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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When you hire a technical recruiter, you get the person who fills your engineering roles fast without lowering the bar, sourcing and closing developers in a market where the best ones never apply. South places full-time, pre-vetted technical recruiters from Latin America who work in your US time zone, cost roughly 53% less than a US hire, and start in about two to four weeks. You get a dedicated recruiting partner who lives in your ATS and owns your hiring pipeline, not an agency taking 20% of every placement.
A technical recruiter is a recruiter who specializes in hiring engineering, data, and other technical roles. They source passive candidates, screen for both technical fit and soft skills, manage the interview process, and close offers, all while understanding enough about the work to hold a credible conversation with a senior engineer and a hiring manager alike.
The reason technical recruiting is its own discipline is that technical roles do not fill themselves. The strongest engineers are employed, not looking, and uninterested in generic outreach. A technical recruiter has to find them, understand the difference between a backend engineer and a software engineer working on infrastructure, write a message that earns a reply, and represent the role accurately enough that a skeptical candidate takes the call. Where a generalist recruiter can fill a sales or operations role with inbound applicants, technical roles demand proactive sourcing and enough fluency to tell a Kubernetes claim from a Docker one. That fluency is what separates a technical recruiter from a generalist who happens to be working a developer requisition.
The day-to-day is built on real tooling and real craft. Technical recruiters live in an applicant tracking system like Greenhouse, Lever, or Ashby, source on LinkedIn Recruiter and GitHub, and increasingly use sourcing tools like SeekOut, hireEZ, or Gem to find and engage passive candidates at scale. They write Boolean searches that surface the right profiles, run structured phone screens, coordinate technical interviews and take-home assignments, and manage the offer and close. They track pipeline metrics that actually matter: time to fill, pass-through rates at each stage, source of hire, offer acceptance rate, and candidate experience scores. A strong technical recruiter treats the funnel like a system and tunes it.
What makes a technical recruiter great is the combination of hustle, judgment, and credibility. Hustle, because sourcing passive engineers is a numbers game that rewards persistence and great messaging. Judgment, because screening for real technical fit and for the soft skills that predict success on a team is hard, and a recruiter who waves through every resume wastes everyone's time. Credibility, because the candidate is evaluating you as much as you are evaluating them, and a recruiter who cannot speak intelligently about the stack, the team, and the work loses good people in the first call. The best technical recruiters partner closely with hiring managers, calibrate quickly on what good looks like, and protect the candidate experience because in a competitive market reputation compounds. Companies in SaaS, staffing, and professional services rely on technical recruiters to win the talent war without compromising quality or speed.
The clearest trigger is that your hiring managers are spending their week recruiting instead of building. When engineering leads are writing job posts, sourcing on LinkedIn, and running first calls themselves, you are paying senior engineers to do recruiting badly and slowly. A dedicated technical recruiter takes that load off, runs a real funnel, and fills roles faster while letting your technical leaders do the work you actually hired them for. The first time an engineering manager gets a steady flow of pre-screened, genuinely qualified candidates without lifting a finger to source, the hire has proven itself.
The second trigger is volume. If you are scaling engineering, data, or product and need to make more than a couple of technical hires a quarter, ad hoc recruiting breaks down. Roles sit open for months, the pipeline goes cold between bursts of effort, and you lose good candidates to faster competitors. A technical recruiter who owns the funnel keeps it warm and moving, which is the difference between hitting your hiring plan and missing it.
The third trigger is the cost of agencies. If you are paying 20 to 25 percent of first-year salary per placement to external recruiters, an in-house technical recruiter pays for itself after a few hires and keeps the pipeline knowledge inside the company instead of renting it.
Who should not hire yet: a company making one or two technical hires a year with strong inbound interest and a recognizable brand. If candidates come to you and the volume is low, a generalist recruiter or your existing HR function can handle it. The honest test is whether technical hiring is a continuous, high-stakes effort or an occasional one. If you are hiring engineers steadily and the cost of an open role is real, hire. If technical hiring is rare and easy, a dedicated technical recruiter is premature.
Evaluate technical recruiters on sourcing skill and technical credibility first, because those are the two things generalists most often lack. Ask them to walk you through how they would source for a specific, hard role on your team. A strong candidate talks specifically: where they would look, what their Boolean search would target, how they would personalize outreach to a passive senior engineer, and how they would represent the role to earn a reply. A weak one describes posting the job and waiting, which tells you they have never actually had to hunt for talent.
Test the technical literacy directly. They do not need to code, but they should be able to explain the difference between front-end and back-end, between a few common stacks, and between a junior and senior engineer's resume. Give them a real job description and ask what they would screen for and what would be a red flag. Listen for whether they can distinguish a credible technical claim from a buzzword, because a recruiter who cannot will flood your hiring managers with unqualified candidates and burn their trust fast.
Green flags: they source proactively and can prove it with specifics, they speak credibly about technical roles, they track and care about funnel metrics, and they obsess over candidate experience. A recruiter who talks about pass-through rates, offer acceptance, and quality of hire rather than just resumes submitted is thinking like an owner.
Red flags: someone who relies entirely on inbound and job boards, who cannot speak intelligently about the roles they recruit for, who measures success by volume of submissions rather than quality of hires, or who treats candidates as transactions. Be wary of recruiters who oversell roles to candidates, since that produces fast offers and faster attrition, and of anyone who has never owned a close.
