While American unemployment remains high, and finding a company willing to hire you is harder than ever for the average American, the opposite is true in the tech industry. Companies are complaining of how hard it is to find the right people for open tech jobs, so much so that part of President Obama’s reelection campaign involves training students to fill those jobs. Tech industry giants have even gone so far as to lobby for immigration policy reform to make it easier for tech-qualified foreigners to get green cards.

At the same time, though, recent graduates are complaining that companies won’t hire them because they lack necessary skills. Without experience, they can’t get jobs, and without jobs, they can’t get experience. How can we decouple this feedback loop? For starters, investing more in training would help. But until a broad, industry-wide shift takes place, businesses (especially IT) have to proactively seek out talent in order to continue delivering innovation to the market. The alternative: foundering in inefficiency while waiting for the right candidate to show up.

How do you configure your team?

From a business leader’s perspective, it’s a simple question of industry-specific economics: market demand for tech resources is outpacing the supply. Things are moving fast, and getting faster by the minute. 

Sure, you can court talent by offering larger paychecks than your competitors or by doing something creative like turning your office into a playground. The bad news for the majority of companies, though, is that, when it comes to perks, it’s nearly impossible to compete with technology giants like Google that offer massages, swimming pools, and dry cleaning in-house.

Perhaps we can learn a thing or two by looking at the state of the workforce. The Atlantic ran a series of articles last year about how the freelancing surge is the biggest shift in workforce demographics since the industrial revolution. A result of this transformation is the democratization of labor: since traditional perks like benefits packages and workplace comforts don’t attract freelancers as much as full-timers (they work remotely more often, and they don’t plan on staying anyway), you can attract talent without building your own Googleplex.

Introducing  the “Elastic Workforce”

But there’s a whole world out there besides freelancing: today, CIOs, directors, and managers are accessing talent in fundamentally new ways. Decision-makers are shifting away from traditional staffing methodologies and embracing an “elastic workforce”—the broader ecosystem of independent contractors, consulting firms, managed services and other third party partners—to deliver on their projects. Instead of taking on new overhead permanently, CIOs are  accessing the right resources at the right time, depending on the task at hand.

I know it seems like outsourcing wouldn’t be of any help to the recent college grad who can’t find a job, but there’s good news. With the proliferation of open-source, cloud, and mobile technologies (many of which you cannot learn in school) anyone can get his or her foot in the door by self-teaching. And while leveraging the elastic workforce certainly helps businesses grow (leading them to hire more), the growing U.S outsourcing services market is providing an even greater source of new jobs. Bluewolf, for example, has been on the Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing companies for the past six years.

But outsourcing has become a bit of a dirty word in some industries, too often used synonymously with offshoring, which is really only a small percentage of many outsourcing strategies leveraged today. So we surveyed a broad cross-section of companies to shed light on the true State of IT Outsourcing to find out how IT Leaders are shifting the way they outsource IT Services (both onshore and offshore) in 2012-2013. Read the full report to find out what top companies are doing right.

Stay tuned for follow-up with a more in-depth analysis of the nature of the “elastic” workforce.