Top Roles to Offshore to LatAm (Lecture Series)

So I just put a note in the chat here. The reason we do these live is hopefully to help you with whatever challenges you have around offshoring, nearshoring. Um, we'll introduce ourselves here shortly. Uh, but beyond that, it's not supposed to be salesy and it's supposed to be live because we want to tailor it to whatever questions you as an audience have. So we have a few slides that we've put together. There's about 20 slides, but we're really just going to focus on going through like the first 6 or 7. Around the topic that we're focused on today, which is what roles are right or wrong for nearshoring and what are people doing and seeing success with. And I'll give Hayden a chance to introduce himself here in a second, but we're going to focus on that first. And then Hayden and I will talk through that. And then after that, we will either go through some of the prepared questions that we prepared ourselves that we hear over and over from people, or we'll switch to y'all's questions as an audience. And that's why we do this live so you can put those in the chat and then we will get to those very quickly and I'll moderate those and bring 'em up and, and ask Hayden, um, those things. So, uh, if you don't know me, hopefully you do. I'm Michael Girdley. Um, I like to create stuff on the internet. I like to help people and it's super fun. And my day job is creating businesses and like I have a ton, ton of joy doing it. And that part of that is I get to partner with folks like Hayden and Franco who are co-owners of the Near business that we started going on 3 years ago, 4 years ago now.

Hayden, almost 4 and a half. 4 and a half. Oh no, no. Yeah. Just, no, just about 4.

Time flies when you're having fun. Uh, there was, there was a period there where we pursued some of my dumb ideas. So once we got those outta the way, then we got to something good. Um, but yeah, um, we, we've been working on this together and, and I love working with Hayden and Franco who are my, partners in the business. So maybe it's a good time, Hayden, for you to introduce yourself and then we'll start into the prepared stuff and then we'll go from there.

Great. So my name is Hayden Cohen. I am the CEO of Near. And as Michael mentioned, we started the company 4 years ago with a third partner, Franco. We've gone through a lot of iterations of the business to get to where we are today. But as it stands, Near is a staffing and recruiting company. That helps startups and growing enterprises in middle market in the United States hire amazing talent from Latin America. And we do this kind of across a variety of roles, and our specialty is basically knowing the Latin market like the back of our hand. And so Michael and I have done a few webinars on different topics like, you know, what goes wrong when you offshore and how to prevent it. And we thought it would be interesting to talk about the specific roles that are good to hire in Latin America. And that's kind of what we'll be doing today. So excited to be here. Thank you for having me and thank you for the team for organizing this.

Yeah, live from New York, Hayden Cohen.

Live from New York.

Uh, cool. So this is today's big question: what roles actually work when offshored? And I think we hear this a lot and it's kind of surprising how many roles these days are getting offshored. It's almost—

it—

I've heard you say it, it's almost like any role that can be done across the internet, uh, is— people are hiring globally for this stuff.

Yeah, yeah, it's a, it's a good question. I mean, when, when my friends ask me, or friends' parents, or people that I'm, I'm really frank with about the question, I say, honestly, anything that can be done remotely that's not regulated can definitely be hired for offshore and then specifically in Latin America for a variety of reasons. We think Latin is a great place to hire from. But yeah, like you can hire incredible accountants, financial finance professionals, software engineers, etc. So the way I think about it is basically anything that can be done from a computer. Like if you're, if you have a business in New York or Texas, if you can hire the role remotely in another state, then you can probably hire that role with top 1% talent in Latin America.

We had Nicole, Nicole raised her hand and Nicole and anybody else just type if you have questions or you want us to talk about something like type it in the chat. We've learned the hard way like you don't let just random strangers start talking. It goes crazy. So if you have a question, go ahead and type it in there and I'll work it in.

So, yeah, and as Nicole types, we could talk more specifically about, you know, which categories of roles are really popular for our business. What we've seen over the past 12 months is like our top 4 categories, and they're quite broad, are accounting and finance up top. And so that's like bookkeepers, FP&A analysts, investment analysts, staff accountants, controllers. Directors of finance, etc. The next kind of grouping would be software engineering. That's like our fastest growing category. And that's a role that's, you know, been our category of roles that has been offshore for a long time. And then marketing and sales, those are the kind of round out the top 4. But then we also hire a lot in customer support, less so a little bit lately with AI, but the reason Latin America is really popular is obviously because of the bilingual aspect of folks in customer support, and then ops data kind of round out the top categories there.

