That's how far she travelled in January, journeying from Columbus to Chennai, India, to interview prospective employees.

"My usual methods weren't working," says Tray, who once offered $50 gift certificates to anyone who merely submitted a qualified application in response to a local job posting. With the labour market so tight--unemployment in Columbus stands at a mere 2.6 per cent--she struggled to fill openings. She was turning away business because she couldn't find people.

Then she decided to try extreme recruiting. While talking over her hiring travails with a group of other entrepreneurs who met regularly at the local chamber of commerce, a colleague who was a native of India, CK Satyapriya, suggested she try looking in his homeland.

Recruiting overseas is highly unusual for a tiny business like Tray's Shared Resources Inc. Thecompany, which builds and supports computer systems, has a workforce of 53, divided between its Columbus base and a branch in Cincinnati. Sales last year were $4.2 million.

What's more, for a company of any size, recruiting abroad is fraught with risks. Tray asks her new hires to commit to work for her for three years, but she knows that they are free to seek other opportunities once they are in the country.

But recruiting in India costs far less than in the US. Tray typically pays headhunters about 30 per cent of a worker's starting annual salary for a domestic recruit, which works out to about $15,000 a person. The costs of recruiting in India, including her visit and one-way air fares for the recruits, is about $6,800 a person. Tray is paying the Indian recruits on the same scale as her US workers, with salaries ranging from $41,000 to $53,000 a year.

"I don't have any more of a guarantee that things will work out with the people I pay $15,000 for as I do with the Indians," she says, "so it was acalculated risk."

Most US employers who hire foreigners use headhunters to do the screening. Not Tray. Shared Resources' 51-year old owner and president has strong ideas about what sort of workers she wants, and she figured the only way to get the right people was to interview them personally. Beatrice Wolper, the company's outside general counsel, says she was startled when she heard Tray was considering going overseas to recruit. But she quickly realised it was the only way Tray would consider hiring foreign workers.

"She'd want to eyeball somebody making such a drastic move in their life," Wolper says.

Paving the way for her visit, an Indian recruiter she had met through her Indian colleague in Columbus helped her place an advertisement in an English-language newspaper. The ad attracted 350 resumes, and the Indian recruiter winnowed them down to 117.

And so in early January, Tray and her husband--James Dyer, who doesn't work in her company--boarded a plane in Columbus and flew to India. The mostdistant travel she had done before was to vacation spots like the Bahamas.

Four days of meetings

Their destination was Chennai, formerly called Madras. Located in southern India, Chennai has a population of 6.3 million, making it the nation's fourth-largest city. There, at an engineering college, the remaining applicants were given tests covering both practical knowledge such as correctly identifying the capital of the US as well as technical skills. The 51 with the highest scores were invited to stay for interviews.

Tray hunkered down, first at the college and later at a hotel, for foursolid days of back-to-back meetings with the job seekers.

"Many of the candidates were amazed," she says. "They'd never had an actual employer come to India to met them."

Sitting at a conference table in her tidy suburban offices here in Columbus, she pulls out a photo album that looks like the sort anybody might compile after an exotic vacation trip. There are pictures of her visiting a temple, visiting aschool. Some of the slots in the album hold colourful postcards. Folded into the front of the album: a bolt of blue and green fabric she bought during the visit. Chennai has a long tradition of producing textiles.

As she conducted her interviews, Tray eliminated three men because they looked at the two men who were with her--her husband and her Indian contact--while answering her questions.

"I get plenty of that here," says Tray dryly. "I don't have to go looking for it."

Tray notes that many of her employees, as well as a number of her clients, are women. She has to know that her consultants won't have problems taking direction from any of these women.

She also wanted to make sure a hire had good communications skills, something not easily discernible from resumes or tests. Indeed, the three candidates with the highest test scores failed miserably in the follow-up interviews.

"One of these guys was fabulous," Tray says. "He had a bachelor's in engineering, a master's in engineering and anothermaster's in computer development; but he couldn't talk to me." His conversational English, it turned out, was limited.

Some screening techniques that work in the US didn't work in India. For instance, to get the candidates talking about themselves, she asked them to name five adjectives describing themselves. Americans easily spew out such lists.

But many of the Indian prospects just stared at her or gave her pat answers, like "honest and hard-working."

Special preparations

She ultimately offered jobs to eight candidates. Six accepted. Four of the new hires are married and are bringing along family members. She rushed to get them the necessary visas to work in the US, and they set out to prepare for the move. She expects the group to arrive by the middle of this month.

Bringing in foreign workers required preparations Tray had never had to consider before. For instance, she had to arrange for a block of apartments in a suburban complex--including persuading the landlord to waive normal creditinquiries required for short-term leases. The workers are paying their own rent and are free to move after an initial three-month settling-in period.

She has enlisted workers in her company to serve as cultural guides for the newcomers and has even plotted the locations of Indian restaurants like the Bombay Grille and India Imports Grocery & Gifts, a store that caters to a large Indian clientele with everything from tea and curry to brass artifacts and saris.

Would she go through all of this again? Tray is keeping her options open. She has hired a recruiter to work on finding workers closer to home. But she did keep a stack of resumes from Chennai.

(The Asian Wall Street Journal)