The Nearshore Cafe

How to Build High-Performing Nearshore Tech Teams with Latin American Developers

• Brian Samson

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In this episode of The Nearshore Cafe Podcast, host Seb Wichmann talks with Brian Samson, founder of Plugg Technologies, about scaling remote tech teams by hiring elite Latin American software engineers.

Brian shares authentic hiring strategies, from using video job descriptions to running pop-up coding challenges, helping U.S. companies attract and retain top-tier nearshore talent.

If you’re a founder, HR leader, or tech recruiter looking to build or grow your nearshore development team, this episode offers practical tips and fresh insights on strategic hiring and culture alignment.

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Speaker 1:

Welcome listeners. I'm Sepp Wichmann, your host of the Do Good Insider, where we dive deep into raw and meaningful conversations with visionary founders and CEOs who see beyond profits, elevating the lives of employees and vendors and the planets we call home. Today's guest, let's welcome Brian Sampson, founder of Plug Technologies. With extensive experience in building and scaling teams, brian has navigated the intricate challenges of aligning company culture, strategic hiring and leadership. Plug's mission reflects his passion for creating impactful teams and solving real operational pain points for businesses by placing Latin American-based engineers and other talents with US-based businesses. Join us as Brian shares insights on fostering a strong workplace culture, best hiring practices and overcoming operational hurdles like remote work and scaling. Whether you are a CEO, founder or a leader curious about the behind the scenes of running a successful venture-backed startup, this conversation is packed with actionable advice and inspiring lessons learned, so welcome.

Speaker 2:

Brian, how are you, a pleasure to be here. Thanks so much for the invite, sam, amazing Good to have you.

Speaker 1:

So let's dive right in. So you guys are experts in hiring, placing top talents in the Latin American region in US-based companies. I'm sure that you guys have learned. You know left, right and center, everything from hiring to technology, to whatever it is that really makes a good hire being placed in the right company. I would love to start with lessons learned. You know the companies, founders, ceos, hr-os that are listening right now. They all have expertise in hiring. But really I would love to dive into the details today. Talk me through a scenario where you guys looked at the cultural fits with the profiling, where you went through your processes from interview techniques, the right questions asked to the cultural match, from interview techniques, the right questions asked to the cultural match. What is this moment where you thought this just didn't go right and what were those lessons learned?

Speaker 2:

Well, seb, there's a lot to unpack there and I will tell you, I've been doing this for about 20 years and sometimes I feel like I'm just scratching the surface. There's so much to talk about on this topic. I think where a good place to start might be my days working for VC funded tech startups when I lived in San Francisco. Eventually I was a head of talent and you know, maybe like a really interesting place would be. I was working with this tech startup Gosh.

Speaker 2:

This is probably 12, 13 years ago and I remember I was dating my wife at the time and I was trying to find a way to break through all the noise. So even then, even 12, 13 years ago, you walk down the streets of San Francisco, you throw a coin, you'll hit 50 different startup guys. They're everywhere, right, like tech startup after tech startup after tech startup. So it's really hard to market, really hard to position, because you just kind of blend in with everybody else. If you were in you know a much different place, you know you might be like the startup guy and really interesting, but out there you're the phrase like a dime, a dozen.

Speaker 2:

So I had a friend who was also a startup guy, but his startup was creating video job descriptions and this was like brand new concept, you know, 13, 14 years ago, and I think I learned a lot about this just going through the process. So I was trying to get this startup out. That was kind of early stage and I had my buddy come by and we spent time with the hiring manager. You know, put it all on film. We tried to make it like really authentic, you know.

Speaker 2:

so it's not overproduced, with like jet planes going through and graphics. Just, you know, hiring manager, you know on camera and it I learned a lot, just about, like, probably what I had missed in the past before I had ever done this. So, number one, I can't think of a single candidate that wouldn't want to know what their future boss is like. Right, but the thing is there's a million companies hiring and every recruiting process is timely for a candidate. Okay, I've got to spend time answering emails, then I've got to talk to this recruiter. Maybe eventually, like after a couple rounds, I'll finally talk to the hiring manager. But what if I could just watch a five-minute video from this hiring manager? Gosh, like who wouldn't want to invest five minutes into learning who their future boss is? Now, on the other side, what do you do on this video?