I am trying to find the Q&A panel on here. Zoom used to be so easy. Zoom's really hard. So I'll keep looking for it, but somebody typed in a question. I can't see it. So let's see if we can figure that out.

So, yeah, Pam Thomas said, how do you solve for culture differences? In your considerations to hire? I mean, that's that. Yeah, I found the Q&A. It's right at the bottom. I don't know if you see like the share, raise hand, all that stuff.

Why don't you go and answer that and I'll keep— I'll be a boomer here looking for it.

Okay, cool. So yeah, that's a great question. It's a common question that we get and solving for culture differences, I mean, it really is a matter of like, there's several factors. One, like, is your company remote as it is? So if you don't have like a good remote working culture, it obviously will be significantly harder to, or, you know, not, not significantly harder, but just, you know, a little bit more complex to start hiring offshore because it's important to, you know, have the infrastructure set up. Like, do you have Slack channels and processes for onboarding remote employees? Do you have that set up? Hiring from Latin America tends to not really be, uh, you have like a ton of cultural differences. We find that the professional culture with, with people, especially in larger metropolitan areas in South America and Mexico, think Mexico City, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, uh, to be quite similarly professional, professionally to, uh, the US. Um, we find that kind of the, the culture gap exists a bit more in, you know, different regions like the Philippines or India. I don't know, Michael, what's your, what's your experience with that?

Well, I was going to ask you, like, just specifically about Brazil. Like, Brazil is a huge economy and a huge group of people in South America. Like, is there— how does their culture tend to be towards the US culture?

I mean, we have Brazilians on our team and it's our second most popular country that our clients hire from. And then like a specific example, we have like one of our account executives is from Brazil and does extremely well. And we only sell really to like 99% to US businesses and they're willing to buy from him. And we, I find that working with him specifically is, it's like working with a colleague from from the States. Um, you know, we vet for, for English, obviously, like we find that like English communication is a much larger gap, uh, to kind of overcome than the culture barrier itself. So, you know, our experience with working with Brazilians has been fun. There's not like a huge gap. Yeah.

Well, and I've noticed, I think we talked about this the other day, I think the Latin American culture and the US culture are really the two closest ones when I've worked with people remotely. And our business partner is Argentinian, right? And I grew up in Texas and I live in San Antonio, which some people joke about being the northernmost city in Mexico. Have I joked with you about this joke? Yeah, it's hilarious. I, I laugh at it all the time.

Um, very funny.

And so because I grew up in this place, it's like 70% Mexican American, like the Latin American culture feels very normal. And then the number of like Latinos across the US makes it so the bridge, the gap is not as much versus like I've dealt with, you know, I've had friends who've hired folks in China or India and it's just like the cultural gap and the stylistic gap of work is really big, which is why I like Latin America.

So yeah, I think, I think that's a, that's a really good point. And I think it also works in the reverse. Like there are large multinational American companies that have been hiring been or building branches in the large Latin American cities for decades, right? So like EY, JP Morgan, PwC, Exxon, they all have huge branches in Buenos Aires, for example. And the people working there have been working with American colleagues for decades as well. And so the professional side is solved in reverse. So, and yeah, of course, there's tons of influence and Latin American culture in the States.

Question from Luis. Thanks for this webinar. What is your take on Colombia? Not the university, the country.

Yeah. What is your take on Colombia? I mean, yeah, in terms of professionally, like, like I said, it's one of the top 4 countries that we hire from. Find that it's a— in terms of like cost, it's actually one of the more cost-favorable countries to hire from right now. You know, you don't see a huge difference kind of across the board in Latin America, but for example, in Argentina right now, they've faced, you know, a lot of inflation, although it's kind of like tapered out over the past year, but that has caused local companies to start to pay higher wages. And so that's putting a little bit of upward pressure on salary demands for nearshore hires in Argentina that hasn't hit Colombia in the same way. And then, you know, professionally, like we said, we find that those top 4 countries, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, to all have like a huge wealth of talent across all of those categories that I mentioned, accounting, finance, marketing, sales, engineering. And so we, we definitely view it as, as an important location to hire from in our strategy and for our customers.

