Compared to his native Iceland, Prague seemed like a tropical paradise to Adalgeir Thorgrimsson when he moved here last year to take over as head of services for software company Creditinfo Group's Czech office.

Thorgrimsson, 26, accepted the relocation offer partly because Creditinfo Group offered a competitive benefits package. A big part of his decision, however, was also the excitement and challenge that would come with managing a team of software developers in a place he'd never even visited before.

"It was an opportunity to try something new and challenging," he says. "It really would not have mattered where in the world it was, but Prague sounded nice."

Today expatriates such as Thorgrimsson continue to walk the halls of companies here, especially in the information technology sector. But companies are recruiting these expats for a different reason than they did in the early '90s, when corporations lured them with lucrative hardship packages that boasted salaries sometimes 500 percent higher than their Czech counterparts.

Those days are coming to an end. While Thorgrimsson's salary is competitive with what he would make back home, multinationals and other large corporations are no longer paying expats huge amounts of money to relocate to Prague and other Czech cities to fill perceived talent holes in the labor market. Today, many top management positions at multinationals such as logistics firm DHL, which came to Prague in 2004, are held by Czechs.

Yet companies are still courting expats to fill empty positions, especially in management. The reason? The booming economy.

Gross domestic product grew a record 6 percent last year. The prosperity has spread across the economic strata to companies, which have responded by creating new jobs faster than they can find workers on the local labor market to fill them.

Employers created more than 28,000 new jobs in February, according to data from the Labor and Social Affairs Ministry. There were 66,487 open positions in this country as of Feb. 28, the highest since 1997.

Daniel Munich, deputy director for development and public relations at the Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education at Charles University, said companies are expanding to capitalize on the economic roll the Czech Republic has been on since European Union accession in 2004.

As a result, they have to hire foreigners to fill many open positions.

"There will never be another period of growth as crucial as this," he says. "Companies are doing what they can to increase profit. They want to attract the best people. Where they come from matters less."

Munich predicted that EU countries will continue to open their labor markets, and that this "denationalization" will create a steady stream of European workers, especially managers, circulating among countries.

This means there's little concern that local companies will run out of talent. Even if a foreign hire decides to leave after a few years, someone else will be there to fill his place in the "labor market of Europe."

IT is hot

Expats find the most opportunities in IT. In the '90s, expats got jobs here in law or consulting, but this decade is slowly establishing itself as the decade of IT. Companies such as IBM, Siemens and DHL have all entered this market in the past few years, bringing thousands of jobs with them.

Foreigners go after IT jobs not only because the positions are available but because English is the universal IT language and technical positions don't often require advanced Czech. The labor market also lacks enough workers with experience in IT, according to experts.

"Local universities don't produce enough candidates," says Petr Draxler, country human resources leader at IBM Czech Republic. "There is still a lack of Czech managers with international experience."

Derek Cummins, managing director of the Czech arm of global IT services firm Dimension Data, echoed Draxler's point.

"Czechs have good technical skills and many certificates," he says. "But it is more than that. It is about company culture, about fitting in."

Companies contacted for this story were reluctant to talk about expat employees, but it appears the multinationals have a diverse staff. DHL's IT Service Center in Prague 4–Chodov employs around 1,000 people comprising 47 different nationalities.

Multinationals aren't the only ones competing for employees with an expertise in IT. Smaller companies such as Thorgrimsson's Creditinfo Group try to hire IT specialists locally but recruit foreigners when they can't find someone already on the ground.

"It doesn't matter where he or she comes from," he says. "We just want smart people working for us."

Prime assignment

Those smart people don't get the same perks their counterparts enjoyed a decade ago. In the early '90s, it was hard to get high-level professionals to move to this region, says Peter Uzunov of the Sauter Consulting Group, an executive search agency.

Companies had to lure them with hardship packages that often included a housing allowance, education benefits and a stratospheric salary.

American attorney Brian Chase was one of them. U.S. law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges had to twist his arm to move here in 1996, he says.

"Many attorneys didn't want overseas assignments because they were negatively impacting their chances for becoming partner back home," says Chase, who received roughly the same salary he had in the United States when he moved here.

Chase says he thinks there was a real need for Western attorneys back then because they had a more creative way of thinking than the Czech lawyers educated under communism.

"There is much less need for U.S. and UK attorneys in Prague now," he says. "Young Czechs quickly adopted a more Western style of thinking."

As a result, expats who come often do so because the Czech Republic has become a prime assignment in the eyes of many, says Uzunov.