Posts Tagged ‘labor’
Finding Cost-Effective Talent Without Looking Overseas
Monday, March 14th, 2011A new trend has been emerging in the labor markets, but is it really new? They call it “onshoring” – term that plays off of the “offshoring” concept.
For the past 15 years, large US corporations have looked to developing countries for trained, educated workers with particular skills at a fraction of the cost of a US worker’s salary and the overhead costs associated with employing someone locally, including health care, payroll taxes, worker’s comp and more. This has been particularly prevalent in the information technology sector and in recent years, startups have embraced the offshoring approach to bring new technology ideas to market.
Outsourcing work to non-citizens outside of one’s country is the common definition of “offshoring”. Conversely, “onshoring” is outsourcing work to citizens within one’s country.
…but isn’t this just a fancy new name for recruiting?
Yes and no. Onshoring tries to take advantage of cost savings within a country, with work being performed in states and regions that have a lower cost of operation for companies that are located in areas with higher overhead costs. In a weak job market, this type of “worker arbitrage” may be possible for at least awhile.
From an entrepreneur’s standpoint, it’s a trend to watch, and there are good articles being penned about this, including one in The Harvard Business Review. A startup in a high cost urban area may be able to find an IT consulting firm with some needed skills in a lower cost, rural area. From this perspective, “onshoring” is a great equalizer for the economy and for the environment – creating jobs domestically and leveraging telecommunications to minimize wasted time and money on commuting and relocations.
Now let’s add another layer of variation through an actual job-creating scenario: how about an technical recruiter firm from another country being engaged by a US company to help hire US workers?
We’ll let someone else figure out what to name this concept (“off-onshoring”? “on-offshoring”?) and we’ll focus on the live example.
TechSoft InfoSolutions (“TSIS”) is a member of the ActSeed Community and a small, entrepreneurial information technology company in Bangalore, India. They specialize in AutoCAD, Visio, GIS, web development and ecommerce technologies. They have almost two decades of experience working with US companies both in the US and from India. They have parlayed this experience into a new role: technical recruiter. The “wrinkle” is that they are using their technical expertise to help US companies find and evaluate candidates for hire IN the US.
Right now, TSIS is helping a company in Texas find software engineers who have expertise in an ecommerce software called Ariba. They are looking for functional business analysts for software modules like Ariba Buyer, ACM, Ariba Sourcing and Ariba Contracts. By the way, if you have these skills, send TSIS your resume at resumes@techsoftinfosolutions.net.
While TSIS is one interesting example, there are many more. From a small business owner’s perspective, onshoring is definitely a concept worth exploring and one that ActSeed will be following closely as it represents the opportunity to create jobs and commerce in the US.
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No One Is Going to Pay You Just to Show Up
Thursday, March 4th, 2010RNN9JSHBCTWX “Though unemployment is at a 25?year high, work will eventually return. But it won’t look the same. No one is going to pay you just to show up. We will see a more flexible, more freelance, more collaborative and far less secure work world.” This was the cover story for Time Magazine on May 25, 2009, and it captures a significant portion of my thinking about how we work.
My contemporary labor mantra is that we no longer manage our careers one job at a time. We manage our careers one project or even one hour at a time.
From an entrepreneur’s or small business owner’s perspective, I often view an FTE (“full time equivalent” job opening) as possibly being filled by 2, 3 or sometimes even 4 different people working less than full time for me. When your company has a dozen employees, give or take …a dozen, then each decision regarding labor is super critical and has significant ramifications. Often, labor makes up a dominant portion of our entire budget.
Understanding the trends in the labor market and the trends in building and managing our own teams – including our interns, freelancers, contractors, full time employees, part time employees and advisors – is what we intend to convey in this Labor Trends section. Some of our company’s greatest resources leave the office every night (ok, maybe some of us don’t have offices or pull all-nighters leading up to a big business event, but you get what I mean!). We must always be cognizant of this fact and appreciate what it means – and what it takes to keep our teams cohesive and productive.
