How to Hire Offshore Employees | HoldCo Lecture Series - Episode 3

I would like to start with a story and then we'll introduce Hayden to you guys and Ty, and then hopefully make this like super action-packed. So thanks everybody for being here. This is the third one of these lecture series that I've done. You can find old recordings of these. We put them all on YouTube, totally free, designed to be something that is just helpful to people. And I've learned just in social media, the more I give to other people, the more the universe tends to pay me back. I just don't know how it's going to happen. So today will hopefully be like that. Hayden and I are going to talk to you about basically this topic of how to hire offshore. I want to start with sharing a story of the first time I tried to hire somebody offshore. Actually, we went and tried to hire 2 programmers in Mexico. They were software developers and this was like 6 or 7 years ago. And so hired 2 different folks. One of them turned out to not be very good. The other one turned out to be actually okay for about a month and a half. And then that second person, he stopped, stopped really producing much of anything. And then later on, I discovered he was actually working like 2 other jobs and had started to farm out our work to somebody else. And You know, I think what I learned there is that just like as we look at how we hire and most of us have figured out how to do it as companies, figure out how to hire domestically and where we're from, like in the United States or Canada or wherever, there is a science and an art and a set of things that work if you're going to be hiring people outside of the country where you live. So for me, that started me down a journey to think about, okay, well, that sucked. Like I had a horrible experience the first time I tried to do it on my own. Like how do I learn the science and the art and from what other people have done in this space of hiring globally rather than just where we are in terms of our company location and then leverage that to hopefully perform better as a business. And I think fundamentally, if you could do a global search for talent and hire the best people wherever they are for jobs that can work that way, like that's going to help any business. And it's definitely helped all of mine. Every company that I'm involved in now from a board perspective or an investor perspective, is taking advantage of hiring globally. And I think we'll be able to talk about that today, because I think this is the future. If you're not doing it now, your competitors will be, and you have to get up to speed because it's going to happen. So, cool. Well, so Hayden, you and I have known each other for a few years. Why don't you take a minute and introduce yourself and where you're coming to us today as my co-host for this lecture.

No doubt. Thank you for having me, Ty. Michael, thanks for organizing this. My name is Hayden Cohen. I am CEO of Near. Michael and I founded Near together a little over 3 years ago now with our third partner Franco. It actually happened after we hired him from Argentina through Twitter, funnily enough. And, you know, we started as a job board helping companies access talent from Latin America so that they could have access to a global talent market, and we've since kind of built it into a larger staffing and recruitment agency. And so we have a lot of knowledge about how to do this, what goes wrong, how to do it well. And hopefully I can share some stuff that you don't already know today in this, uh, live Q&A.

Yeah, awesome. Uh, and then Ty, who is part of the team here, who is in a dark room by himself, he'll be managing Q&A and stuff like that. We're gonna try to have as much Q&A time as we can. So what we're going to do here is Hayden and I put together a set of questions that I would ask if I was like a new business owner trying to think about, okay, how do I hire globally rather than locally? And we're going to go through those questions pretty quickly and then we're going to save a ton of time for Q&A. So this is not going to be like a standard slide deck. It's going to be me actually asking questions of Hayden and then Hayden answering them. But I put these questions together kind of from the perspective of, okay, what is, you know, what, what are the things that I would want to know if I was approaching, you know, somebody as a customer for him or just in general, I wanted to go hire globally because that's— there's an option here and we'll talk about the different options. You can go directly to hire on your own. You can work with partners, you can work with staffing agencies. There's like all kinds of options for you and none of them are wrong. So we'll talk through them today and that way you can leave with some of the options around understanding what you could do. But mission for today is hopefully de-risk and demystify the what, when, and how of hiring globally rather than just locally. So, okay, Hayden, why is everybody suddenly talking about hiring globally and nearshoring and offshoring now? Yeah, like that on social media at least.

Yeah, it does. And feel free to jump in after I talk. Also, you, you were one of the people that talk about this on Twitter, so you probably share some context as to why people are talking about it so much. But, you know, to some of us it might be obvious, to others not so obvious. But setting the stage, basically COVID happened. We entered this remote-first world. At the same time, right now there's kind of a talent shortage for some positions in the US. For example, we hear from accounting firms all the time that people have trouble finding talent locally. And also companies want to stay competitive in terms of attracting the best talent and being able to grow while, you know, monitoring and improving their bottom line. So this nearshore, offshore, global talent hiring markets kind of comes in there because it's an obvious and smart choice once businesses know how to do it and how it works. So the obvious thing— so that's kind of the background context, obviously. First thing, 100% way lower costs, right? So you can hire lower-cost talent globally. You get an increased access to talent. You're not hiring from a single city or region. You're hiring from the entire world. And it also enables some business functions that would otherwise be cost prohibitive. For example, you could hire multiple SDRs, build an outbound team instead of for the same price as it would to hire an SDR in the States.

Yeah. And I think that's one of the things I also want to demystify from people. Like most people think about hiring globally as just like VAs and call center employees and like the talent level across the world is going super high. You know, companies like ExxonMobil or like different, different big Fortune 500 companies in the US have had like, say for example, major accounting operations in Buenos Aires for like decades. So like that talent is suddenly starting to want to work for smaller businesses as well. And you know, that's anyway, it's just one of the cool things about and has surprised me about like the quality of global talent is like super high.

