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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Hire a talent acquisition specialist from Latin America and add a full-time recruiter who can source, screen, and pipeline candidates end to end, all in your US time zone for roughly half the domestic cost. South places vetted talent acquisition specialists fluent in LinkedIn Recruiter, Greenhouse, Lever, and Boolean sourcing who start in 2 to 4 weeks. You get a dedicated recruiting engine without a US salaried headcount or a large upfront fee.
A talent acquisition specialist is a recruiting professional who owns the full hiring process for a company, from understanding a role and sourcing candidates through screening, coordinating interviews, and managing offers. Unlike a transactional recruiter who just fills reqs, a talent acquisition specialist builds pipelines and improves how the company hires over time.
The role is the engine room of a growing company's headcount plan. A talent acquisition specialist partners with hiring managers to write accurate job descriptions and define what "qualified" actually means, then runs proactive sourcing through LinkedIn Recruiter, Boolean search, and direct outreach to build a candidate pool, especially for hard-to-fill or passive-candidate roles. They run initial phone screens, push candidates through the applicant tracking system (ATS) like Greenhouse, Lever, or Ashby, coordinate interview loops, gather structured feedback, and shepherd offers to acceptance. Done well, the role compresses time-to-fill and raises the quality of who walks in the door.
The discipline sits between pure sourcing and full HR. A talent acquisition specialist is more strategic than a coordinator who only schedules interviews, and more focused than an HR generalist who owns the whole employee lifecycle. Where a contingency recruiter gets paid per placement and is incentivized to move fast, an in-house talent acquisition specialist is invested in fit, candidate experience, and the long-term health of the pipeline. The best ones track metrics, time-to-fill, source-of-hire, pass-through rates by stage, offer-acceptance rate, and use that data to fix the bottlenecks in the funnel rather than just grinding through applicants.
What separates a strong talent acquisition specialist from an average one is sourcing skill and judgment. Anyone can post a job and review inbound applicants. A great specialist can find the right candidates who are not applying, write outreach that gets responses, screen efficiently for both skill and fit, and manage hiring managers who are vague about what they want. For a SaaS company scaling its team or a staffing firm whose product is talent itself, that capability directly determines how fast and how well the company grows.
The clearest trigger is hiring volume that your founders or managers can no longer handle off the side of their desks. Once you have several open roles at once and leaders are spending hours sourcing, screening, and scheduling instead of running their teams, a dedicated talent acquisition specialist pays for itself immediately by reclaiming that time and filling roles faster. The cost of a slow hire, a key role sitting open for months, almost always dwarfs the cost of the recruiter.
The second trigger is expensive agency dependence. If you are paying contingency recruiters 20 to 25 percent of first-year salary per placement, a full-time talent acquisition specialist usually costs less after just a few hires and keeps the institutional knowledge, your roles, your bar, your candidate pipeline, in-house. A South specialist who knows your company and your standards beats a rotating cast of external agency recruiters who learn your business fresh each time.
The third trigger is candidate experience problems. If good candidates are dropping out because the process is slow, disorganized, or unresponsive, you are losing talent to better-run competitors. A specialist who owns the experience fixes that leak.
Who should not hire yet? A company hiring only one or two roles a year does not need a full-time recruiter and is better served by a contractor or an occasional agency engagement. And if your real gap is broader people operations, onboarding, benefits, employee relations, you may need an HR generalist or an HR coordinator instead of, or in addition to, a sourcing-focused specialist. Hire a talent acquisition specialist when recruiting volume is steady enough to justify a dedicated, full-time seat.
Start with sourcing, because that is the skill that separates real talent acquisition specialists from glorified schedulers. Ask a candidate to talk through how they would source for a specific, hard role you actually have open. A strong answer includes Boolean strings, target companies, the channels they would use, and how they would write outreach that gets a reply. A weak answer is "I would post it and review applicants." Inbound-only recruiters cannot fill the roles that matter most.
Probe screening judgment. The point of a phone screen is to efficiently separate the worth-interviewing from the not, while keeping good candidates engaged. Ask how they decide whom to advance and how they assess fit beyond a resume. Look for someone who can articulate a clear, consistent evaluation approach rather than going on gut feel, which is both less accurate and a compliance risk.
Test hiring-manager management. The hardest part of in-house recruiting is often the internal stakeholder, the manager who is vague about what they want, slow to give feedback, or unrealistic about the market. A great specialist can push back diplomatically, calibrate expectations, and keep a loop moving. Ask about a time they disagreed with a hiring manager and how they handled it.
The red flags: candidates who only know inbound, who cannot show a real sourcing process, who have never owned the funnel end to end, or who treat candidates as commodities rather than as people whose experience reflects on your brand. South screens for sourcing skill, ATS fluency, screening judgment, and English communication before any candidate reaches you, so your interview time goes to evaluating fit and approach, not filtering basics.
