I Built a Company by Hiring in Latin America: Here’s What I Got Right, and Wrong

Written by Hayden Cohen

In 2020, my co-founder and I were running a small venture studio and needed a financial analyst. We posted the role, and more than 250 people applied. The one who stood out was Franco, an analyst in Buenos Aires who was clearly hungry to build something. We hired him, mentioned it in a post on Twitter, and my inbox did something I didn’t expect. Founder after founder wrote in with a version of the same question: how do I hire someone like Franco?

We helped a handful of them for free. Before long it was clear the question was the business. Five years later, Hire With Near has helped over 950 US companies hire remote talent in Latin America.

The pattern I first saw in that inbox has since turned into a mainstream way US companies build their teams. We run our own team the same way: roughly 60 people across a dozen countries, with no headquarters anyone commutes to.

I’ve watched it up close for five years, and I want to share what holds up, because a lot of what I believed early on turned out to be only half right.

The cost savings are significant, but that’s the wrong place to stop

Most companies look south for the savings. A hire in Latin America often costs 30 to 70% less than the equivalent US role, a gap wide enough to change what a team can afford to build.

The mistake I watched founders make, and made myself in the early days, was treating that gap as a discount. But the companies that get real value (us included, these days) use it to hire more experienced people than they could at home. And this is what takes nearshore hiring from a hiring strategy to a growth strategy.

Overlapping hours change how a distributed team works

The reason I keep steering US companies toward Latin America over regions much farther away is the time zone alignment. When your team in São Paulo or Bogotá shares most of the working day with your team in New York, you get a colleague you talk to in real time. That does more for how a distributed team feels than any policy I’ve tried to write.

Sales was the surprise

If you’d asked me in 2020 what US companies would hire for most, I’d have guessed accounting or engineering. The most requested role turned out to be sales talent in Latin America. One client, AvantStay, has built a team of 18 reps there, added $20 million in annual recurring revenue, and cut new-rep ramp time from six months to two. I’ve since seen smaller versions of that story on sales teams across our client base, and SDRs have continued to be our number one role placed for the last two years.

We’re our own case study

I say all of this as someone who bet a company on hiring great talent in Latin America. And it’s worked.

In August, Inc. ranked us No. 118 on the 2026 Inc. 5000, the top 2.4% of America’s fastest-growing private companies. Earlier this year, we placed third in the Southwest on its Regionals list, on the back of 1,082% growth over two years, and Clutch has us at number 14 on its own version.

I bring the rankings up because of what produced them. We took our own advice about the cost gap and spent it up, hiring people with a level of experience a company our size would normally wait years to afford. That team is what grew this company, and building teams like it for our clients is the whole business.

We couldn’t have reached those numbers hiring the old way, in one city, chasing the same short list of local candidates as everyone else.

You need a strong remote hiring process

The last thing I got wrong was assuming remote hiring could be looser because the stakes felt lower. It needs more rigor. The teams that win screen the same way every time, hand candidates a real work sample from the job, and listen for judgment over a rehearsed answer. Do that, and distance isn’t a problem.

None of this is exotic anymore. Hiring in Latin America is becoming a normal first move for lean, ambitious US teams that want to build a stronger team faster and spend less doing it. We wrote a longer version on why so many companies in the US are hiring talent in Latin America. Worth checking out.

Author Bio:
Hayden Cohen is the CEO and co-founder of Hire With Near, a staffing and recruiting agency that helps US companies hire remote talent in Latin America. Since 2021, the company has placed 3,500+ Latin American professionals into remote roles with 950+ US businesses.