This is sort of a no-brainer. I'm pitched by recruiters about once a week, and they're all for far away positions - typically SF area, but other areas too. I can't sell my house any time soon - the market just isn't moving - so I'm somewhat held hostage by geography. This doesn't mean that I can't travel onsite and visit your office regularly, nor does it mean skype and phone don't work out here in the sticks :)

Telecommuting requires the entire team or ideally the entire company be set up to work like that - just having one guy out in a different state or country on his own doesn't work very well in most cases. I understand that. What I don't get is why more companies aren't structuring themselves to take advantage of remote workers.

If you have strong procedures in place to deal with remote/offsite workers (fulltime or not), you can more easily integrate short term labor when you need it - you'll have the shared workspaces, file transfers, documentation, version control, etc, already set up and ready to let new people in as needed.

This seems like this would be a competitive advantage that more companies should be looking at. Maybe they will be in the coming years as the impact of underwater mortgages and geography-locked workers starts to impact the broader tech labor market.