Guest Contributor > Small Business > Talent Acquisition
A Jobs Solution: Innovation, In-Shoring and Education
- October 10th, 2011
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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.Stay Connected
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- Economy
- employee benefits
- Employee Engagement
- employee morale
- employee recognition
- employment brand
- Employment Branding
- Generational Hiring
- Generation Y
- Gen X
- gen Y
- Going Green
- hiring
- Hiring Forecast
- Interviewing
- interview questions
- Job Forecast
- Job Postings
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- layoffs
- leadership
- Leadership Development
- Matt Ferguson
- millenials
- recession
- recruiting
- retention
- SHRM 2008
- SHRM 2009
- SHRM annual conference
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