South helps growing companies find, hire, and pay top Latin American talent. Build high-performing teams in 21 days or less.
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You are paying to send traffic to a page that converts at 2 percent. Doubling that conversion rate is worth more than doubling your ad budget, and it costs a lot less. When you hire a CRO specialist through South, you get a pre-vetted conversion rate optimization expert in your US time zone who runs disciplined experiments that lift the numbers that matter. Placement in two to four weeks, 30 to 60 percent below US cost, no large upfront fees.
A CRO specialist, short for conversion rate optimization specialist, improves the percentage of visitors who take a desired action on a website or app. They research user behavior, form hypotheses, design and run A/B and multivariate tests, and analyze the results to systematically lift conversion. The role exists to extract more revenue from the traffic you already have.
The discipline is more rigorous than most people assume. Bad CRO is "let's make the button green and see if sales go up." Real CRO is a research-driven, statistically literate process. A strong specialist starts by understanding where and why visitors drop off, using quantitative tools like Google Analytics 4 to find the leaky steps in the funnel and qualitative tools like Hotjar session recordings and heatmaps to understand the behavior behind the numbers. They run user surveys and usability reviews. Only then do they form a hypothesis worth testing, because running tests on random ideas burns traffic and time without producing learning.
From there it is experimentation, and experimentation done right is a science. The specialist builds variants in a testing platform like Optimizely, VWO, or Google Optimize's successors, defines a primary metric and guardrail metrics, calculates the sample size needed to detect a meaningful effect, and runs the test long enough to reach statistical significance without falling for the trap of peeking and calling a winner early. They know the difference between a result that is real and one that is noise, which is precisely the judgment that separates a CRO specialist from a marketer who occasionally runs tests.
The output is twofold. The obvious output is wins: a redesigned checkout that lifts completion by 12 percent, a clearer value proposition that raises signups, a friction point removed that recovers abandoning users. The less obvious but equally valuable output is learning. Every test, win or lose, teaches you something true about your customers that compounds across future decisions. A good CRO program builds an institutional understanding of what actually persuades your buyers.
The role sits between marketing, design, analytics, and engineering, which is why it is hard to staff. The specialist needs the analytical rigor to design valid experiments, the UX sensibility to know what is worth testing, enough design fluency to mock up variants in Figma, and enough technical comfort to implement tests and read the data without constantly blocking on a front-end developer. That blend is rare, and it is what makes a genuinely good CRO hire so valuable.
Hire when you have enough traffic to test against. CRO needs volume; experiments require a baseline of conversions to reach significance in a reasonable timeframe. As a rough rule, if a key page sees thousands of visitors and at least a few hundred conversions a month, you have the throughput to run a real testing program. Below that, tests take months to read, and your time is better spent on acquisition or qualitative research.
The second trigger is expensive traffic. The more you pay to acquire a visitor, the more a conversion lift is worth. If you are spending heavily on paid acquisition and your landing pages or checkout convert below benchmark, a CRO specialist is one of the highest-ROI hires available, because every point of lift multiplies across all that paid traffic. This is why CRO and paid acquisition belong together, and why your growth marketing manager will be the specialist's closest partner.
The third is a plateau. When acquisition is working but revenue growth is stalling, the constraint is often conversion, not traffic. A dedicated specialist focused entirely on lifting conversion can break that plateau without spending another dollar on ads.
Who should not hire yet: if you have low traffic, hold off. You cannot run valid experiments without volume, and a CRO specialist with no traffic to test against will spend their time on qualitative work that a UX researcher could do as well. Likewise, if your product or value proposition is the actual problem, that visitors arrive and bounce because the offer is not compelling, no amount of button testing fixes that. CRO optimizes a fundamentally sound funnel; it cannot rescue a broken offer. And if you do not yet have clean analytics, with reliable conversion tracking and a trustworthy funnel report, fix the measurement first. Optimizing against bad data produces confident, wrong conclusions, and you may need an analytics specialist before a CRO hire.
Lead with statistical literacy, because this is where most CRO candidates wash out. Ask how they decide a test is done. The weak answer is "when the variant is winning." The strong answer involves pre-calculating sample size, committing to a runtime, accounting for business cycles, and understanding that calling a test early because it looks good is how you ship false winners. A specialist who cannot explain significance and the peeking problem will run a program that produces noise dressed up as insight.