Speaker 2:

Here's something else that I had learned is that you really are doing a disservice to your company if you're trying to be everything to everybody and yeah, that sounds like OK, whatever, brian, that's kind of generic advice, but you'd be surprised like a company really needs to take a stand. Like, if you're for these couple things, that means you should be just as easily against these other things, and I'll even give like a kind of a funny example. So the word or the phrase data-driven is thrown around all the time Like yeah, that sounds great. Who doesn't want to be data driven? Well, guess what? There is a counterweight to being data driven. It means you. If you're so focused on getting data to make a better decision, you're going to be a little slower. You're not going to be the first out there to make a decision so like, but that's okay, you're just making a count like a clear decision. We are going to be a little slower, but a little more thoughtful, right, that's what it means to be data-driven.

Speaker 2:

Or maybe somebody else is prioritizing, like speed and aggressiveness, right, but it's okay. So you want to decide who you are, but that also means who you're not. Now back to when I was with my wife we're still married but when I was dating her. So I was so intrigued by this concept of video job descriptions. So this company had like a dozen startups as their first clients you know, I was one of their first ones and I started to show her all these little videos and she said something that like-. So the videos.

Speaker 1:

So let me just ask the videos from founders or from the hiring or from the business owners. What are the things that you?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, in some cases it was the same one of the same. Like early companies, the founder might be the hiring manager, right, right? Or maybe the founder makes a quick 30 second cameo.

Speaker 1:

I've seen that before, like years ago, and I'm curious to see how that went. How that went or not.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so my wife said something that like blew my mind and it really just hit that nail on the head in like the series of videos that I'm showing her because I'm so excited, like watch this, watch this, like this is so much better than reading the javascript on. Indeed, and we watched this video of uh like a total pro-typical founder, right, like like you know he it's this, this guy with his hoodie, his startup hoodie you know like an like a really industrial loft office in the background with like the ducts and the air ducts and, um, you know like exposed everything brick. Um, there's like seven other dudes in the background. All look the same and they're like riding around the office on skateboards in the back while this guy's, you know, telling about the company. And what she said was incredible. She said, oh my god, I would never work there.

Speaker 2:

But that was brilliant, because imagine how much time is spent wasted for both parties, like if she had just seen a job description, let's say it's like a marketing manager job or something and she applies, goes, goes through the process, waste her time, waste the hiring manager's time. But by her investing, like she probably knew, in 30 seconds, right, like, this is not the culture for me, but so she saves her time and on the other side, the hiring company saves their time because, like, people that really want to be in that environment are the ones that are implying. Now, obviously there are things to worry about later if you get too homogenous and yet everybody's like the same thing. But the concept of who you are and like, be authentic, be real, put it out there. But it also means who you're not and it saves everybody.

Speaker 1:

So that is so interesting. Yeah, yeah, thank you so much for sharing that. Like I remember I don't remember anymore. You know, during my years of being an employee it sounds like a world ago, lifetime ago I think, in my time, and I haven't had heaps and heaps of jobs, but, fair bit, I had, you know, 10 years or so of roughly, of maybe not quite of employment like solid employment, higher ranks, team leader, managerial director positions and so on in L&D. I think I remember once or twice having had such a process where I think I was able to get to see and feel and read. This is what we do. We are picking up on this energetic stuff where we like, I like this person, or I really don't like this person at all, and the background looks like I would never work there, right?

Speaker 1:

yeah, I had an opportunity, brian, where I saw the person. I got got to feel into this person, if that's a thing, and it also helps me to to be more in sync and comfortable with maybe recording a video myself, with even going on a call. Like you know, we have met before. We jumped on this podcast here and that gives us a sense of familiarity where I'm like, I kind of I feel like I know Brian.