They have good educational system. It's a pretty thriving economy. I don't— I think people don't realize how big the Colombia economy is. Like, it's one of the bigger ones in Latin America. It has one of the biggest sets of airports between Medellín, Bogotá, Cartagena, and Cali. Like, there's some big cities there, lots of people. Um, so yeah. And then, then I think the quiet thing that I like about Colombia, I have a number of colleagues that I've worked with. I hired a Colombian who was an immigrant here. Uh, they're, they speak very crisply. So like there's different variations of accents across Latin America and there's, we're all very familiar with the Mexican one. And then there's some that are like stronger. I find like the Chilean ones, which are tougher, not only to understand in Spanish, which is darn near impossible. Um, but Some of them, it's the language kind of gap and the strength of the accent is stronger in some of these other countries. And I like the Colombian one a lot.

Yeah. And, uh, and then kind of another, um, important secondary aspect is that is the proximity to the US is actually quite an advantage. It's obviously very, you know, it takes just a couple hours to fly to Florida from most places in Colombia. And then we've actually found a lot of strong sales talent with less accents in Colombia. So, you know, that's oftentimes a requirement for customers looking for account executives, for example, when they hire in LATAMs, they want people, you know, with like maybe less of an accent to make that, you know, go back to that culture piece, you know, super important thing for salespeople selling into the American market to have less of an accent. Cool.

Let's do this. This is a slide we put together. I guess this is what you guys are seeing in the market right now, Hayden.

This is a report we put together of kind of some historical data. And I mean, there's small adjustments, but basically what you notice is these are, you know, across marketing and then EA and accounting and then engineering. And what you'll see is that for, as you kind of go up the spectrum of, uh, like toward the higher end ranges, like software engineers, where it's gonna be more expensive to hire, you still can get a 36 to 56% cost savings, um, for kind of those mid-level roles where, you know, maybe you hire an accountant for $3,000 a month in Argentina, you can save, you know, 50 to 70% against what you would hire in the US. And then kind of the more junior roles, like an executive assistant, that's where you see like the highest cost savings. And so, you know, for people who have experience hiring offshore, Latin America is, you know, slightly more expensive than the Philippines or India, but there's like a variety of advantages to hiring in LATAM, namely proximity to the US, really strong timezone collaboration, right? You can have people working like the same hours as your team because it's always within 1 or 2 hours of Eastern Standard Time. And then, yeah, that professional similarity and English level is also really strong.

One thing that was interesting to me, and then we have some questions, is Argentina, for example, or São Paulo, they're, they're pretty far east. So like, you know, I'm in Chicago Standard Time, you're Eastern, you're Eastern Standard Time right now. And like the Argentinians in Buenos Aires, they're like 2 hours ahead of you, I think, depending upon the time of year, sometimes 3 hours.

Yeah. So no, so actually right now they're only 1 hour ahead of us. And then the next day, yeah, the next daylight savings turn, they'll be 2 hours ahead. And we find that that is virtually never an issue. You know, there's basically 2 labor pools in Latin America right now. There's like the local labor market where people are getting jobs with local businesses. And then there's the nearshore labor market where people are effectively exporting services or working for American companies. And in that pool, you have, you know, really strong talent, English-speaking talent, highly educated, experienced doing this. Type of work. And those people are super amenable to working whatever hours your company needs them to work, you know, within reason, right? Like if you want them to work like a 24-hour schedule, obviously you're not gonna get that. But if you treat them like teammates and you treat them with respect, you know, they're super flexible to kind of work within your company's hours. So if you have, If you're, you know, working Central Time, we have plenty of people on that we've staffed out in place that are in Argentina that are 3 hours ahead in certain cases and are fully happy to adapt their work schedules. Yeah.

And I think, well, one thing that surprised me when I went to Buenos Aires, like I went outside at like 7:30 in the morning and there wasn't anything going on. Like it's very— they live much more of a European start the day later kind of culture. So they were actually, I think, pretty psyched to be like not having to get up at at 8 AM or 9 AM for meetings, right?

They were happy to stay. Yeah, and I lived in Buenos Aires for 2 years and I didn't mind, you know, pushing back my morning a little bit. You know, back in New York, I'm not getting that as much. Yeah.

All right, an anonymous attendee asked, my organization is not ready to hire a direct full-time employee. We are interested in temp to perm. Is that a role that this would be a good fit for?

Yeah, that's a, that's a good question. We, we definitely have seen that happen. Our, yeah, Near, we don't really do that. We'll occasionally do that for existing customers, but there are solutions where you can do that. Like Upwork is, you know, a common place to start out with kind of like a few hours a week tasks. And there's, you know, some other things that if you wanna reach out to me, @hayden@hirewithnear.com with kind of some more details. I'd be happy to kind of point you in the right direction there. What we do is, you know, 95% basically full-time teammates integrated on your team that you manage and own the relationship with.