That's, that's a good point because like large companies have been doing this forever and the remote world effectively enabled any company to do it. So they're doing it because there's obvious reasons behind it in terms of cost and ability to attract the right people. So now it's just open for everyone.

Well, so I think you talked about why hiring globally, like you get a broader access to talent, potentially it's cheaper, usually it's cheaper. There's other benefits, I guess, also in terms of people, if you're trying to do 24/7 coverage and stuff like that, having people in other time zones is a good thing. But asking the second part of this, like, okay, well, like, should I hire from Latin America? Should I hire from Mexico? Should I hire from Canada, Philippines, India, Eastern Europe? Like, how do you, how do you, how should somebody evaluate kind of which regions make sense and why?

Yeah, great question. It's a— there's no one-size-fits-all approach. Obviously, Near only hires people from Latin America, helps companies hire from Latin America, but there's a variety of regions you can, you can access really strong global talent from that also gives you an attractive cost savings. So all Latin America, so that'd be South America, Mexico, Caribbean, Caribbean Islands, etc. Eastern Europe, that's often kind of a really hot spot for developers that a lot of people know about. Africa. So Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Philippines is a common one, especially for in the virtual assistant world. That's kind of spoken about a lot on Twitter. Twitter and India, popular place to hire developers as well. I can speak to LATAM specifically. Folks that are really highly educated speak really strong English. And in Latin America, what's interesting is because English is not their first language, it's often a proxy for people who are highly educated and motivated. To get better jobs, right? They've learned English to access better opportunities. And you mentioned before, kind of companies like PwC, JPMorgan, large multinationals have hired folks and built offices all over Latin America for years. And so people there have experience working for US clients, working with teammates in the States, and then therefore kind of adopt a similar professional and culture attitude. So it's pretty seamless. Yeah. Yeah.

And I think I've found that it depends upon the region in which you can like kind of find what's optimal for what you're trying to do. So like one of the things we have is like there's an editor that works with me full time, like on all my Twitter threads and newsletter and all that kind of stuff. We hired somebody in Canada for that. And like his ability to understand the US culture was super important. When I've asked, like, people are trying to hire somebody for whom English is a second language, like in Argentina or other places to work on that stuff, like the cultural gap is just too small. So I think there's, there's a lot of tying back, like, what do you want with, like, where the region's going to be strong as well.

100%.

Okay. So like, like if I'm going to hire, if I hire somebody in the US, I put up a job posting. And like, candidates apply. I know how to check their background and I had to interview them and I had to do reference checks. I know how to do a criminal background check on them. Like, if I want to hire somebody who's in a foreign country to work for me, like, how, what are my options to like make that happen?

Yeah. So you kind of nailed it with, with what you just mentioned. It's the exact same thing, virtually the exact same as hiring someone in the US. It's just whether or not you know where to source the talent from. How to do it, right? So you identify what regions you want to hire from. We kind of just spoke to that. Different regions have different strengths, costs, considerations. And once you've decided that, you run a process to source, interview, and then hire the right person. And effectively, after you identify the person, you should have a solid onboarding process, basic expectations, performance monitoring, KPIs, and tools to support remote work like Slack. But it's basically the same. The complication is, do you know where to look for them? So there's a variety of ways to do it. You can do it on your own and then you can do it with an agency, which is where we come in and kind of where, where companies kind of decide whether they have the resources to do it or not. Do they have recruiters that can spend time looking in the right areas? Do they have the network of people? Do they have the local knowledge? Do they speak the language, etc.?

Got it. Okay. And I have a lot more questions about like, how do I pay the people? How do I do the criminal background check on and off? I think some of that's coming up with questions.

I mean, in your experience doing this, has it worked the exact same? Like, have you seen any significant differences once you kind of got past the initial nuances of hiring from a different region?

I mean, there's obviously cultural differences. There's ways I've had to change as a manager to work with people globally. I mean, some of it, even the fundamental fundamental stuff like Argentinians have different holidays than Americans, you know, and then how do I, you know, at one point I had a Filipino employee and like I discovered very quickly, like a lot of times Filipinos won't speak up. They'll just sit there and like grind away at something that's not working. So there's like, there's that kind of level of stuff, but there's a lot of details like I just didn't even know, like I guess it turns out in Argentina, criminal background checks get done through the government. They don't get done through private. Entities. And correct me if I'm wrong on that, but like, like that kind of stuff was things I was like, oh, okay. Like if I have to make sure somebody is not a thief, like it's— I know how to do that in America. I don't know how to do that in other places.

Yeah, that's a good point. And kind of like what I meant was the actual bones of the hiring process are the exact same, but there are a lot of nuances as you kind of navigate it, right? So there's a lot of unknowns that I've learned over the past few years doing this. So yeah, like understanding like different cultural nuances when you chat with people, knowing that English might not be their second language. So when you interview someone, you know, they might seem less animated or less interested in the position, but they might just be a little nervous because they're speaking in a language that's not their own. So there's a lot of little things like that to be considerate of and to understand. But once you kind of get the hang of it, it becomes a lot easier and it's basically the exact same as running a process in the States.

