Outsourcing: Interview with Harley Lippman, CEO of Genesis10 (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You discussed different regions: Michigan, Cleveland, Georgia and Kansas City. What are each of them individually? Are those competitive landscapes?

Harley Lippman: In certain cities there is more talent and certain skill sets than in others. .Net or Java people – certain places have a greater preponderance of those people. In Kansas City, for example, you may have more project managers. First of all, you want to diversify locations – this is a mitigation of risk. Second, you have greater access to a different or additional talent pool.

SM: Are you finding enough people in each of those locations, or do you have to recruit them nationwide and bring them to those locations?

HL: It all depends on the project and technology. If we have to ramp up for a huge number, like 5,000 people, then we may recruit nationwide. If it is not at that level, typically we can find people in those locations. We have to deal with word of mouth and reputation. People are not commodities – they will not work just for anybody – and they have to feel comfortable. A lot of people overlook the importance of what we call the care and feeding of people. If you have a strong recruiting engine and your own unique software that is able to track quality people and that your competition doesn’t have, and you have a reputation that attracts people to want to work with you, you should do really well. We have not found it a problem to find enough IT people.

SM: So, you are saying that in America today there are enough experienced IT people who can be hired for onshore work?

HL: Yes. One reason is that there have been millions of jobs going offshore and a lot of companies in the U.S. have had additional layoffs, even where it was not sent offshore, just as an effort to trim their payroll and cut fix costs. You continually have companies laying off IT people. Between the jobs that were lost – those people are still IT professionals – and the layoffs, there is a big part where you have this pool of people you can hire.

SM: What I am trying to gauge is where we are in terms of normalizing the jobs that were lost. If a million or more jobs were lost in outsourcing when globalization took over, how much of that has come back? I know there are parts of the country that are absolutely booming – like Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is absolutely booming, and there is a tremendous shortage of talent here, and this is high-end talent. This is not a place for a lot of people sitting around.

HL: You are right. But if you make it attractive enough and you want to hire excellent people, you can find them in Silicon Valley – you just have to be competitive.

SM: I think the situation in the areas you mentioned is completely different.

HL: It is. I will give you another reason why you can scale and hire a lot of people in America. A lot of people, when they lost their jobs over the last decade and work went offshore, they left the IT sector. What I found is that a lot of those people only left the IT sector because they had to. To make money and take care of their families, they went outside the industry to take another job. But most people, when they get the chance, will go back to the IT sector, because that is their preference.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Outsourcing: Interview with Harley Lippman, CEO of Genesis10
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