Speaker 1:

And I feel like I know, seb, and that just gives us a totally new dynamic, much more a comforting dynamic. Right, we all are creatures of fear, if you will, humanity in general living in duality in this world here. Is that what you have learned from those early days that I don't know. Candidates get to be more comfortable, get to be more themselves by having seen the hiring manager prior, or what were the other challenges, maybe from the hiring manager that they didn't want to go on, or they maybe weren't sure who they are, or talk us through that a little bit.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, I think I mean there's no science behind this. This is just my experience. But AB testing this, you know, like a candidate that is only going off of a written JavaScript and a candidate that's going off of a video, I think the one that watches the video and decides to continue in the process is going to be way more enthusiastic, engaged. I love what you just said about familiarity. It's all. It all works really well together. That's amazing.

Speaker 1:

Let's talk about plug technologies. Let's talk about also the wider you know. Let's also bring, let's take this into a wider context. What are those? You know? Video, for example. What are those? I mean video. Nowadays we pretty much only work with video in terms of within the hiring process Because, again, there's so much it's so and there's so many data points we can elicit for our clients and for us internally, where we're like you know what, this person just fits really well into our culture or vice versa. Right, what have you learned? What are those golden nuggets? Just let's grab two, three golden nuggets where you feel and think like this is detail that really would our, our listeners would really value to listen to. What are you doing that's different? What are you doing that you have realized over the years that works really well?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so I'll just give a little background on Plug for a second and then maybe I'll share a broader experience that I've had.

Speaker 2:

What Plug is? It is an opportunity to create talent arbitrage for companies. We have discovered Latin America. I found Argentina about 10 years ago. It changed my life. Could not believe that there was this level of talent, this level of flexibility, ability to overcome adversity, grit, intelligence, english, all on my time zone, and nobody was talking about it. I couldn't believe it. And that's really what arbitrage is. It could be financial, it could be anything, but it's finding value where others aren't.

Speaker 2:

And I think in the US market, hiring managers have worked with Asia forever, usually due to cost reasons, and they started to work with Eastern Europe and Africa was up and coming and I don't know why, but Latin America was just kind of skipped over. And then, all of a sudden, covid happened and time zone was everything. So we've just seen a massive gust of wind in our sails with what we call nearshoring, which is basically labor, that's on the same time zone as you. It's almost often a developing country supplying a more developed country, and then you have this leverage dynamic, this arbitrage dynamic. So to plug we happen to be experts in Latin America.

Speaker 2:

Labor, it's one thing, to be self-serve and go on Upwork and try to find somebody. It's a whole other thing to find a person that is a really good cultural fit, a really good technical fit, domain knowledge fit, senior level, speaks English, and these candidates would rather work with us too, because places like Upwork take a big part of their fee, just like Uber takes a big part of Uber driver fees and Airbnb takes a big fee. We don't do that to the candidates, so they come to us for better opportunities and the companies come to us because we have access to that cream of the crop Latin America talent, something that I wanted to share, seb, that might be kind of interesting for your audience. So maybe another tale of Silicon Valley that kind of helps put all the cultural stuff together.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I would love to hear. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, this is probably, you know, a good 10 years ago. So I was head of recruiting for two different companies and I think, like the comparisons are going to be really interesting here. One of those companies is a company that's not public called Lending Club. So I was there during the pre IPO days. You know, hot fintech, and it was really interesting.

Speaker 2:

When I first started working there, everyone in finance knew who it was. It was like this really cool finance story, but it wasn't really known in the tech community. So the company was kind of stalled out. You know, around 19, 20 engineers, despite being almost a unicorn valuation, unheard of, right. And and I was trying to like think, okay, you know, we're kind of struggling to find the right engineers.