And I think that's the thing that's changed, right? You know, gone are the days when it was just call centers or somebody you get off of Upwork for a project. Like, people are hiring employees that are peers and like top-tier, like, like core team members of their team. They just happen to be located in Mexico or Canada or Latin America or Brazil or Argentina. And that's the fundamental thing that shifted post-COVID and why I think so many businesses are doing this. 'Cause the model works great. The people, like, they're potentially more affordable. They usually are. They're talented and they're like, their attitude is terrific. And like being somebody who's, you know, it's a breath of fresh air when somebody's not super entitled, if that makes sense. Like they, they, they see it as a partnership rather than like, what are you gonna do for me? And, uh, that's not necessarily what you get. With domestic employees.

So yeah, yeah, I think that's, that's a good point. And then something else that, you know, we were at a conference together last week and I met a lot of people running large businesses that were there and talked to them obviously about, you know, offshoring in certain capacities. And one of the interesting things that I've learned throughout this, you know, 4-year journey and have been noticing a lot lately is that, you know, the BPO model is just not what companies want anymore. And so like BPO is business process outsourcing, effectively, you know, staffing agencies that have a bench of people that place someone for you that you don't really have control over, uh, you know, who gets put on your team to do the process. It's basically just, you know, butts in a seat. And our model, while to me was kind of the obvious way to go, uh, is definitely newer where we help identify, source, and kind of integrate with your hiring process, the company's hiring and interview process. So you can actually like identify someone and hire them just as you would look for and hire someone in the States. And then you kind of manage that relationship just like they're a full-time member of your team. To me, that's like the obvious way to go, but it's kind of a newer model. And what that does is allow you to basically build a global team. Just as if they were, you know, in, in your backyard, as long as you're, you know, working remotely.

Uh, a question for you from Steven Spellman: if you hire multiple folks in Latin America, do you recommend hiring from the same country? Is there nuance based on the roles you're hiring for? So I think he's asking, like, first and foremost, should you, like, cluster your people and, like, hire all from Venezuela or all from Colombia? And then I think he's also asking a second question, but let's answer the first one like, should you cluster your people or how do you think about it?

Yeah, no, it's a really good question. It's a super common question. So the answer, like, the answer to most things is it depends and on a variety of factors. So there are definitely locations where there might be like a stronger breadth of talent. But like I said before, those top 4 countries, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, you can really find people across the board. For any type of role. Where we find certain companies may want to hire from in the same country or the same location is if they want to build a hub and they want to have people go to a coworking space a few days a week and have a manager and kind of build almost like a second branch. You know, there's advantages to that, right? You know, for people who want to kind of have more collaboration with their team in person, et cetera, they want to be able to visit all of their team members like more easily and kind of like have a separate location. That's, that's an advantage. The advantage to having people kind of dispersed is one, you just get access to significantly larger talent pool and that helps you, you know, oftentimes hire a little bit faster, identify really good candidates faster, access, uh, you know, different costs. So the cost structure across LATAM, like we showed those ranges before, does differ a little bit country to country, right? Uruguay and Chile are much higher cost of living locations than Peru and Ecuador, for example. We have a fast-growing subset of countries where we're placing talent from in Central America, so Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica. It allows you to access larger talent pools. So, you know, I could go on about the different reasons, but there's nuance to it and it kind of depends on your organization and what you want to do. But what we, you know, can offer, not to plug ourselves too hard here, is we can kind of, you know, take away some of the complexities of hiring in multiple locations. So for, if you need to, you know, source equipment for people or you need to send things to different teammates, it can be complicated if you don't know the processes to do that across a variety of countries. But when you work with a company like me or we kind of can help take care of that for you. And we have processes and partners that can help us, you know, solve those challenges. So then hiring people in different locations becomes a lot simpler. Um, so it, you know, that was a long, long way of saying that it, that it depends and there's no right or wrong answer.

Well, that reminds me of one of the crazy things we learned. You can't just like buy a laptop at the Dell store and like ship it to Argentina. Like, it just, like, there's all kinds of crazy nuances to it. And it, we figured out how to make it happen, obviously, But like, I think if I recall, there was at least one country where we learned that if you sent something like that through the mail, like it was definitely getting stolen. Like you had to figure out a different way to make that happen if you're going to staff, get your employee the right equipment.

