Jeff's Blog

One of the things that STAR BASE does besides IT consulting and IT strategy is IT staffing.  I've noticed on the IT staffing side, more and more Cincinnati and Dayton IT jobs are going to foreign nationals.  These would be individuals from other countries such as India and China.  Being a local IT firm, our preference is to use local talent if at all possible.  The last couple of years, this is gotten to be increasingly difficult.  There is no one reason for this, but here are some of my observations.

Our recruiters tend to work on IT staffing jobs in the Cincinnati and Dayton area, and I believe one of our strengths is being local, so the recruiters usually look for local IT talent first.  If they are not successful, they take their search regionally and even nationally.

What we have found in taking our search national, is there is a huge pool of IT talent that is willing to travel anywhere for work.  Since most of the individuals that are willing to travel anywhere in this country are usually from another country, they really don't have any family or roots tying them to any specific geographic location.  Compared to some of the places they have come from, the American lifestyle is like living a life of a king.  A lot of these individuals don't have any family here and so they tend to put a lot of hours in at work.   Depending on how they are classified could create a legal issue as far as overtime rules.   It also makes it challenging from a background check standpoint. 

On the other hand, it can also be quite challenging working with local IT talent.  With the price of gas, we found that people tend not to want to drive.   Sometimes it takes several days for them to return an e-mail or phone call, and in general, have a really arrogant attitude.  It's almost like they are entitled to something or are angry about the situation. 

Folks there is nothing I would like to do more than hirer local talent to serve our local companies, but the facts are its global economy.   Skill sets are going to need to change on an increasing faster pace.  Everybody's got to learn to adapt and to change.  Things are never going to go back to the way they were.