Yeah, super cool. Okay, um, okay, so like you guys talk to a lot of people that are in my shoes, like trying to figure out how to do this for the first time. Like, what are the questions that people tend to ask when they're thinking about like hiring overseas? What confuses people the most?

We shared this with our sales and recruitment team to like, uh, kind of poll the group and see what the most common things were. There's a million questions, but the 3 that kind of popped up the most were: 1, can I get the same quality of talent as if I hired someone locally? That's like a really common concern and question people have. In my experience, that's definitely true, right? It comes down to understanding exactly what you want and being able to, to vet them effectively. But 100%, you can hire from junior to senior positions, uh, definitely in Latin America and get the same if not better quality of talent. Second question is, how can I ensure that they're set up for success slash will work successfully? Like, do they have good internet? And there's like a host of questions underneath that. Do they have good internet speed? Are there power outages? Do they have a professional setup? Are they going to look professional on camera? Do they have a computer? Hardware can we provide them, what tools should we use, etc. You know, the right agency can guide you through that, or there's content online that can help you through it. And then lastly, how can I hire them if I don't have an entity overseas? And you can do that through a company like Deal who can provide contract and payment management for international hires or do it through an agency like us. So yeah, you can definitely hire without an entity overseas.

Yeah. And I think a number of those we're going to come back to in the next few slides. I'm trying, I'm trying to move us.

No, they're all related. Yeah.

We want to spend a lot. There's, it's a big topic, but we want to spend a lot of time on other people's questions.

Okay.

Like you see people doing offshore hiring. We talked about in my original story, I talked about some of the mistakes I made. Like what are the mistakes that you see people making when they go hire globally?

Yeah, I wrote 5 for this. The first 3, I would say, are like kind of obvious, and then the last 2 may be slightly less obvious. So upfront, not setting objectives and hiring someone not knowing what objectives they're supposed to hit, and then thinking that they're not doing a great job because you're not sure how to measure their output versus what you expected from them. So for example, you should have short-term, you know, first week, first month, first 90 days objectives, however it works for, for your firm or your business, and then longer-term objectives and KPI setting. Second mistake, not training and investing in talent. Right. And this is related to the third. I'll kind of combine these, like considering them resources versus teammates. You should consider people that you hire globally, like teammates, like anyone that you would hire in the States. If you treat them as part of the team, if you train and invest in them, they're gonna be invested in you. They're gonna have really good output and you're gonna grow and get the benefits of remote hiring that you set out to achieve when you go and hire someone globally. And then like 4 and 5, I think this is interesting. I think a lot of companies think kind of small and this touches, I think when it comes to remote hiring, this touches on a point that you made like, Some people think you can only hire VAs. You can hire offshore or nearshore for all types of roles. There's really no limit to what you can do. Junior, mid-level, senior talent managers, executive talent all across the board for any job that can be done remotely, right? So you're not going to hire a remote nurse, but you can hire a remote director of accounting or director of engineering or VP of marketing. So you shouldn't think small. You can build a robust team offshore. Tons of companies have done it. Are doing it and will do it. And then the last mistake is going with the cheapest option. And that especially counts for compensation. You don't want to just pay the cheapest person and make everything about cost. And maybe a better way to say that one is like, don't make it all about cost savings. So you definitely want to achieve cost savings, but don't be too cheap because you don't want to make mistakes. You don't want to make the wrong hire and waste a bunch of time rehiring or think that this doesn't work for your company. You, you should be willing to invest in it and treat it as an important initiative when you, when you go about it. Yeah.

And that last point reminds me, I have a friend and his strategy with global hiring is, let's say a job in the US would pay $120,000 a year. It's like an accounting controller, right? Like a very, a very senior kind of well-paid job in the US. But if you were to hire that same person in Argentina, let's say it's a $40,000 a year job. Those are just hypothetical numbers. What he'll actually do is instead of trying to pay $40,000, which is the average wage, and/or pay the $120,000, he'll pay a premium and pay extremely well, but Argentina wages. So he, instead of being like paying $40,000, he might pay $55,000 or $60,000 and be aggressive about making sure like, okay, if I pay a premium here, I can get the absolute best controller out there and still do it at a discount to what I would be paying if that role was onshore. So anyway, just, just a data point. I think that to what your points were, Aidan, like thinking strategically about how you're going to be managing talent with offshoring being part of that is, is the right thing. And here you can see my friend kind of has thought through his strategy of, okay, I'm going to get really good people, I'm going to still save money, but I'm going to pay a premium for what the prevailing local wages would be.

Not only is he getting good people, they're going to stay forever and be loyal to him. Them and work hard because they're one living really well back home in a way lower cost of living area. But then they trust and appreciate and want to like dedicate their time to someone who's investing in them and treats them like a human, like a teammate.

It's— that's one thing I think I've made as a great decision is like treating global team members as peers and like treating them like any other, like first-class employee in the company and like they value it so much.

Like, yeah, I brushed over that quickly on that, but that's super important and it's all related.

