Robert Ardell
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 Compare staffing quotes on the all-in hourly bill rate, not the quoted markup, because one 35% can mean $135, $159, or $167.40 an hour on the same $100 of pay. What changes is the number the percentage is applied to, and whether the 24% employer burden gets … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 As of October 16, 2026, a mid-level contract data analyst or BI developer bills $82 to $111 an hour nationally, median $95, or about $49,600 for three months (KORE1 Contract Rate Index 2026-Q4, modeled). KORE1’s own placements for the role billed $69 to $116, median $115, across … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 Staff augmentation is priced three ways: an all-in hourly bill rate, cost-plus (pay plus burden plus a disclosed markup), or a flat monthly rate per seat. The trap is a quoted markup that leaves out the 24% employer burden. A mid-level software engineer bills $96 to $122 … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 The best sales engineer interview questions in 2026 put the candidate in a live discovery call with hidden facts, break their demo on purpose, and ask something they can’t know, then score how they recover. Technical depth still matters. It just isn’t the part that loses deals. … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 A Power BI developer job description should state the storage mode and model size, the license and capacity it runs on, how much Power Query and DAX the role owns, how content reaches production, and a published pay range. Generic BI postings skip all five. The candidates … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 IonQ agreed on October 12, 2026 to buy zero trust firm Elisity for up to $1.3 billion in stock, putting post-quantum cryptography and network segmentation in one product and, for most security teams, on the same few engineers. The quantum half is not what you hire for. … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 Good IT director interview questions in 2026 test what a resume hides: how the candidate handled a vendor renewal that tripled, who wrote the help desk reset script, and what happened to the Windows 10 machines nobody retired. Leadership-style questions still belong in the loop. They just … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 A game developer job description should name the discipline, the engine and its version, the platform, the milestone the hire lands into, what counts as a shipped credit, your generative AI policy, and a published pay range. Most postings name the engine. Then they list adjectives. Here’s … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 The Labor Department suspended Microsoft, Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, HCL, and Capgemini from PERM on October 8, 2026. H-1B status was not touched. Only the green card step stopped, and only at those eight employers. Everyone else files normally. A green card freeze at … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 CBP has accepted roughly $134.7 billion in IEEPA tariff refund claims, and Phase 3 opened October 6, 2026, but only importers already suing at the Court of International Trade can file in it. The money is real. The bottleneck is people who can prove a claim entry … Read more
