7. Can I skip these recruiting headaches by outsourcing more of my shop's work?

Nice try. But if you think you can insulate yourself from personnel problems, decisions and strategy by outsourcing, you're sadly mistaken. You still have to roll up your sleeves and get involved. Otherwise, such arrangements are doomed to failure.

Mary Lacity, professor of information systems at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, has studied outsourcing best practices. She notes that with successful domestic outsourcing relationships, clients review the resumes of their supplier's employees before they are assigned to their delivery team. And when it comes to a successful offshore outsourcing arrangement, clients often personally interview each potential offshore-supplier team member.

If you move to a more outsourced model, you'll also inherit another set of recruiting headaches: hiring someone to manage it. "You'll have to find the rare, but valuable candidates who have experience managing vendors and outsourcers, negotiation skills, contract and SLA management experience — skills a lot of people in IT may not have. Or want," says Laurie Orlov, vice president and principal analyst for Forrester Research. And, as anyone who's done significant outsourcing knows, it's never long before any HR problems your supplier has trickle down to you. "A lot of the complaints you hear from people who have outsourced is actually disappointment in the level of quality of the outsourcers' staff," says Orlov.

An outsourcing decision might be made in part due to staffing concerns. "Some companies may outsource their legacy systems because they want to reduce the risk of being exposed should their Baby Boomers leave," says Gartner's Berry. But an outsourcing decision should never be made with the idea of removing all risk or responsibility for something — recruiting or otherwise. The work may move; responsibility stays.