LEBANON, Va. --- Software engineer Keith Brown was conducting a teleconference from home when he had to call an abrupt halt. Dido, one of the family's two dogs, had just brought in a dead opossum.

Welcome to professional life in rural southwest Virginia.

Like many before him, Mr. Brown, 42, left this region of rolling hills after high school because he saw no future outside farming and mining.

Now he is one of a growing number of people bringing their professions back to small-town America thanks to Web-based recruitment campaigns by rural regions beckoning with quality of life.

In southwest Virginia, the program is called Return to Roots. Funded by the Virginia Tobacco Commission and private grants, it lists job openings on its Web site that include positions in information technology, engineering, education and health care.

Similar efforts have been launched by other states. An Iowa site calls the state "more livable than 88 percent of the U.S.," while Vermont promises "vibrant small towns and cities and growing opportunities in high technology and other information-based sectors." West Virginia inserted tear-off postcards in newspaper ads this month and asked residents to send them to friends and family as part of its campaign.

More than 500 job-seekers have moved to South Dakota since it launched Dakota Roots in 2006, said Dawn Dovre, a state Labor Department spokeswoman.

Under southwest Virginia's program, 30,000 postcards promoting the Web site have been mailed to high school and college graduates from the area, said Carl Mitchell, the head of the nonprofit Virginia Economic Bridge, which manages the program.

Rural areas have gained appeal among companies looking for a less expensive way to do business without sending jobs overseas. Northrop Grumman's Lebanon office, for instance, is a call center and backup data center for Virginia's government.

"A call center in northern Virginia would have been unaffordable," said Doug McVicar, a Northrop Grumman vice president.

Mr. Brown and his wife, Julia, also a software engineer, are among the few direct placements Return to Roots claims. But Mr. Mitchell said it has increased interest in Virginia's southwestern corner. He counted 4,000 visits in one month to the program's Facebook and MySpace pages.

For the Browns, the target was rural Russell County. CGI Group Inc.'s new quarters, where the couple work, sit opposite Northrop Grumman Corp., forming a mini-technology corridor amid the farm fields.

Glade Spring native Jeremy Honaker found his own way home. After moving to northern Virginia and taking a job at Northrop Grumman, he transferred to its Lebanon center as a recruiter.

Mr. Honaker prefers to find job candidates through the Return to Roots Web site, he said, because "I know that person understands they're looking for a job in rural Virginia."

Mr. Brown grew up about an hour's drive north in Bluefield, where his parents still live. He stayed close by for college at Emory and Henry. But when he finished, it never even dawned on him to go home.

"It was just expected. You had to leave," he said. "You couldn't get anything hardly above minimum wage or that would hardly be 40 hours a week."

Mrs. Brown was born in New York and raised in Chicago, but she discovered a love for nature at the same time she met Keith at a music camp in the North Carolina mountains.

It was on a camping trip with his close friend from home that they learned of the Return to Roots project. The Browns were about to leave Cincinnati after 13 years anyway for a move with Lockheed Martin to upstate New York, but they considered the new possibility.

"Once we understood the vision, we chose to come here," Mr. Brown said.

He sees it as an opportunity to help his native area, and he likes being able to keep a fishing rod in his office to use on lunch breaks. The Browns are happy to be close to his family and think it's a safer place to raise their daughter.

Mr. Honaker is grateful to be free of Washington, D.C.-area traffic. He drives twice as far to work now but gets there in half the time.

"I bought a motorcycle and commute across Clinch Mountain after work," he said. "It's actually a stress reliever."

The Browns and Mrs. Brown's mother live on eight acres next to a farm outside Abingdon.

They miss the arts of Cincinnati, Mr. Brown said, but he hopes to put together an ensemble that he envisions giving outdoor concerts on a platform he'd attach to his barn's silo.

Mrs. Brown is a little troubled by a lack of ethnic diversity, since their daughter Wendy is from China and they plan to adopt a second child from that country. But for the most part, the family has felt welcome in Virginia.

"I think it's much better for her to live in a more wholesome place where we're not caught up in this rat race all the time," Mrs. Brown said.