You may be feeling the skill gap pressure, or you might be in the camp that believes the talent shortage is a myth. Regardless of how real you believe the talent drought is, you have, as a recruiter or staffing professional, at one point or another, found that finding the right talent can be down right impossible.

If it’s been smooth sailing, odds are the waters are about to get a little rough. The latest STEM Smart Brief Report revealed that employment in professional, scientific and technical services is projected to grow 29% by 2020, and this increase is said to add more than two million new jobs to the US economy. If you’ve been in recruiting for any amount of time, you don’t need another stat to know that there simply is not that many STEM professionals available, or even projected to become available.

Many employers are turning to training programs, beefing up talent pools and offering mad incentives and sign on bonuses in their referral programs. We contend that there’s a better solution; think outside the box, and recruit outside your zip code.

Let’s Look at the Cost…

The first reaction to this solution is that hiring from out of state, or even out of the area is too costly. So let’s take a look at the alternative –leaving the spot vacant until someone in the area is found to fill it. Volt.com offers a really simple calculator to estimate an employee’s daily revenue, and then revenue lost per position. It adds up faster than you probably think. Careerbuilder’s blog for employers offers some great words of wisdom in cases of hard-to-fill positions:

“Of course, different positions have different costs per day based on how much revenue that role brings in to the organization. Some positions realistically cost a company more to leave open than others. And many companies more actively recruit for these positions based on this increased cost-per-opening. One way of determining if you should invest more in recruiting for such a position is to determine if different recruiting tactics lead to filling this position faster, and if the cost of that is less than the cost of leaving this position open then you need to get on trying to get that opening filled.”

For those harder-to-fill positions, recruiters have to get more strategic, and find out what makes the most sense for the success of the organization.

They’re Ready and Waiting!

Did you know that 92% of survey respondents said that if they were offered a relocation package, they would seriously consider relocating? The math is pretty simple; figure out the cost of keeping the position open (including what you know about this position’s average time-to-fill), compare it to a fair relocation package, and there’s your solution. It might not always be the right decision to widen your search, but there’s power in knowledge.

Although the vast majority of candidates would consider the offer, only 17% of those polled have actually been offered a relocation package. So while none of this might seem like out of the box recruiting, it actually is!

Video Screening and Interviewing Cut the Cost

Relocation packages aren’t the only cost to consider when recruiting out of the area candidates. Recruiters have to take into account the fact that screening and interviewing candidates can get pretty costly when distance is a factor. So if you’re going to widen your search area, you’re going to need to cast one of those “wider nets” that everyone is talking about.

That is exactly what video screening and interviewing does. Employers can effortlessly and cost-effectively screen and interview as many candidates as they want, with just one recorded session of questions. Once these recorded interviews have been completed, the recruiter can then push a smaller pool onto a live interview process. During this stage, recruiters can get face-to-face with each candidate over a live, virtual interview. This drastically cuts down on travel costs and hassles for both the candidate and the organization.

With video interviewing and screening, the world is your candidate. The fate of those hard-to-fill positions is no longer at the mercy of local candidates. These tools essentially put the employer in a nothing to lose scenario when it comes to recruiting outside of the zip code.

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Julie Salerno, VP of Sales, Strategic Partnerships and Alliances at GreenJobInterview, is a talented professional who provides GreenJobInterview's sales team with strategic leadership and guidance that has helped more than 300 of the world’s leading organizations discover global talent through cloud-based virtual interviewing solutions, which reduce time and costs associated with scheduling and conducting interviews.