Use these to find talent acquisition specialists who source and assess, not just schedule:
The cost difference on a talent acquisition specialist is substantial, and it does not require trading down on skill. Here is the comparison:
The gap reflects local cost of living and currency, not recruiting ability. A talent acquisition specialist in Mexico City, Bogota, Buenos Aires, or Sao Paulo earns a strong local salary that still lands well below US rates in dollar terms. The region has a large, English-fluent recruiting talent pool, much of it built by years of US companies running nearshore operations there, so familiarity with US hiring norms, ATS platforms, and LinkedIn Recruiter is common.
The math gets even better when you account for what a recruiter saves you. Every agency placement avoided is 20 to 25 percent of a salary you do not pay. Every role filled faster is weeks of lost productivity recovered. South folds sourcing and vetting of the recruiter into a transparent monthly cost with no large upfront placement fee, so the all-in value frequently exceeds the headline 56 percent savings. For a scaling SaaS company or a staffing firm whose margin depends on recruiter efficiency, that is a direct lever on the P&L.
Recruiting is a real-time, relationship-driven job, which makes time-zone overlap essential, and that is where Latin America wins decisively. A talent acquisition specialist in Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, or Brazil works your business hours. They are screening candidates, coordinating with your hiring managers, and moving loops forward during your workday, not handing things off across a 12-hour gap where every back-and-forth costs a full day. In recruiting, where speed of response often decides whether you land a candidate, that synchronous overlap is a genuine competitive edge.
The talent pool is deep and well suited to US hiring. Years of nearshore operations and global SaaS hiring have built a large base of recruiters in Latin America who know US-style structured interviewing, modern ATS platforms, and LinkedIn Recruiter cold. English fluency among experienced recruiters is high, which matters enormously in a role that is mostly conversation, on screens, on outreach, and with hiring managers. Many have recruited both US talent and nearshore teams, giving them range you can put to work.
Retention rounds out the case. South places full-time, dedicated specialists, not freelancers splitting attention across clients. Because these are real roles with strong local compensation and ownership of your pipeline, recruiters stay and accumulate knowledge of your roles, your bar, and your sourcing channels. In talent acquisition, that institutional memory, warm candidate relationships, a living pipeline, a calibrated sense of your standards, is exactly what you lose every time you churn through external agencies.
South does the sourcing and vetting so your interview time goes only to recruiters worth it. Every talent acquisition specialist in our pool is screened for full-cycle recruiting experience, proactive sourcing skill (LinkedIn Recruiter, Boolean search), ATS fluency (Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby), screening and stakeholder judgment, and the spoken and written English the role demands. You review a curated short list, interview your favorites, and decide. You manage the specialist directly as a full-time member of your team and own the relationship entirely.
Placement typically takes 2 to 4 weeks from first call to working hire, fast enough to staff up before a hiring surge rather than during it. Pricing is a transparent monthly cost with no large upfront placement fee, and because the specialist is dedicated full-time to you, there is no divided attention and no agency markup. They work your hours, in your time zone, inside your ATS and your hiring process, partnering with your managers and an operations manager or HR lead as needed.
If your leaders are drowning in sourcing and scheduling, you are bleeding cash on agency fees, or good candidates are dropping out of a slow process, a dedicated talent acquisition specialist from Latin America is one of the highest-leverage hires you can make. Book a call with South to see vetted candidates and get a talent acquisition specialist onto your team in weeks.
Through South, a full-time talent acquisition specialist from Latin America costs around $2,400 per month, compared to roughly $5,500 per month for a comparable US hire. That is about 56 percent in savings, with no large upfront placement fee and no separate benefits or payroll burden layered on top of the monthly cost.
Yes. South vets for full-cycle recruiting experience, sourcing skill, and screening judgment, not just price. Latin America has a deep, English-fluent recruiting pool built by years of US nearshore operations, so familiarity with US hiring norms, structured interviewing, ATS platforms, and LinkedIn Recruiter is common.
Yes. This is a major reason to hire in Latin America. Recruiters in Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, and Brazil work standard US business hours, so they screen candidates, coordinate with your hiring managers, and move interview loops forward in real time, with full overlap to Eastern, Central, and Pacific teams.
Most placements take 2 to 4 weeks from your first call to a working hire. South maintains a pre-vetted pool of talent acquisition specialists, so you can review profiles and interview candidates quickly and add recruiting capacity ahead of a hiring surge instead of scrambling for it.
Yes. South's talent acquisition specialists are experienced recruiting US-based candidates as well as nearshore teams. They work in US time zones, use US-standard ATS platforms and LinkedIn Recruiter, and understand US interview processes, so they can run searches for your US roles directly.
The terms overlap, but a talent acquisition specialist usually owns the full hiring process and builds pipelines proactively over time, while an agency recruiter is often paid per placement and focused on filling individual reqs fast. A talent acquisition specialist is an in-house, strategic role invested in fit and long-term pipeline health.
Full-time and dedicated. South does not place gig or freelance recruiters. Your talent acquisition specialist works exclusively for your company, embeds in your hiring process, and builds the institutional knowledge of your roles, bar, and pipeline that external agencies never accumulate.
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.