Yeah, we had, we had someone send a laptop to someone in Jamaica and there's like a ton of nuance there. Like in a lot of areas in Jamaica, there's no numbers to identify like the specific address. So you can't send it to someone's house, for example, you have to send it to the local post office. Lots of things that we've learned.

Yeah, uh, hence, like, yeah, we learned really quickly, like, this is— it's great, but it's not— it's not straightforward. Um, okay, so second question I think Stephen was asking was, okay, so should you cluster in one country? It sounds like the answer is it depends. But then there's a question of, like, should you look at specific countries for specific types of roles, for example, accountants or salespeople? Like, are you best to find those in certain places?

Yeah, it's a good question. To be honest, we don't see— there's not— it's not like such a— there's not such strong signals or such, you know, deep levels of certain, like, categories of talent in different countries that we recommend it. But, you know, speaking generally, you can find really, really strong accounting and finance talent in Argentina, but you can also find it in Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. But we do, you know, our largest talent pool is in Argentina and our largest category of placements is in accounting and finance. And, you know, it tracks, you know, within those categories as well. We find really strong software engineers in Brazil, but then also in Mexico and Argentina. I think there's, there's certain nuance. We've definitely found, like I said before, people with less accents on the sales side in Colombia and Mexico than in other countries, but it kind of is role dependent. It's not like there's no, we don't have like a list of, you know, if you want to hire a customer support rep, hire from here, you want to hire X role, hire from here. We do find that what's tends to be slightly more important, uh, is understanding what the different cost structures are for different roles in different countries. So, you know, in Mexico is going to be a little bit more expensive, probably in Colombia and Ecuador for certain roles, so on and so forth.

Uh, the transformation that's happened in Mexico over the past 15 years is incredible. Like, they didn't used to have a middle class. Like, there's totally a middle class there now, which I think is great from a somebody looking to hire overseas, but it just means kind of the quality of people that you're getting, plus the educational level and sophistication has kind of upped the game to where, you know, it's a good opportunity, but they're, you know, they're not gonna— they're not gonna be dirt cheap, but they're gonna be great in terms of people.

Yeah.

So, all right, uh, next question for you, and then we'll do the— do the next slide. Um, what is your experience hiring SDRs and salespeople from Latin American countries?

Yeah, it's, uh, you know, our experience hiring SDRs and salespeople from Latin American countries is probably a little different than, uh, some of our customers. So for us, all of our salespeople and SDRs are from Latin America and, you know, we're a quickly growing business and we've been successful and we're, you know, we're growing faster each year, but also what we're selling is recruiting and staffing services in Latin America. And so when you talk to someone from Latin America who's on the sales side of the business and you can see that they're a really, you know, they're consummate professional, they're adaptable, strong English, etc., it obviously, you know, the proof is in the pudding. We have certain customers that basically have more preconceived notions about what they want from a salesperson. For example, like zero Latin American accent, they want them to basically be quasi-Americans and understand culture. Like there are certain things where if you want your salespeople to be able to talk about, you know, the NCAA finals that just happened and they're in Latin America, they might not be keeping up with American pop culture the same way. So it depends on what you want from your salespeople. If you have processes that they're following and it's like really like systematic sales, like you can find really strong A-level talent, but if you have kind of people that need to be more in person or you really need like an American selling to another American, that's where we find that, you know, some companies might have more success hiring people from the States. But in terms of offshore locations to hire salespeople from globally outside of the US, In my opinion, LATAM's the strongest.

Yeah, I think this is a good— let's go through these two slides real fast. So we talked about industries hiring in Latin America. Turns out it's almost every small and medium-sized business and some large businesses.

Sorry, I missed that because I was reading the most recent comment, which was pretty funny. Good question.

We're going to come back to the comment. Yeah, we'll come back to the questions. But yeah, it's like, I just wanted to get through these prepared couple slides. So the message on this one is like, basically it's every industry that's post-COVID kind of doing this trend of hiring globally.