So there was a question in the chat. I want to ask this real fast because I think it ties into this next question as well, which is like, um, an anonymous attendee asked like, are the remote employees contractors or are they employees? Like, what are the, what is the choice that I have as a as a business owner hiring remotely? Like, how do I think about those options?

Yeah, the right firm can advise you on that. If you go with an agency, here's the truth, at least in Latin America, and speak to it in the Philippines as well. The vast majority of cases, companies are hiring remote folks as contractors. So they're working from home. They're hired as contractors, not employees. It's like tax advantageous. We have companies of all sizes doing this, several really large companies that are our customers that were doing this before they worked with us. In Latin America, the, you know, it's kind of important to hire folks as an employee if they're doing business inside of Latin America, especially if they're salespeople. There's a lot of nuance and like it's really important to stay compliant with local labor laws. So you want to make sure that you have tight contracts. But like in the vast majority of cases, folks are being hired as contractors.

Cool. And then there's an option where like I can go to loan, I can go like just to Upwork and, and hire people through that, right? I can post jobs through any of the different job boards and stuff like that. Or like I could partner with a staffing agency. And I think that's where people that came to this through social media are seeing a lot of the staffing agencies like us. And I guess we haven't been talking about Near a ton on Twitter and stuff like that, but we've been at it for over 2 years. Like what, how should I think about like evaluating which one of those things I should do? Because it doesn't seem like there's one size fits all.

Yeah, I mean, 100%. Like I'm going to try to answer this as unbiased as possible. Obviously I run a staffing agency, so obviously take what I'm saying with a grain of salt. But the truth, we, I, before we started Near, we would hire folks through Upwork. And those sites, I would kind of say that that's almost a separate conversation because when we're talking about hiring global talent here, I think we're, we're talking more about hiring teammates, not people for one-off projects and stuff. And if you're trying to hire someone longer term on a freelance platform like Upwork, you're, you're probably not going to have success because they're getting access to tons of jobs. You're, you know, they're, they're less committed to you. They're not as incentivized. But in terms of looking for global talent and doing it alone versus hiring an agency, there's a few considerations. But you should hire an agency when you have like a niche, hard-to-fill role that you don't have knowledge on how to do it, how to find that type of talent in the market. Right. We've done this, for example, for kind of less common programming languages, finding developers who know how to code in less common programming languages. And companies are really happy that we're able to help them find that talent. Second, if you don't have the time or resources to manage the recruiting process, if you don't have one and you prefer to delegate it to an expert who can manage it end to end to save you time, effectively thinking of it as an extension of your team, an agency can do that. Third, and really importantly, if you need to move super fast and you don't have the infrastructure to do this. So we had a customer one time who came to us and their time to hire on remote roles was well over 60 days because they didn't have tons of talent coming in the door through the channels they were looking for remotely. They came to us and we got that down to just a number of weeks because we have a large talent network in the backend. We have tons of recruiters and talent sourcers that can just do this quickly and have done it before. And kind of related to that, if you need to fill several roles super fast, an agency is a good option for you. And lastly, if you have need or want access to a specific market and don't have the network, that can be a really good option to go with an agency, right? But if you have an in-house dedicated recruiting team that knows how to do this and their job is to go look for talent and source for you, then, then that, that might be an option. But a lot of companies don't have the time or the knowledge to do that. To do this well. Kind of touched on your point earlier, right? People make mistakes. You, you learn tons of things. There's so many unknown unknowns when you go and hire remotely. I really only know it super well for Latin America. I'm sure that if I went to go hire someone or I said we want to expand near to hire developers from Eastern Europe, for example, there's tons of nuance that I would have to go learn and we would get through experience and, and would potentially be unsuccessful. So you kind of like improve your likelihood of success often going through an agency.

Yeah. Look, I think we started an agency because I learned the hard way, like I'm not hiring any other way except through a staffing agency. And there are staffing agencies in the US, there are staffing agencies overseas, people hire direct in the US, like, so there's a place for each. A lot of it just depends you know, I think on those factors. So, so let me call an audible because two people have asked the same questions and it's basically it comes from Shane and also Arthur, basically like how do you make sure when you're working with somebody remotely overseas, like how do you know they're not scamming you and working on multiple jobs? How do you like measure their productivity? Like, you know, I'm not seeing them come into an office. Like, how do I How do I manage that once I hire them?

That is a great question, right? So you run into that problem in the States as well when you hire remotely. So it's not only like an offshore question, it's just like a remote question. So it comes down at the top. You want to make sure that you have trust. So ensure you're paying people fairly, right? Make like, make sure that they feel part of the team, treated fairly. Set expectations with their working hours, right? And reasonable deadlines. Make sure that the work is getting done right. The simplest, simplest way to answer that is, is the work getting done and are you getting what you're paying for? So that, that kind of— yeah, that question is, I think, the fundamental one. And having performance metrics and KPIs are super key to knowing that work is being done for you. They have a reasonable workload and they're probably not stealing from you. Right. And there's, there's like a data question outside of that. But in terms of like, are they just working for you? That's— those are kind of like the key things to answer. And then lastly, you can, you can set up time tracking software. There's software to do that, to understand whether people are actually working on a certain thing, taking screenshots. But it's kind of like, how deep do you want to go in terms of monitoring? Versus trusting. We, we tend to recommend and go for trusting people and making sure that they're getting their work done to, to solve for that. But during COVID there were stories of people in the US having 5 jobs or realistically like 2, 3 jobs at the same time. Their companies didn't know and probably no work was getting done because the workloads were super light for those positions. So if you have expectations, you know what people want to do or you want what you want to get out of them, and they're getting the work done, then they're probably working for you.

