WORTH WATCHING:
Hire the Talent You Cannot Afford
The Advantage · Mike Wystrach × Leandro Cabrini · ~57 min
When we announced Proppel as our first sponsor, I got inundated with questions about hiring offshore. Rather than answer them one at a time, I put Leandro Cabrini, Proppel's founder and CEO, on the mic. If you have ever thought about hiring outside the US and did not know where to start, this is the episode. What to hire for, what it costs, where it breaks, and how to keep the person once you have them. Leandro also has a great founder story, and he tells it in here, which is worth the listen on its own.
WHAT I LOVED ABOUT IT:
Start with the reframe. Offshore hiring gets sold as a cost play, and the savings are real, but that is not why I have done it. Between Freshly and Petfolk we have hired somewhere around 700 people outside the US, in Belarus, Poland, the Philippines, South Africa, and Latin America. In Belarus, our budget for a mid-tier US engineer bought the person who would have cost 400K in the States. We were not trying to spend less. We were trying to get someone in the room we could not otherwise afford. Leandro adds the part I had not put words to. The savings also buy you time. If the math lets you hire three months earlier than you planned, you bought back three months of your own attention.
Where this goes wrong is almost always the job itself. Leandro will not take a role that asks for one person who edits video, manages a calendar, and runs projects, because that person does not exist. This is the generalist to specialist moment in a company. Early on you need people who connect everything, and I have never been able to hire that well remotely. Once the work is specific enough to name, an editor, a designer, a creative strategist, offshore starts to work.
The other two failure points are time zone and onboarding. The Advantage is a two-person show right now, so our processes are thin, which made time zone non-negotiable for us. LATAM buys you the same working hours, the same Slack, the same Zoom. And anybody can find a good CV. You lose the good ones in the first ninety days, when there is no manager, no SOP, and no plan for them.
On that founder story. He was running a performance marketing agency in London, hired in Latin America for himself, and his own clients asked him to do it for them. Three months in, the side project was bigger than the agency, so he built the firm he wished he had as an operator.
THE LINE THAT STUCK
"You're not going to get a video editor who can also manage your calendar."
MY 20-SECOND RECAP
if you do not have the full 57 minutes
→Write the task list before the job description. Not the title, the tasks. What does this person do on a Tuesday? That list tells you whether you are hiring an editor, a project manager, or two people.
→Know the rate before you make the offer. Creative strategist is the fastest growing request Proppel gets. In the US that is roughly 100 to 150K base. In LATAM they are seeing 6 to 8K a month. Same role, and that gap is the entire argument.
→Buy the overlap while you are early. Our Belarus engineers worked until midnight to sit on our clock. If your SOPs are thin, same time zone is the cheat code, and it is the best reason to start with LATAM.
→Run a test project on every creative hire. Give the finalists a real brief with real raw footage. That tells you more than three interviews will.
→Treat them like the team, because they are. This is not Upwork. Same onboarding, same standup, same PTO conversation. The real cost of hiring is having to hire again.
PRO MOVE
Open a doc and write out every task you want this hire doing in a normal week. If the list needs two people, you just avoided a failed hire. If it names one specific job, you are ready to go looking.