And yeah, so this is from a report that we put together of, um, of all customers and prospects that have like reached out about certain roles in their industries. And who is looking to hire from in LATAM and then also kind of like surveying professionals across the board. And so we, you know, these are 10 industries that are hiring offshore in Latin America. But yeah, so I mean, it's marketing agencies, accounting firms, financial services businesses, startups like that probably go under computer software, etc. But like I said, we don't have tons and tons of industry concentration. It's, it's really like role-specific and like whether another company, uh, you know, understands how, you know, effectively much of a cheat code it is. And so as long as you're not in like a regulated space where you can't hire for offshore, you don't have significant needs for regulated roles or in-person roles like a nurse or an architect, um, or a lawyer, then, then you know, there's really no barrier to, to doing this.

Um, okay, let's get to the funny comment. Uh, Anonymous Attendee asks, are people in South America actually good? I've heard people had issues with offshore folks from Asia. Turns out I did too. This way I like Latin America. The quality of work in Asia was inconsistent with a lack of follow-through. So this may be, this may be a good opportunity for us to talk about why we only do Latin America.

Yeah, yeah, we could do that. This is also not the funny question. That'll be the next one. Um, so are people in South America— that actually is kind of funny too. Are people in South America actually good? I mean, I'm obviously, I'm going to say that they are, but they like, they, they really are. I think what we should do, uh, for this next one is invite some of our customers. Who, you know, like don't have too much to gain, to just like ask them their experience on kind of like a roundtable format about their experience. Cause we have a lot of customers that have hires in South America, but a lot of hires in the Philippines and India as well. It's not like they have replaced their hiring efforts in Asia with all Latin America. They've just added Latin America as a strategy. Like generally what we hear in terms of feedback about hiring and, you know, we typically talk about Latin America and then India and the Philippines just because like they're like the most common regions that our customers are looking at or already working and hiring from. But generally what we hear is that the culture in Asia offshore hiring locations is either a little bit more deferent or, you know, not risk-oriented, not necessarily willing— like the professional culture is they won't necessarily speak up to authority figures. They'll kind of like be more rote task-doers or yes-men. Whereas in Latin America, you kind of have more culture professional similarity to the US where people might be a little bit more higher agency. They have a desire to move up through the organization, you know, they'll be willing to provide feedback or kind of go against the grain to get to the best solution and not just try to people please. And we and our customers find that to be, you know, really good for, you know, higher-level individual contributor roles, managers, you know, like higher level, Whereas, you know, people might have more data entry roles in the Philippines, so on and so forth. But those are definitely generalities and not 100% true, but that's kind of directionally how I would think about it.

All right. Let's— anonymous attendee has been doing a great job of asking questions. Good job, anonymous attendee. Assuming you're all the same person, you're— the anonymous attendee answers are questions, all the writing sounds similar, so it may be the same person. So let me skip, I'm gonna skip to the second question here and we'll come back to the, uh, the hair thing. Okay. Tyrell Dale asks, are there any HIPAA or PHI compliance issues with offshoring even if they don't directly access patient data? I'm in the healthcare industry.

Uh, I'm, I'm gonna, I'm gonna have the follow-up specific on that. We don't have tons of like regulated healthcare roles that we've placed. So I'm not going to sit here and answer one way or the other, but I will, I will follow up on that. We can, we can email the answer. I'll just screenshot their questions.

Yeah. And then Tyrell, if you want to check into it with and have a conversation with Hayden and the team, I think they'd be happy to kind of dig into it with you.

I think at a high level, we definitely dug into it, but I need to, I need to confirm before I answer one way or the other.

Perfect. Yes. We don't know the answer.

We'll follow up.

All right.

Uh, okay.

How do you vet your talent? How are you compensated?

And if they select our company, can they allow any distributions from that sale?

He asked 3 questions. Okay. Let's just do how do you vet the talent?