Super good. Okay. Yeah, I mean, the one thing I would add to this, like, productivity thing is for me, when I was starting to transition to manage people remotely and remotely in another culture, like, I realized there were a lot of things that when I was in the office with somebody or like they were— I was able to see them face to face a lot. Like, I was getting a lot of stuff for free because of that that I had to recreate by being more aggressive and overcommunicating a lot more and managing a lot more of these remote folks. So like one-on-ones, you know, detailed KPIs, reports on activity, like all those are things that as a crappy manager personally, like that was something I had to learn to do. So go from there. Cool. All right. Continuing kind of in the direction of the way the audience wants to go, Hayden, can we go back to this contractor versus EOR thing? Like there's two there's, there's kind of the two paths and there's several questions about it. And ultimately, like, this ends up being a trade-off that every company needs to make the decision as to how they want to handle it. But could you walk us through like, okay, what is this EOR idea and what's the plus and minuses of that? And then what is the, what is the other kind of YOLO approach that a lot of people do?

Yeah. So there's, there's different levels to it and An EOR is effectively a, like, an entity to hire people as full-time employees in their region, and they're effectively leased out to you, kind of like a PEO in the United States.

So employer of record or a— Employer of record. Employer of record, or PEO is like a professional employer organization, one that like actually is, you contract with them and they hire all the employees.

Yeah, effectively enabling you to hire an employee without an entity in that country. And the other model is the contractor model. There's a lot of considerations, right? And we can talk about this for a long time. But the fact of the matter is that the majority of cases, people are working remotely on their equipment from their homes in Latin America. At least they're being hired as contractors using locally compliant contracts that an agency can provide or a company like Deal can provide you on their platform. There's some level of risk if you don't follow the misclassification guidelines. And then there's also kind of different risk mitigation things you can do in terms of contracting. Companies like Deal provide different levels of service that cost more to mitigate risk. On your contractor model. Agencies can do that by offboarding risk onto them where they hire on your behalf. So there's a lot of due diligence that you should do. But in most cases, people are being hired as contractors and not as employees because of tax advantageous considerations for the talent.

So to some extent, like the trade-off there is a business decision that each company should make. You know, obviously, like, there's, there's a cost to going down and paying for DealShield or any of the other kind of payroll process and situations like that, like the Deals of the World or Gusto has international stuff. Like, that's a trade-off, you know, that you would want to make and understand how you're approaching your, your operation there. In that foreign country. And obviously we're not lawyers, talk to your lawyers, but it's also a reason I, for me to like, the only reason I feel like I mostly understand this topic is because you guys have spent so much time working on it, Hayden. And like, it's a, I think a case in point for using an agency type thing for this sort of stuff.

Yeah. I mean, I, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, working on this, speaking with attorneys, understanding like laws in the, in the jurisdictions that we work in. The fact of the matter is that, like, we have never seen a misclassification issue with our talent. The, the big consideration is treat them like the contract states you're treating them. Don't— if you're forcing people to go into an office and monitoring every move that they make, they're probably being treated more like an employee. And yeah, like I said, the right agency can definitely guide you through this. And then it's a complete business decision. But the majority of companies are doing it with the contract.

Yeah.

Okay.

Let's keep following some of these questions we're getting because these are actually probably better questions than the ones I wrote. How should we deal with local critique? So like people inside of our companies or people in our communities getting angry or feeling hurt that we're hiring globally rather than only locally?

Another question that I spend a lot of time thinking of earlier on, now less so, because I— this is obviously kind of like, I guess it goes into the moral bucket of issues. But the truth is, this is the same thing as the automation wave, right? Became cheaper to build cars in Mexico. And so factories moved to Mexico. It's just the natural evolution of what's going to happen. Automation tools came into place like Zapier so companies could run tons of automated processes and didn't need people doing them. That cut jobs. Now that the talent markets are open worldwide and you have access to the best talent that's just as good as folks in the States. If a job can be done remotely, it can be done from anywhere. It's going to happen and you're going to be left behind if you don't do it because you're like you said early on, like I think the first thing you said, Michael, was your competitors are going to do it. So there's, you know, there's local critiques of saying like you're taking away jobs, but these jobs are going to be taken away one way or another. And that's, that's one way of looking at it. The way I also look at it and really believe is true is that this enables companies to grow more and create more economic opportunity. It enables businesses to be created that wouldn't have otherwise been able to be created because there's access to talent that helps you build companies earlier on without breaking the bank. Right. So we were able to build Near much lower cost upfront by having a few people offshore. Like if we wanted to hire someone in the US early on, it would have been impossible. It's kind of like before this, the wave of hiring global people, global teammates for kind of like more full-time roles happened. People were hiring agencies offshore for marketing or for design because they had access to cheaper rates for the same quality of service. So it's kind of like the natural evolution of things. And it's not going to stop. It's the truth. Yeah.