Use these to test sourcing skill, technical credibility, and judgment:
A US-based technical recruiter typically costs around $6,500 per month in base salary, and more once you add commission or bonus, benefits, and the recruiting cost to hire them in the first place. In-house technical recruiters at competitive tech companies command meaningfully more. Through South, a comparably skilled technical recruiter from Latin America runs closer to $3,050 per month, a savings of roughly 53%.
For a US hire, expect about $6,500 a month in base, plus bonus or placement incentives and full benefits, with a search that often takes two to three months because good technical recruiters are themselves hard to recruit. Through South, the same caliber of recruiter from Latin America comes in around $3,050 a month, fully dedicated, working in your US time zone, with placement in roughly two to four weeks and no large upfront fee.
The savings reflect geography, not capability. Latin America has a large and growing population of recruiters who have built engineering teams for US and global companies, sourced on the same LinkedIn Recruiter and GitHub, and lived in the same Greenhouse and Lever ATS workflows their US peers use. Many came up in the nearshore staffing world recruiting developers for the US market, which means they already know how to source, screen, and close technical talent for American teams. They earn strong local wages that still produce major savings. Compared to paying agencies 20 to 25 percent per placement, an in-house technical recruiter from Latin America is dramatically cheaper per hire while keeping the pipeline knowledge inside your company.
Recruiting is a real-time, relationship-driven function, and time zone overlap makes it work. Candidate screens, hiring manager calibrations, interview debriefs, and offer negotiations all happen on calls during business hours, and momentum kills deals when it stalls. A recruiter in Bogota, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, or Buenos Aires works your hours, runs screens while your hiring managers are available, and pushes an offer to close the same day rather than losing a candidate to a competitor across a time gap. For a function where speed wins, that overlap is a direct advantage.
The talent pool is unusually well suited here. Latin America has been the nearshore hub for US technical hiring for years, which means a deep bench of recruiters who already specialize in sourcing and closing developers for American companies. They know the US market, the stacks, the comp expectations, and the candidate experience standards US engineers expect. English proficiency is high among these recruiters, which is non-negotiable for a role built on outreach and candidate calls.
Retention matters because recruiting knowledge compounds. A technical recruiter who knows your roles, your bar, your hiring managers' preferences, and your warm pipeline of past candidates is far more effective in year two than a new hire starting cold. A full-time, dedicated recruiter who is well compensated locally and embedded in your team tends to stay, so that pipeline and calibration knowledge accrues instead of resetting. South places recruiters for long-term, full-time roles for exactly this reason, the same logic that makes Latin America strong for a recruiter or a talent acquisition specialist.
South recruits, vets, and places full-time technical recruiters from across Latin America so you get a dedicated recruiting partner who owns your technical hiring pipeline, not an agency that bills you per placement and keeps the knowledge. Every candidate is screened for what the role actually requires: real passive sourcing skill, technical literacy credible enough to screen engineers and partner with hiring managers, ATS fluency, and a track record of quality hires. We test sourcing with real scenarios, because the combination of hustle and technical credibility is exactly what separates a technical recruiter who fills roles from a generalist who clogs the funnel.
The process is fast. Most roles are filled in about two to four weeks, versus the two to three months a domestic technical recruiter search typically takes, and technical recruiters are notoriously hard to hire yourself. There are no large upfront fees and the pricing is straightforward, so you get an excellent recruiter at a fraction of US cost rather than a markup. You own the relationship. Your technical recruiter works on your team, in your time zone, inside your ATS and your hiring process, reporting to you. South handles sourcing and vetting and supports the placement, but the recruiter is yours.
If your hiring managers are drowning in recruiting work, or you are scaling engineering and need a real pipeline instead of agency invoices, a technical recruiter is the hire that lets you win talent without slowing your team down, and hiring from Latin America makes it affordable. Book a call with South and we will place a vetted technical recruiter on your team in weeks.
A technical recruiter through South typically runs around $3,050 per month for full-time, dedicated work, compared to roughly $6,500 per month for a comparable US hire, plus benefits. That is about 53% in savings, with no large upfront recruiting fees. Compared to paying agencies 20 to 25 percent of salary per placement, an in-house recruiter from South pays for itself after just a few hires.
Yes. South places technical recruiters from countries like Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, and Mexico whose business hours overlap with US time zones. This matters for recruiting, where screens, hiring manager calibrations, and offer closes all happen live and momentum is everything. Your recruiter is available when your candidates and hiring managers are.
Yes. Latin America has been the nearshore hub for US technical hiring for years, so many of our recruiters specialize in sourcing and closing developers for American companies. They know the US market, common stacks, comp expectations, and candidate experience standards, and they work in the same LinkedIn Recruiter, GitHub, and ATS tools US teams use.
Most South placements happen in about two to four weeks, compared to the two to three months a domestic search commonly takes, and good technical recruiters are themselves hard to recruit. South maintains a vetted pipeline of LatAm recruiting talent, so you move straight to interviewing strong, pre-screened candidates.
A generalist recruiter can fill roles that attract inbound applicants, like many sales or operations jobs. A technical recruiter specializes in engineering and data roles, which require proactive sourcing of passive candidates and enough technical fluency to screen engineers credibly and partner with hiring managers. The sourcing skill and technical literacy are what set the role apart.
Full-time and dedicated. South does not place gig or freelance workers. Your technical recruiter is a long-term member of your team, which matters because recruiting knowledge compounds: a recruiter who knows your bar, your hiring managers, and your warm pipeline gets more effective every quarter they stay.
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.