I was excited to answer the third one. So how do we vet our talent? So a quick backstory, when we started Near, we hired our third co-founder as an employee originally in a financial analyst role. And the business kind of started 3 weeks after that 'cause we realized there was an opportunity. And what we did was we started a platform to hire financial analysts from Argentina. And it wasn't a recruiting firm, it was like a, a job board. Effectively with pre-vetted candidates. And we did that for about a year or so. And there were a lot of issues, um, with that model, which kind of ended up, uh, having us pivot to, you know, what we ultimately became today, which is like full-service, soup-to-nuts staffing and recruiting. And some of those issues were that we would receive hundreds or thousands of resumes for a certain role, and our customers would log on to their platform, see all these resumes, and the vast majority of them were in Spanish or poorly formatted, or they would have pictures or their marital status on them, and a lot of these personal details, and it's kind of like weird answers in, in the, the COVID letters that just were not how American professionals were used to vetting talent. Like, they would— they— people just thought that the quality of talent was bad. And what actually was is that it's just like, it's a different set of ways of doing business or applying to jobs that's done in Latin America. So we vet for resumes and making sure that they're in an American format so they're easy to read and review by our customers. The other thing that there's that's common is you'll receive resumes in Spanish for people who don't speak English. And so a huge value prop that we deliver is that we vet all of our talent for strong English levels. So about 10% of Latin America, which is Mexico, South America, and then certain Caribbean islands and Central America, about 10% of the population speaks English. And then we vet to make sure that you have English-speaking people, kind of, you know, a range depending on the role, right? So a non-customer-facing person might need slightly lower level of English requirement than a customer-facing salesperson. We also do video interviews. So we do the first round of interviewing and then kind of adapt to any tests or case studies or assessments that our customers might want. So that's how we kind of vet our talent on the front end. And on the back end, we also do reference checks, background checks, and all that good stuff to make sure that you're hiring person you think you're hiring, that they have no issues, etc. And the way we're compensated is that we take a fee that is a percentage of the compensation paid to the candidate. And if you select our company, can distributions from those sales only go to equity holders with Hair? Yes. That, you know, I would— so anyone who signs up to be a customer from this webinar, you know, all of All of the distributions from your sales will go to me and Franco and not to Michael, uh, because he does not have any hair at all.

Awesome. That's hilarious.

Okay, I'm sorry, it's the last time we'll do that.

It's so funny. Um, Let's see. Combination of salespeople that are well-versed with AI or competing with AI?

Uh, combination of salespeople that are well-versed with AI or comp— I'm not particularly sure what the question is.

Um, but look, yeah, I think the answer to this is we have seen people in any of these roles in LATAM as being very coachable. Like if you say, hey, I want you to start using this tool, they do it. Like they're, they're comfortable with that. They want to produce. They have a good attitude about that kind of stuff. So, uh, I, you know, I don't think there's a ton of people anywhere in the job pool right now that are coming in being AI experts or spending a ton of time, you know, in it, just because that's just a small percentage of population. But if that's something that you as a leader or you as people building process for your team, you tell people you want them to use it, they will use it. And, you know, that's, that's the answer here, which is it goes from good people with good attitudes and they're willing to use the tools you put in front of them because ultimately I think they want to produce.

Yeah, I think that's, that's a great way to answer that question. Like, how would you think about it with, with salespeople in the US? You know, make sure that you're hiring smart, capable people that are willing to to use tools, to have like that, have a growth mindset, etc. And how do you vet that? You vet that like during the interview process and you get a feel for them and you replicate the exact same thing and treat people that you're looking to hire from Latin America with the same, you know, level of— I can't think of the word that I was using, but you employ the same interview process. Treat them the same way, and you'll identify people that kind of have those characteristics and, uh, growth mindset, and you'll have just as much success.

Right on. Okay, so timeline-wise, we have about 6 or 7 minutes left that we need to wrap up, so we got a couple— time for a few more questions. So if you have questions, put them in and we'll get them here. Um, what is the proper way to pay employees located overseas while ensuring that these expenses can be legally deducted on U.S. company taxes?

Yeah, good question. Um, so the truth is, in like this market I talked about, kind of like the, uh, Latin American labor pool exporting services or working for U.S. companies, um, vast majority of people are hired as contractors. That's what we do for, um, most of our customers. But depending on the role, there's like a variety of ways to do it, but you either pay an agency like us and you would, you know, categorize that as a service paid and deducted, pay people directly as contractors and deducted that way, or hire through an employer of record, which is basically, you know, having them work legally for an employer located, you know, with an office in that country, an entity in that country, and effectively leased out to you. and then you'd be paying, um, you know, that would be deducted from your, your SG&A as well.

I once looked at—

and you know, if you have like specific questions, you can, you can, you can always reach out. We can, you know, talk about the specifics.

Yeah. And that's one of the things like a Near or a similar kind of recruiting firm should be helping US clients kind of navigate and understand what their options are. There's, there's multiple different ways to do it. Everything, I think, everything, some of the stuff you talked about to employer record to the different services that are out there to, you know, that kind of stuff. So we're not accountants and we're not tax experts, but we can push you, push you in the right way to understand the options.

Yeah, that's a good— that's a good, good caveat.