And I think, I think two things I would add, like my experience so far in hiring globally is it's not reduced the total number of Americans or Canadians or whoever employed in the company, right? We tend, it tends to be jobs that we weren't going to be impossible to hire for. If you look, for example, like in a number of my companies, like it is freaking impossible to hire accountants and CPAs. And it's the reason it's difficult is because these companies, we all need them, but we're only graduating so many of them. So either that business can be less efficient and have worse reporting and do less for all the existing employees, or it can hire remotely and be a more efficient company like, like you talked about. I think the second thing, well, certainly it's, it's 100%. Well, the, my kids' generation, the kids that are in their early 20s, that's the smallest workforce generation since World War II, like that. There are not that many. This is only going to get worse before it gets better in terms of the number of members of the workforce. Look, and I think the second thing, and this really opened my eyes to the whole situation, is I used to view my community as the people that lived within 5 miles of me, right? That's my community. I live in San Antonio, whatever. Like, what I've learned now is that I have a community that's not only those people, but it's also the people across the world and like they are human beings just like my fellow citizens are, right? Or the people that live in my town and like, like you and I have an amazing relationship with our, our partner Franco, right? Like, do I think about Franco as anything other than a fellow peer human being to us? No. Like, but he's Argentinian. Like, doesn't, doesn't change anything. So, you know, I think there's also a shift in the way we should view the world. Like, as you get to work with these people and you treat them as like real human beings, like you'll discover an appreciation for them and a sense that your community is broader than just like who you can see when you look outside your front door.

So yeah, I really like that answer. And that's something that I guess was just kind of— I was assuming in my mind, having done this for a while, but that's super true. And I think a really intelligent way of looking at that question, right? Like the business is global now, 100%. And so you should consider, like, you shouldn't look at it as a negative hiring globally. It's a net positive for the world.

Yeah.

And for you.

On the accounting note, Joshua had a question that said, when considering offshore hires for higher-level accounting positions, i.e., controller, accounting manager, how successful can they be managing existing US-based employees that may be employed at a higher wage rate than the offshore leader? It's pretty interesting specific question.

Uh, yeah, that is an interesting specific question. Um, the, the truth is that's going to happen, period, right? If you're, if you're hiring globally and, uh, and you're hiring talent kind of all across the world and paying based on effectively cost of living and and wage rates there, then there's going to be differences in the level of talent you might pay people for similar positions. This is an interesting scenario, but what we have seen is that, like, I'll give you an example. People, if you're hiring like an accounting director from Argentina and they're being paid X and their direct report might be you know, a couple of levels lower than them in the business, but being paid by Wise more as long as they're being paid really fairly in the market that we're working in, which is US companies hiring real talent. So they're going to be making more than they would be in Argentina. They're being paid in dollars, so they're not, you know, getting screwed by being paid in pesos and losing value on their money instantly. They're, they're probably not going to have an issue. We haven't seen tons of cases like that, but we have several companies that built entire accounting departments with us. So they have like a lot of these people have access to everybody's compensation. We haven't run into an issue like that at once. You know, our internal team has access, our internal accounting team has access to everybody's compensation. I think if you set that expectation upfront when you're hiring them, that, you know, hey, you're going to have access to compensation ranges for everybody at the company or what people are being paid. Some people might be paid more than you. Like, we think we're paying you a really fair compensation for this role. As long as you feel that way, we just want you to kind of know that upfront and be transparent with them. And, you know, it shouldn't be that difficult of a conversation. But yeah, I mean, maybe don't leave it up to surprise. For this specific scenario.

All right, I think these— this question— I kind of went through our remaining questions that I had prepared, and I think there's a few we could jump through, but we'll center around just focusing on people's questions from the audience. So this is kind of a trend from a trend question from an anonymous attendee. How sustainable is the long-term economic advantage of offshore hiring, and do you see it leveling out sometime soon. Look, I think that the reality is you see in economics there's this idea of like competitive specialization, right? The same reason that a, you know, like a China can get very good at making iPhones, right? Our iPhones are all made there. We outsource them to China and they ship them to us. You know, I think the same thing happens globally as well. And with 7 billion people in the world, and a democratization of kind of the, the way hiring works. Like there's just almost an inexhaustible supply of folks that can join this kind of global marketplace of talent. So I think you may see trends where things move around on a micro basis. It used to be, for example, that if you wanted to hire programmers, you would go to Poland. Before that, you would go to Ukraine. Before that, you would go to northern Ukraine. Before that, you would go to Russia. Like there is that kind of thing where you do see it changing at a micro level, but from a macro level, like, it is just inevitable that there will be a continuing kind of arbitrage where capital, like, finds the way to hire the right people at the optimal level to make everybody's, you know, everybody as successful as possible. So I don't think it's slowing down. I just think you'll see it on a micro level kind of move around depending upon, you know, what happens in those economies and what happens in markets and stuff.

Yeah, but in terms of salaries or like compensation ranges going up to be as expensive as the states, like, I don't see that happening anytime soon.

