LATAM: Your best partner in building a world-class talent network

There is nothing better than starting the year with new and promising opportunities to grow your business, including potential new additions to your team. As the year 2022 starts, and still with the uncertainty of how long Covid-19 will continue to impact the employment market, preparing for future job openings to avoid starting from scratch and building a strong talent network is crucial.

Simply put, a talent network is a database of interested leads who agree on receiving communications from your business to learn more about your jobs, projects, events, and other career-related information without necessarily applying for a job. 

But actually, a world-class talent network is much more, as it can help you to build a pipeline of evergoing interested leads (giving you the ability to fill positions more quickly and successfully) and nurture them to keep candidate leads warm and grow their interest in your organization so they may eventually apply or spread the word about your business opportunities. Last year, over 27% of the Fortune 500 allow candidates to join their talent network without applying, and the number is expected to grow. 

Now, if you do not have a clear idea of where to start building a talent network, here are a few tips for you to start right away:

Rejection is not the end

The easiest and fastest way to grow your talent network is through your company’s regular job application process. While most applicants either get hired or turned away, there are always a few candidates that fall into a grey area that your talent network can cover. If you come across someone that it’s not the perfect fit your the position they are applying, but could be a good fit for your company in the future if you have the right position, consider adding them to your talent network:

Inform your potential candidates that while they have been rejected for that position they applied for, you were impressed with their resume and would like to add them to your talent pool for future consideration.

Ask around 

Confucius once said, “the man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life”. Even if you think you are starting from scratch, we guarantee you that you have more connections than you think and closer than you imagine. Just ask around! Put out calls for colleagues and employees to refer or suggest to you other candidates in their network. Plus, having a personal connection already working within your team can encourage potential candidates to feel confident enough to apply for a job or to gain interest in your company. 

Once you make the connection, do not let the relationship go cold. When somebody joins your talent network, it is crucial that you interact with them to keep them engaged; remember building relationships is what matters. 

Get creative on your search

One of the best pieces of advice we can give to you is to not limit your search for talent to certain groups; the more creative and open-minded you are, the more chances you have to build a strong talent network. It's time to think out of the box and expand the places where you connect with new talent. 

For example, look within former independent contractors or employees who have successfully worked for or engaged with your company in the past; keep an eye on different organizations and schools for eager new graduates hungry for the experience, and connect with retirees that want to keep working as independents. The sky is the limit! 

On that note, diversifying where you look for talent can be your game-changer, and Latin America has consolidated over the years as a giant pool of pure talent. 

Why LatAm?

Well, first of all, as the global tech industry keeps booming, it relies on a continuous influx of professionals to fill its growing number of job demands. Just in the U.S., the tech sector has seen unprecedented growth in recent years, with four tech firms reaching a $1 trillion market cap by the beginning of 2020 — all of which have seen double-digit growth since achieving a 13-digit valuation pre-pandemic, making demand much higher than supply.

On that note, Latin America has become one of the main hubs for tech talent and software development and the region has become the perfect place to look for engineering talent

due to its ever-increasing number of tech graduates and new developers.

However, it’s not by chance that companies look at Latin America as a talent gold mine. Here are some advantages to look into:

It’s Cost-effective

Ok, first of all, the money…One of the main reasons American companies turn towards Latin America for potential hirees is lower costs. American tech companies can lower their operational costs by outsourcing their tasks to more affordable candidates in other countries. For example, outsourcing a software engineer job to someone in India can cost 11x less than it would hire someone in the USA to do the same job. On that note, Latin America is an attractive option for sourcing talent. Hourly rates for developers in this region, although higher on average than countries in Asia and Africa, are significantly less than in the Global North, plus the area is within the same time zone and has a relatively similar work culture enabling better collaboration to overall project success.

It’s Logistically Smart

As already mentioned, besides the lower costs, the Latinamerican region is close enough to the Northamerican markets, enabling real-time collaboration at times that work best for both parties to make projects time-efficient and easy to coordinate. While the time difference between America and Asia can exceed 12 hours, the time difference between American companies and countries in South America is usually within 5 hours, which keeps exchanges within the same business day.

Beyond the time difference, many cultural similarities make working with Latin America the clear choice for tech outsourcing. For example, the U.S. is home to more than 41 million native Spanish speakers, plus over 12 million bilingual Spanish speakers, while English is the third most spoken immigrant language in South America, with about 5.4 million speakers, compared to the English literacy rate in China that hovers around 1%.

Also, the number of consumer and cultural exports from countries like Mexico and Colombia to the U.S. helps to build familiarity and solidarity between the two countries, which can only help advance to a healthy relationship within the company.

 It’s Full of Talent 

As stated above, Latin America is producing big amounts of engineering talent day by day. For example, Mexican universities are nearly producing as many computer sciences graduates as American ones, and outside of education, Mexico and Brazil have a combined workforce of just under three-quarters of a million technology specialists. This makes a good pool of highly qualified and very experienced workers at the reach of companies HR team’s hands. In other words, LATAM is full of attractive candidates to choose from when companies are looking to set up world-class development tech talent networks or to hire individual remote engineering talent.

Building your talent network should not be a mind breaker. Give people a way to join your community, engage with them once they’re in, and then go back and match people up with your new positions when you can. Once you follow these steps, you will enhance your quality of hire. Also, you can always reach out to us to overcome your tech talent shortage and we’ll provide you with a flexible nearshore workforce solution of highly skilled tech talent.