Speaker 2:

Um, and our culture was a little bit different. It wasn't. It didn't look like any cool silicon valley office that I'd ever been to. You know, it looked like a law office, honestly, you know, you go in and it's like drab, gray cubicles. Everybody in there was probably in their like 40s and 50s and but I try to think like, okay, how do we make this an advantage, right? So so you know, as we started to do some more pattern recognition, that meant that everyone in there was quite senior. They liked working with other senior people. If they're that age they probably have other priorities and obligations, so they don't mind going to the office, but they don't want to be there at 10 o'clock at night. They want to leave around five or so. They all were working right downtown San Francisco, so they needed access to the train, because who wants to drive there? And then we also had quite a few people that were interested in visa sponsorship.

Speaker 2:

Okay, so I kind of put all this together and I started to see there was a pattern of not only the ones that worked there but the ones that had gotten far along in the process, like on-site interviews. It was kind of a big signal because if someone makes it that far, there's probably something there. Either they move forward or not. The ones that aren't there, that don't make it that far, you know there's probably something missing.

Speaker 2:

So long story short kind of circled the city called Fremont, which is about an hour train ride to San Francisco, and I took me and my small recruiting team. We went down to Fremont, recruiting team. We went down to Fremont and we spent instead of spending like a couple like our normal week behind our laptops in our downtown office sending emails away to candidates and just crossing our fingers and hoping they respond. We got out in the wild. So we set up one of those like big giant, 10 foot tall, coding exercises. It was like a, you know, like a big sign with a coding problem on it, and we put these little flyers together like as a test on the street.

Speaker 2:

You mean yeah, yeah, and like we put these flyers together like only looking for senior level talent. You know, normal business hours, piece of sponsorship, competitive salaries, something like that. You know, just kind of nice and easy apply here you know, to get to the funding club.

Speaker 2:

So we go there and um, uh, you know, every eight minutes a train comes through. The morning was a little challenging because people are on their way to work and you know they don't, they don't have time for this Four o'clock off. From four o'clock to seven o'clock, wow, it was a gold. Nine-seven Every eight minutes. Big rush of you know couple hundred people Every eight minutes.

Speaker 1:

you knew your recruitment team would arrive.

Speaker 2:

You knew candidates who would be shipped. Get these like big crowds of people around our sign. They're straining their necks, trying to solve the puzzle. They're not in a massive rush. What if they had a bad day at work? They are eager to talk to us, you know, and we got so many applications and it was like right in that center thesis that we talked about. So was that?

Speaker 1:

for Plug or for clients.

Speaker 2:

So this is for this company, lending Club. Yeah, just like you know something for your audience as you start to do like pattern matching within your own company and candidates that get really that go really far.

Speaker 2:

You try to find an alternative way to recruit. Now I took this same lesson to another startup that I worked at called Soch, which was eventually bought by Postmates and then Postmates was bought by Uber. So Soch was, you know, a 40 person, hip little startup. Everybody there was 23 years old and, you know, stayed till midnight playing video games at the office. So could I take some of these lessons to Soch? Well, what I did is we found like a food festival, like a food and beer festival, made our own little coding puzzle and they were not going to be, and you know, same thing happened, but it was like that right group of crowd.

Speaker 2:

You know, we were like this is the kind of company where, you know, nine o'clock on a Tuesday these because these, the, your co-workers become your best friends, right, and that's what what people were kind of opting into. O'clock on a tuesday these because these, the, your co-workers become your best friends, right, and that's what what people were kind of opting into. And long hours not necessarily long work hours, just long hours because you're taking breaks to have dinner and video games and be on the same sports teams and they're your saturday night friends and that works like a charm. So, uh, if your audience is thinking about recruiting, it doesn't always have to be internet, right, it doesn't always have to be web recruiting and try to think like where are my?

Speaker 2:

and, by the way, for a company like Soch, future employees were probably users too of the product. So we went to where like a user of our product might be. We went to where future employees would be, get offline Circles. Back to the original lesson of know who you are, but because you know who you are, you also know who you're not. You know, and then people kind of self-select in. Someone that worked at Lending Club has nothing in common with somebody that worked at Soch and vice versa, you know. So you're kind of appealing to the audience and potential employee group. If everyone is a future candidate for you, then nobody's a future candidate because you're not clear enough on who's the right fit for your company.

