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By Beth FitzgeraldDale Cline, chief executive officer, said NetForensics has saved money over the years by hiring technical support and product development professionals in India, where salaries are roughly half what the company pays for similar talent in New Jersey.
But Cline said there are drawbacks to outsourcing overseas, including the 12-hour time difference, language and cultural barriers that can impact productivity, and delays in bringing new products to market. “While it’s more expensive to hire someone in New Jersey, having people who are local, and having instant communication among team members, makes it more beneficial to hire in the U.S,” he said.
NetForensics is winding down its relationships with about 22 technology workers in India, Cline said.
During the summer, the company hired five people in New Jersey, and will add another five to cover the work being brought back to the state; in addition, the company expects to expand its work force by another 10 percent or 15 percent in the coming months, Cline said.
Government agencies and corporations hire companies like NetForensics to patrol their computer networks “looking for patterns of attack” by hackers, he said.
These intruders might be fired workers seeking to get revenge, criminals stealing credit card and Social Security numbers, or foreign spies intent on breaching national security.
“The intruder might try to hack your network, to come through your firewall,” Cline said. “They might make a couple of attempts in different locations. We are the connecting layer behind all of that; all the information gets sent to us, we correlate the information and look at patterns and basically figure out if an event is occurring and what is its severity.”
NetForensics is taking advantage of a new job creation program announced earlier this month by Gov. Jon S. Corzine, called Return to Work, which uses state and federal funds to give companies $2,400 for each long-term unemployed worker they hire and retain for six months. To qualify, companies must hire workers who have exhausted their unemployment insurance benefits.
Cline said the program “makes a lot of sense.” For an entry-level job at NetForensics that pays $50,000, the $2,400 rebate amounts to about 10 percent of the $25,000 the individual will earns in the first six months. He said it takes about six months for a new hire at NetForensics to become fully trained, and the Return to Work program provides a salary subsidy during the new-hire learning curve.
New Jersey has a wealth of universities and other high-tech companies that create a substantial and well-educated work force pool for NetForensics to recruit from, said Cline, who has degrees from Rutgers University and New Jersey Institute of Technology.
The recession began in 2007, and there are many well-qualified candidates “who have been out of work for a while, have great backgrounds and great experience and are just waiting for the next job opportunity,” Cline said. “I have no doubt that we will find qualified applicants who have exhausted their benefits.”
E-mail to bfitzgerald@njbiz.com
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