But yes, I am not a lawyer, but I play one on podcasts. Okay, let's see. I once looked at a deal that was a modeling agency It's the first time I've ever had this question. I once looked at a deal that was a modeling agency with offices in New York City, Medellín, Guadalajara, and Rio de Janeiro. Could vet this kind of talent? Could you vet?

Yeah, no, assuming that the modeling agency, that, uh, that deal that you're looking at, you know, has remote employees, you know, you need a back office, you need all types of people to run a business like that, we could, you know, absolutely. Vet and hire the talent to, you know, run that modeling agency remotely and successfully.

Yeah.

Be happy to do so.

But this person may be asking like, do we do vetting of talent as a service? And we don't. We're, we help people.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

We help people recruit and staff and, uh, I think that's what we do.

Okay.

Uh, let's see.

All right.

We are coming up on time. Uh, so we went through this slide, roles that don't work well. And then these were all the questions we prepared if nobody asked questions, but they asked questions. So it turned out pretty well. But I think you said all this, like high-touch sales, roles that require travel, heavily regulated roles, US certifications. Like you're not going to hire a nurse out of Argentina. It's just not going to work. Internal HR for US teams, just because of some legal type stuff. And then this unscoped or undefined roles. And I get the sense that this last bullet tends to be one of the big problems is clients have to do the work to understand, to define what they're looking for. And if they don't, that could be a real problem with remote folks.

Yeah. And that's, and that, and that last bullet is like less of a knock on Latin American talent and more of a something to keep an eye on when you're hiring remotely in general, right? If you don't have like a scoped or defined roles, or you don't know what metric that you're evaluating remote employees or talent against, then you're, you're a lot less likely to succeed or understand whether someone is doing good or bad in that position. And, you know, you're not going to set that person up for success. And then one, one thing that I think is like an interesting kind of note to leave off on before we wrap up under that, you know, under roles that don't work well, right? You're not going to hire, like you said, you're not going to hire a nurse from Argentina to be a nurse, obviously, working remotely. But we have done interesting projects with certain customers. So we have a customer that, you know, is a startup working in the sleep tech space, and they hired people with PhDs in a variety of subjects to be like sleep score analysts. You know, it's not like a, you know, a common job. You know, we've had customers say we want architects because we find that architects make really good consultants for our businesses, and then we help them hire architects. So they're You know, they're working, you know, they are architects, but they're not working as an architect for, you know, a US firm. Or we've helped, you know, legal tech platforms hire attorneys not to give legal advice or to act in the capacity of a lawyer, but because, you know, they like the way lawyers think and they, you know, they help them build a platform and find what's useful. And so there is all of that talent available, but they might just not work in the exact regulated space itself. But like I said, anything that can be done remotely, you know, the world is typically your oyster. And that goes for junior all the way through senior people. So like, you know, we talked about Colombia before, what's our opinion on Colombia? Huge breadth of talent. We placed a CFO, someone in the C-suite, you know, through an employer of record for one of our companies. And so, you know, you really can hire across the board. And, you know, I think we're in the early innings of you know, how much companies are going to leverage, uh, you know, this strategy or program for their business. I've—

I tell folks, if they— if you're not doing this soon, your competitors will. Totally the case. Uh, cool. All right, uh, turns out for coming here you can get a promo code. This is the only salesy slide. Do you want to do the salesy slide and then we'll wrap up?

Yeah, it looks like Andres crushed and put a QR code last second on the, uh, on the slide. So nice stuff, Andres. Um, so like we said, we're Nyr. We are a recruiting and staffing firm that helps you hire, you know, great talent from Latin America. Um, if you go to hirewithnyr.com/girdley, if you're interested in learning more or you have a role that you want to know, uh, could be a good fit or you're ready to get started and you know that this is something you wanna do, go over to that link, hirewithnear.com/girdley, and you'll get 5% off your first hire with us. And even if you're not ready to start and you're just interested, we can honor that discount for a good little while. And you can find me, you can email me at hayden, H-A-Y-D-E-N, @hirewithnear.com. And, uh, with any questions you might have.

Nice. All right, everybody, thanks for being here. I think we got through all the questions. Really great questions today. Like, that seems like the levels of sophistication, the questions keep getting higher every time we do one of these.

So it was awesome.

Appreciate y'all being here. If we can be helpful, reach out. If not, uh, thanks for, thanks for joining us. We'll catch you next time. Hayden, great job, man.