37 percent) of health care employers said they will provide more flexible work arrangements for employees in 2010, including:

• Alternative schedules (74%) — Employees can come into work early and leave early, or come in later and leave later
• Compressed work weeks (53%) Employees work the same hours, but consolidate work into fewer days
• Telecommuting (40%) — Employees work from home or from another remote location
• Job sharing (12%) — Employees share the same position in a company, each working part of the week
• Summer hours (12%) — Workers enjoy condensed hours during the summer; typically 1/2 days on Fridays

3. Recruitment Tools

As the demand for quality health care employees continues this year, health care employers will leverage a variety of recruitment tools to fill their open positions. But on what are they planning to spend more money, exactly?

• Online recruitment sites — (25%)

• Newspaper classifieds — (20%)

• Career fairs — (18%)

• Social and professional networking sites — (13%)

• Staffing firms and recruiters — (7%)

4. Freelance Workers

Because of the great demand for qualified workers, many health care employers are seeking out freelance or contract health care workers to supplement their needs.  In fact, 34 percent of health care employers are hiring contract or freelance workers in 2010.

5. Green Jobs

“Green jobs” are defined as jobs that contribute significantly to preserving or restoring environmental quality. Being “green” is a rapidly growing movement within the health care industry as companies seek ways to run more efficiently; 10 percent of health care employers plan to add “green” jobs in 2010.
If you missed it, read the full press release here.