Objectively, I mean, it's part of this idea of economics, right, where we like, we don't make, we don't make t-shirts. This shirt was not made in the United States. There's a reason for that. It's because it is much better for this to be made in Vietnam because they can specialize on it and do a much better job. And you're like, well, that's just ship money to Vietnam. Well, ultimately, like, that entire process of me taking some of my hard-earned money and using that to buy the t-shirt not only enriched some people in Vietnam, but it also accelerated the economy here in the US by the transport, the retailer, like the, the Amazon driver who shipped it to my house, the programmer who built Amazon. Like all of that is stuff that is a huge benefit because it makes this machine here in the United States even more effective. So, you know, this, This unfortunately is one of those things where it causes micro-level pain but macro-level benefit, where the rising tide benefits everybody. That does not get talked about in the presidential debates because nobody wants to study macroeconomics and theory of competition, all that kind of stuff. But that's the truth of it anyway. Sorry. Oh, okay. So let's go to this question. This is a good question. Like in the US, I know what an accountant, a controller makes. Like I just told you that. How do I figure out what the right thing to pay is? Overseas, Hayden?

Yeah, I hate saying it depends for a lot of these things, but it kind of does. So it depends on the— on 3, 3 basic things. So the role, seniority, and the region you're hiring from. Different offshore regions are going to have different levels of expenses. So like if you're hiring someone for sales in Canada, you're going to get someone cheaper than the States. But in Latin America, it's going to be way cheaper than Canada. And you have to basically evaluate the, or make trade-offs on those 3 levers. So I can speak to Latin America. You, you're gonna achieve savings between maybe 30 to 75% on compensation. The right person or the right agency can help guide you through what to pay them. And there's a lot of resources online to, to figure this out. But this is a really important question. To understand before you go out and look for talent because you want to make sure that people are being paid fairly. One of the things that we've seen companies do a lot is they'll go on Glassdoor and they'll be like, oh, I can hire someone in Argentina or Ecuador for X. And the truth is that is so much lower than anybody would want to be paid or take a job. And that's because there are effectively two markets. Right now. There's local labor markets where people are speaking in their native language, being hired as employees by local firms and getting like those benefits. And then there's the global market where US businesses, maybe Canadian, European businesses are hiring global talent from these regions and the compensation ranges are significantly higher. So that's, that's kind of an unknown. That companies and individuals new to the game figure out kind of early on. And yeah, the right agency can definitely help you out with that. But there's also lots of, a lot of resources online on our website for Latin America specifically. We have a salary comparison guide that we put up and we update, I think, every quarter with actual data from candidate surveys and in our experience. So you can, you can check it out there for Latin America. I'm sure there's a ton of stuff for the Philippines, India, etc.

Andy had a question where he was asking how flexible are offshore contractors, and his context for it was his company needs some flexibility and workload. How would you set that up and encourage that type of culture and environment, going back to your expectation, expectation setting point earlier, Hayden?

Yeah, I think like there's it, I mean, it's kind of, uh, slightly generic, so I'll answer it the best I can. But yeah, there's definitely flexibility, but the biggest thing is like setting up upfront expectations on your job description and what the role is going to entail. Don't tell someone that you're hiring them for longer-term work that has X amount of hours and they get paid by the hour and then take it away from them because you, you want flexibility on the backend, the backend, you should set those expectations up and basically run your search with that in mind. And there are people who will work hourly positions. You're getting like a potentially a different level of talent. But if you need extreme amounts of flexibility, then you might want to look at a platform like Upwork where you can kind of test out the waters. And start, but an agency could help depending on the situation. Right. But working with a company like ours would be way more effective for someone you want to bring on longer term rather than kind of lumpy up and down hourly work situation.

That's great. Chris had another question. Do you find specific regions do better for certain jobs? He's specifically looking for accounting roles. So wondering which regions are the best to look for talent-specific jobs.

Yeah, that, that's definitely true. There is a little bit of work going on in the building. I mean, I hope that's not coming in too loud, but yes, for accounting specifically, Latin America is great and Argentina is really great. So we mentioned before, like the Big Four accounting firms have had offices here forever. There's also a standard in Latin America, like their international accounting standard, IFRS. That's very similar to US GAAP. And so you can find people that are doing international tax returns for US businesses. They're effectively doing US tax returns for US businesses. They've been working with US-based clients. They speak English. They, they can work just like an accountant does in, in, in the States. So that's actually one of our more most popular roles like we have. 2 very large companies that have built their— and when I say very large, I mean 1,000+ person companies that have built virtually their entire accounting departments with us, including director-level talent. So accounting is a great, it's a great function to hire for internationally and definitely Latin.