Probe their research process, because good CRO is not guessing. Ask how they decide what to test. The strong candidate describes a research phase: pulling the funnel in GA4 to find the biggest leak, watching session recordings to understand why, forming a hypothesis grounded in evidence, then prioritizing with a framework like ICE. The weak candidate jumps straight to "I'd test the headline," which tells you they optimize by hunch.
Check for intellectual honesty about losses. A real CRO specialist loses plenty of tests, and they treat losses as learning, not failure. Ask about a test that failed and what they took from it. Candidates who claim near-perfect win rates are either lying or running such timid tests that they learn nothing. You want someone comfortable being wrong in service of being right at scale.
Assess range across the stack. The most effective specialists can do the analytics, mock up the variant in Figma, and often implement the test themselves. The more they can do independently, the faster your program moves and the less they bottleneck on design and engineering. Ask how hands-on they are in the testing tool and the front end.
Who should not hire yet, as a caution: do not hire a generalist marketer who has "done some A/B testing" and expect a rigorous experimentation program. That gap shows up as wasted traffic and false conclusions. And do not over-index on a pure analyst who cannot translate findings into compelling page changes, or a pure designer who cannot run a valid test. The role needs the full loop, research to hypothesis to experiment to analysis, and you should screen for the whole loop, not one piece of it.
In the US, an experienced CRO specialist runs roughly 7,000 to 10,000 dollars a month, around 8,000 at the midpoint, with senior optimization leads at high-traffic companies earning more. Fully loaded with payroll taxes, benefits, and overhead, the real cost is a third higher. The blend of analytical, design, and technical skill the role demands makes strong candidates scarce, and scarcity drives the premium.
Through South, a comparably skilled CRO specialist in Latin America typically costs around 3,750 dollars a month, roughly 53 percent less. The candidates we place have run real experimentation programs in Optimizely or VWO, understand the statistics, and can do the research and design work, often for US companies or agencies. The savings come from geography and currency, not from a quality gap.
The ROI on this role is among the clearest in marketing. A CRO specialist who lifts conversion from 2.0 to 2.5 percent on a site driving 3 million in annual revenue adds roughly 750,000 dollars in top-line, on the same traffic, with no additional ad spend. And because conversion lifts multiply across all your paid acquisition, the specialist effectively makes every other marketing dollar more efficient. Against a fully loaded annual cost in the mid-40,000s, a single meaningful win pays for the role for years.
South charges no large upfront fees and bakes no recruiting multiplier into the rate. You pay a clean monthly cost, you own the relationship with the person directly, and you get a dedicated full-time specialist instead of an agency that runs your tests between other clients on a slow cadence. For a discipline where momentum and test velocity matter, a dedicated in-house specialist through South is a structurally better deal.
Time-zone overlap accelerates the work. CRO is collaborative and iterative. The specialist needs to review test results with marketing, hand variants to design, coordinate implementation with engineering, and make fast calls when a test goes sideways. A specialist in Latin America works your hours, joins your experiment reviews live, and keeps the testing cadence moving instead of losing a day to every handoff. Test velocity is the engine of a CRO program, and real-time collaboration keeps it spinning.
The talent is genuinely strong and well matched to this role. Latin America produces a deep pool of analytical and technical marketers, many with experience running optimization programs for US companies and agencies. They know the testing platforms, understand the statistics, and bring the design and front-end fluency that makes a specialist self-sufficient. Because so much of the regional ecosystem serves US clients, they already understand US consumer behavior and US conversion benchmarks.
English proficiency is high in the markets South recruits from, which matters for a role that documents experiments, presents results to stakeholders, and collaborates across functions. Clear communication is essential when you are arguing that a result is real and the team should ship it.
Retention rounds out the case. Strong CRO specialists in the US are heavily recruited and move often, taking their understanding of your customers with them. For an equally skilled LatAm professional, a stable full-time role with a US company at a competitive local wage is a job worth keeping. Lower turnover means the institutional knowledge a good CRO program builds, the accumulated truth about what persuades your buyers, stays in house and compounds.
