Monday, April 04, 2011

'Rural sourcing' brings online jobs to small towns

Some businesses, leery of hiring full-time employees, move jobs to rural communities in the United States instead of other countries. "Rural sourcing" first gained media attention several years ago. Now, as economic conditions improve, the trend is growing again, Rieva Lesonsky, president and founder of small-business consulting firm GrowBiz Media, reports for Small Business Trends.

New research from oDesk, an online global employment platform, reveals "Small towns are outperforming their big-city counterparts in both online work activity and the number of hours worked per contractor," Lesonsky writes. The report notes small towns with populations under 15,000 are "keeping pace with large cities in terms of the number of online workers per capita" and "have proportionally higher 'actively working' online populations in terms of hours worked per online contractor," Lesonsky writes. (Read more)

2 comments:

Grand Junction Web Marketing said...

The trend now for businesses to be able to save is to hire virtual workers. Workers that can work from their home using their pc and internet. No need to provide for office space, nor office equipment for the workers. On the part of the workers, there's no need for them to travel or commute. That's time and money saved.

Blooming Tea said...

I have used odesk before and there is a trade off on workers the issue arises whether to outsource or hire locally, when fixed costs from employees is a main factor many businesses but i feel a middle ground between outsources and staying local is the best bet