Speaker 1:

That is so interesting. Thank you for that. Sharing, brian, this notion, I almost feel that it's kind of this default, this total default that we say of course we hire online. That's just the way we do that. Have you seen, like, how would you operationalize this If we have somebody sitting there right now listening or watching that, watching our podcast here, like it is? You know, we have the workflows, we have the processes of knowing how to go about the hiring process online. We have seen success.

Speaker 1:

You know it seems clear cut to say that I would argue that probably no company right now has a best practice really physically being out there and doing that hire the way you just described, which is usually, if I look at the landscape in general, polarization or doing the things that nobody else does, is usually the right way to go about it from an operational strategic perspective. Are you right now, have you operationalized this within Plug? What is your recommendation for companies really kind of trying to wanting to test this out? What are the next steps? Like, how do you even come up with the idea of where to position yourself, knowing who you are and where your market hangs out?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So I think it's still as Ronald Reagan used to say it's mourning in America. I think it's still mourning in near shore, in Latin America. So you think about the books, like I've seen the of early adopters and you know late adopters, the places that aren't on the radar for most Americans. Less than 25% of Americans this is an unfortunate statistic less than 25% have passports. Most that have ever been to Mexico or Latin America have gone to Cancun or Cabo. That's their view, right. So, but it's to our advantage because they just don't know enough about it. They're not recruiting there aggressively.

Speaker 2:

So our competition is domestic companies and we have a massive advantage over them. We pay in USD, we have access to really interesting projects, really interesting customers, and then it's really about helping these companies find the nuance or the arbitrage that best fits them. So, for example, if you have a very hardcore hardware requirement, I might steer you away from Argentina, because it's very difficult to get hardware in and out of that country, right, but if it's a bring your own device type of thing, then amazing place. If you're more concerned about cost than anything, like cost and English language are the most important things, I would steer you towards Nicaragua and Central America. If you want to have everybody in one country and then one specific city.

Speaker 2:

A place like Monterrey, mexico, was a great arbitrage three or four years ago. Today, with convergence and competition, office space, labor, the prices are going up. So I think that's the value that we're trying to add for our clients and maybe how we're trying to operationalize it, by providing all of our firsthand knowledge in country and steering companies and hiring managers to the right country for the right scenario. It's just not a big one-size-fits-all. Try Latin America. Latin America has a lot of unique and distinctively different countries.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it seems like Plug has a great service there, as you mentioned, and I wasn't aware about this until recently. I found out myself that not many Americans have actually passports. I thought that to be interesting. You know, coming from Germany, for us it's like you're kind of running with this thing, just you know over our shoulders.

Speaker 1:

It's just like where do I go now? Not in Europe, of course, but if a company has rigorous processes right now, may doesn't want to use Plug as a service, which is totally fine as well. What are those? You know, square stacks, what are those different methods of hiring that you just mentioned? Around having a booth outside the school, outside the train station? You know, again, they don't have the refined processes to even understand how to go about it, because its default is around we just hire online. This is the way we do it. What is the next step for them if they want to trial this Like where do they actually put up a pop-up booth? How do they find where their candidates run around? Have you been able to operationalize this insights plug as in? Are you still doing it? Did you see validity in it? Do you see that? Look, it's not needed? And not just plug related right now, but in general, like, what's your recommendation in terms of other hiring strategies?

Speaker 2:

places, but online, I think what? So maybe there's two lessons here. The first is you know what did Warren buffett always say? You know, when there's blood on the streets, right like bye, you know, and um and when like everything looks like right.

Speaker 2:

It's you know, it's just heights right right, or like when your taxi driver is giving you stock tips, it's time to sell. So there's some analogy there of if your labor market is so overheated, you probably need something different, like a different way to attract talent, different way to source talent. With plug, we um, we're not there yet. With latin america it's it's not that competitive or crazy. We've been able to focus on, like again, who we are and who we're not. We're not a full dev shop and maybe I'll I'll talk about that for a second we're really a recruiting expert for latin america and there's a big reason why I fundamentally decided to build plug and think about our values around that.