South recruits, vets, and places full-time CRO specialists from across Latin America with US companies that want to extract more revenue from the traffic they already have. We screen for the full loop that real conversion optimization demands: statistical rigor in experiment design, analytical fluency in GA4 and the funnel, research instinct from qualitative tools, and enough design and front-end ability to move fast without constant handoffs. Every candidate is tested on real scenarios, not just interviewed about them.
You tell us your traffic, your platform, your conversion goals, and where the funnel is leaking. We come back with a short list of pre-vetted candidates who fit, usually within days. You interview the ones you like, you make the final call, and you own the relationship directly. The specialist is a full-time member of your team, running your program on your cadence, not an agency resource testing between other accounts. Placement typically takes two to four weeks.
There are no large upfront fees and no recruiting commission baked into the rate. You get a dedicated, time-zone-aligned CRO specialist at 30 to 60 percent below comparable US cost, plus the compounding upside of a disciplined experimentation program that lifts conversion and makes every marketing dollar work harder.
If you are paying to send traffic to pages that convert below their potential, the highest-leverage move is a specialist who can systematically lift those numbers. Book a call with South and we will show you vetted CRO candidates who can start running experiments on your funnel within the month.
A full-time conversion rate optimization specialist through South costs about $3,750 per month, compared to roughly $8,000 for a US hire, around 53% in savings. You get dedicated testing and optimization firepower without the US salary.
Yes. South places CRO specialists across Latin America who overlap US business hours, so test planning, analytics reviews, and sprint work happen live with your growth and product teams.
They run the experimentation program: hypothesis development, A/B and multivariate testing, funnel analysis, and UX research to lift conversion. A strong CRO specialist ties every test to a metric and a statistically valid result, not just opinions.
Look for fluency in experimentation platforms like Optimizely or VWO, analytics in GA4 and Amplitude, heatmap and session tools like Hotjar or FullStory, and a working grasp of statistical significance and prioritization frameworks like ICE or PIE.
Typically two to four weeks. South screens for a real testing track record, analytics skill, and English fluency, so you interview pre-vetted candidates rather than sourcing on your own.
Full-time and dedicated. South does not place gig workers. Your CRO specialist is a long-term member of your team, which compounds because a continuous testing program beats one-off optimization sprints.
The region has the perfect mix of everything you want in remote employees: English skills, shared time zones, hard-working, and depth of talent. They are already accustomed to working remotely for top US startups and Fortune 500 companies.
Absolutely! The US and Latin America have basically the same time zones. No Latin American city is more than two hours ahead of EST.
Every hire is sourced based on your exact needs. They will arrive ready to support your business right away. They can do basically any tasks done remotely, but we recommend starting them as support so your team has more bandwidth for high-value strategic tasks.
All types of roles - customer service, executive assistant, sales, accounting, email marketing, lead generation, content writers, operations, social media marketing, and more!
You can pay directly through us (most popular) or we can connect you with one of our payroll partners.
You don't have to deal with any American labor laws / taxes when hiring full-time remote contractors. They aren't US-based, so no visas or sponsorships to deal with either.
We recommend market pay which varies for each role. See our salary guide and success stories for some ideas.
Then, we have two different models:
Staffing (most popular) - We charge a small monthly fee for each employee's monthly salary to make the process hassle-free. The fee covers sourcing, recruiting, admin, payroll, compliance, ongoing support, and a free replacement if necessary at any point. There are no cancellation fees or minimum commitments. You only pay if you make a hire.
Headhunting - A one-time simple fee once we've found the perfect candidate. This comes with a 120-day replacement guarantee.
For both options, you only pay something if we find you someone great that you want to hire.
Yes, we only recruit for full-time and we strongly recommend full-time hiring if you can. Stability (full-time & long-term) is highly sought after abroad. The top caliber candidates are only looking for full-time work.
You're also going to spend time training and getting them up to speed on your processes. It would be a waste to do that over and over again with new people all the time.
We recommend training new hires on one thing at a time.
For example, once they get up to speed on lead generation, you can add the next role writing blog posts or whatever you'd like. You can definitely overlap roles until you have enough work for multiple people.
The cost of living is much less in Latin American countries. Many of our employees are able to own homes, raise families, provide for their parents, and have in-home help of their own with their salaries.
If you aren't happy with your hire in the first 120 days, we will work with you to conduct a second round of search for the same role for free.
Just email us at Hello@HireInSouth.com and we will get back to you with an answer as soon as possible.