Can we ask this question? How do I keep from getting robbed or scammed by data? So it's the number 1 question I get. That people are—

I think I kind of like touched on this when, when you asked your productivity question. I realized I wasn't answering the question super, super well, but, um, it comes down to— so yeah, there's like, there's the basic stuff. So trust, like you want, you want to develop trust with people and make sure you're working with trustworthy people. It's not always super easy to do that upfront. So the basic stuff is use a password manager. Very few companies do this. It's really not that expensive. LastPass, 1Password, that is managed at an administrative level and you're effectively— people have the plugin on their computer so they can only access systems with like passwords that they can't see and that could be changed instantly once they're onboarded. Use business emails. So these are kind of like standard things. We've had companies use Gmail accounts, like personal Gmail accounts that they set up for new hires. And then they lose access to those accounts if they let them go, which is silly because they don't have good onboarding procedures. That kind of takes me to the next point. Make sure you have good onboarding and offboarding procedures so you know what systems people have access to and when they no longer have access to them. So you're kind of seeing like a theme, like very basic, know what people have access to and prevent them from having too much access to it if they don't need it. And then the time tracking, time tracking and reporting software. right? If you, if you want to be super, super careful. And then lastly, we get to the make sure people don't have access to information that they don't need. So provide limited access to really sensitive systems. In the case that the folks that you want to hire for internationally do need access to more sensitive systems, potentially use VMs, like virtual machine, with logs to track what data is being accessed and downloaded. And then you can even do more basic stuff like protect your CRM, make sure that folks have kind of custom roles that don't have access to download entire customer databases. So you can, you know, feel a little bit more confident that your data is protected. But if you think about everything I just said, it's the exact same situation as a remote person in the States. So you can only at the end of the day mitigate these risks there's lots of things you can do to mitigate them significantly more than others, but it really comes down to trust. And then I guess the last thing that I didn't have a bullet for, but I remember countries in Latin America like Brazil and Argentina have pretty strong consumer data protection laws, kind of like GDPR. People are probably maybe less likely to break those because they're aware of them. But yeah, it comes down to trust and ensuring that you have like the proper IT system set up. At your firm.

All right, we have a few questions, um, to go through. One of them was just based on your experience, Hayden, what's the most, uh, common off— like outsourced offshore job type in the US market right now? What do you see the most of people hiring for?

Yeah, I mean, I don't know if there's one most common, but the, the big three are like functions for us are accounting and finance, marketing and, and software engineering, you know, also sales and customer support, whatnot. But I mean, like any, any role that can be done remotely in the States can be done remotely offshore. You want to understand like the regions you're hiring from and, and why and the cost considerations. But for us, accounting, finance, marketing, software engineering, and I kind of touched on the accounting reasons before because there's a lot of knowledge for it all over Latin America. With really high quality people and the talent shortage in the US. So that's a super obvious function. But yeah, marketing talent, especially performance marketing, there's, there's a wealth of talent abroad and software engineering probably provides the biggest cost differential in terms of absolute compensation difference. But yeah, you can, you can, you can do this across the border 100%. We've built the vast majority of our team with global talent in Latin America. And we have some really well-run— with some customers with really well-run businesses that do the same.

So one attendee asked, how would you say Near does things differently, slash differentiates the recruiting process from other offshore agencies?

Thank you for the opportunity to plug us. I'll answer that by saying—

This is the one slide when we're going to sell something.

Yeah.

Come to my conference or go shop with Hayden.

Like, I'll answer. I'll say this. Like, I think we do a really good job. Like, you can go on our website and G2 and see what our customers are saying about us. But I'll answer this more with another question that we had on the deck, which is like, Why? Like, what are the risks of going with, like, the cheapest option, right? So if you go with the cheapest option, when you go with an agency, you're sacrificing some important things like robust requirements gathering and vetting processes from recruiters who have experience doing this, who know the market, who can guide you on compensation. So make sure you're not overpaying, which does happen. Candidates, like, can tell if people don't have, like, experience doing this before. If you lead on, or underpaying so much that you get screwed because someone leaves super quickly and you lost all of the time you invested and have to do it again, or think that it doesn't work for you because you had a bad experience one time and then never do, never hire globally again, or you wait a long time and then you're like losing the competitive advantages that we talked about earlier on. So basically, like, you want a good agency. I think Near is a good, a good one that will help you mitigate the risks of a bad hire. That's like the simplest thing. And you don't want an agency who's just going to be sending you CVs and not vetting their talent, or charging so low that they don't have a way to incentivize their team to get you the best person. You want, you want the, the, the firm that you're working with to have really good people who are incentivized to get you the best person, not just the fastest because that's, that's going to save you a ton of money in the long term. But yeah, in terms of like what we do really well, we know Latin America really well. We have boots on the ground all over Latin America, especially in Argentina. And we started our company as a job board for people in Latin America. So we literally have tens of thousands of profiles of people that filled out long profiles with us. So we have like a lot of a big internal database where we fill a lot of our positions from so we can quite quickly. And the thing I pride myself most is that we provide a really good customer service. So like all of our customers are just really happy with our communication speed. So thanks for that opportunity. And you can go to this, this link, hirewithneer.com/girdley, and get, get a discount on your first hire.

Yeah. So I get credit for, for being a good business partner. Okay. And I have a conference. I'm— Ty and I are running a conference a year from now called Holdco Conference. If you're into holdco stuff, please come see us. We're selling tickets now. It's going to be awesome. We're working on great speakers. And if you want to pursue parallel entrepreneurship, owning multiple companies at once and incubating them, selling them at some point, hopefully for me, this is the conference for you and should be in a great venue with great people. And not your standard get drunk in the bar kind of conference. So hopefully you learn and have a great time. So check it out and come see us.