Speaker 2:

If, if you're organized like a dev shop, what does it mean to be a dev shop? It means that you're doing fixed price projects. You know. You ask for a scope and you come back and say, okay, we'll build this for a half a million dollars and I'll have it done in six months. That all sounds great, you know, for a company, but you have no idea what's really happening behind the scenes. You know the two developers that sounded so great. They might never touch your project again, right, and it's all done by, you know, like an army of junior people that are cycling through and who knows if the code is good or not, and you're often dealing with this like massive overhead. Again, you don't really know who's working on the project. You're talking to architects and project managers Sure eight, that's really how they're making money. It's just very it's not. It's not good for the client, and you also have this concept of the bench. So that means that the worst thing that a dev shop can have is somebody who's on their company but not billing.

Speaker 2:

They're just burning a hole in the company's cash, right? So let's say you're an okay Java developer, your project just ended, your company, your dev shop, is dying to get you billing again. A client comes through yeah, you know, we need a Java application bill. Great, take this guy. And it doesn't matter if this guy is going to be good or not. For them Now it's no longer a cost, it's revenue for the company. So I took all those lessons and built Plug around bespoke, on-demand Latin America recruiting.

Speaker 2:

You get what you pay for, and that's a huge principle for us. So you're only working with the developer that you've interviewed and you've hired. They're part of your team. There's no middlemen, there's no architects, there's no project managers, there's no junior person secretly doing the work. You get what you pay for and when that project is over, the project is over. It's not burning a hole in our cash. So therefore, is over, it's not burning a hole in our cash. So therefore, we don't need to overcharge or desperately try to get our hot potato over to your books.

Speaker 2:

So back to your original question. There Seb is operationalizing this. I think we found a really nice niche because we know who we are. We're just looking for senior developers, senior technical talent that want to work with great US companies. We're not dealing with junior guys. We're not dealing with executive search and all this other random stuff. We know exactly who we are and the types of companies that we're going after. We've been entrenched, you know, for a decade. We know all the right people. Our network is really vast. We've worked enough with ones that weren't the right fits either. So our network, I think, is pretty legitimate and we've gone through the 10,000 hours of getting this right so our customers are able to benefit Amazing.

Speaker 1:

Brian, I want to thank you for your time. It's an amazing experience to get you on today. Thank you so much, and I hope our listeners have received a lot of value. You know, if I reflect on this conversation, there are two things that really stood out for me, One of which is know who you are. When you do, you know who you're not and you know that's maybe a point that our listeners want to take away from this conversation to ask themselves who am I in the context of my hiring practice for smaller scale-ups, who are we as a company and who are we looking for? And therefore figuring out who we are not, so that we don't waste time, don't waste our resources and make sure that we get the rights higher.

Speaker 1:

And the second point that stood out for me was this piece around let's try different things as well. You spoke about video 12, 13 years ago. Nowadays, it's kind of like probably the way to go, I wouldn't say the way most companies go about it. I think we're still kind of set in our old ways of just it's weird, because it is such an old principle of here's a text that you can. You can at times, you know, write down whatever you want if you're creative, right.

Speaker 1:

So, let's be honest, but you can't fake things. In a video, right, you? You can see experienced hires or hiring managers. Rather, they see through BS. Right, and try things that are different, don't? You know? Don't hide away from giving a shot, maybe to go out on the streets and put up a booth and situate yourself near a train station or put a coding, you know, I mean, it depends on who you hire, but just, let's be a bit more experiential, let's try new things.

Speaker 1:

You know, the world hasn't grown and evolved because we have been doing the same things over and over again. Definition of insanity I think this also is a point that we may want to think about reinventing. Thank you so much for your time, Brian. It was a pleasure hanging out and have a nice day.

Speaker 2:

Wonderful Thank you.