Hiring Strategies and Talent Arbitrage with Brian Samson, Founder of Plugg Technologies | DoGood Insider

*Seb:** Welcome, listeners! I’m Seb 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 profit, elevating the lives of employees and vendors and the planets we call home. Today’s guest, let’s welcome Brian Samson, founder of Plugg Technologies. With extensive experience in building and scaling teams, Brian has navigated the intricate challenges of aligning company culture, strategic hiring, and leadership. Plugg’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 Brian, how are you?

**Brian:** Pleasure to be here. Thanks so much for the invite, Seb.

**Seb:** Amazing. Good to have you. So, let’s dive right in. 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 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. The companies, founders, HR professionals 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. What was this moment where you thought this just didn’t go right, and what were those lessons learned?

**Brian:** Oh, wow, 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 a good place to start might be my days working for VC-funded tech startups when I lived in San Francisco. Eventually, I was Head of Talent. And a really interesting place would be, I was working with this tech startup, gosh, 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 or 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? 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 a much different place, you might be like the “startup guy” and really interesting, but out there, you hear the phrase “a dime a dozen.”

So I had a friend who was also a startup guy, but his startup was creating video job descriptions. And this was like a brand new concept 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, put it all on film. We tried to make it really authentic, so it’s not overproduced with like jet planes going through and graphics, just the hiring manager on camera. And I learned a lot just about 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, 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, 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? Here’s something else that I had learned: that you really are doing a disservice to your company if you’re trying to be everything to everybody. And yeah, that sounds like, “Okay, whatever, Brian. That’s kind of generic advice.” But you’d be surprised. A company really needs to take a stand. If you’re for these couple things, that means you should be just as easily against these other things. And I’ll even give 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 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, that’s okay. You’re just making 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. Or maybe somebody else is prioritizing speed and aggressiveness. 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 – I was so intrigued by this concept of video job descriptions. So, this company had like a dozen startups as their first clients. I was one of their first ones. And I started to show her all these little videos. And she said something that like…

**Seb:** So, the videos? So, let me just ask, the videos from founders or from the hiring…?

**Brian:** Yeah, in some cases it was the same one. In some early companies, the founder might be the hiring manager.

**Seb:** Right, right. Or maybe the founder makes a quick 30-second cameo. I like that. I’ve seen that before, like years ago, and I’m curious to see how that… how that works or not.

**Brian:** Yeah. So, my wife said something that blew my mind, and it really just hit that nail on the head in the series of videos that I’m showing her, because I’m so excited like, “Watch this! Watch this! This is so much better than reading a job description on Indeed!” And we watched this video of a total prototypical founder, right? Like, he’s this guy with his hoodie, his startup hoodie, an industrial loft office in the background with the ducts and the air ducts, and exposed everything brick. There are like seven other dudes in the background, all look the same, and they’re riding around the office on skateboards in the back while this guy’s telling about the company. And what she said was incredible. She said, “Oh my god, I would never work there.”

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

**Seb:** So, that is so interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing that. I remember, I don’t remember anymore, you know, during my years of being an employee – it sounds like a world ago, a lifetime ago – I think in my time, and I haven’t had heaps and heaps of jobs, but a fair bit. I had, you know, 10 years or so, roughly, of maybe not quite, of employment, like solid employments, you know, 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 it’d be 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? But I had an opportunity, Brian, where I saw the person. I got to feel into this person, if that’s a thing. And it also helps me to be more in sync and comfortable with maybe recording a video myself, with even going on a call. Like, 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 feel like I know Brian,” and you’re like, “I feel like I know Seb,” and that just gives us a totally new dynamic, much more 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 candidates get to be more comfortable, get to be more themselves by having seen the hiring manager prior? Or what were other challenges maybe from the hiring manager that they didn’t want to go on, or they maybe weren’t sure who they are? Talk us through that a little bit.

**Brian:** Yeah. Well, I think there’s no science behind this. This is just my experience. But A/B testing this, like a candidate that is only going off of a written job description 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 all works really well together.

**Seb:** That’s amazing. Let’s talk about Plugg Technologies. Let’s talk about also the wider… 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, 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? Let’s just grab two, three golden nuggets where you feel and think, “This is detail that 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?

**Brian:** Yeah. So, I’ll just give a little background on Plugg for a second, and then maybe I’ll share a broader experience that I’ve had. What Plugg 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. I 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. 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, arbitrage dynamic. So, at Plugg, we happen to be experts in Latin American labor. It’s one thing to be self-served and go on Upwork and try to find somebody. It’s a whole 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.

**Seb:** Yeah, I would love to hear. Yeah, yeah.

**Brian:** This is probably a good 10 years ago. So, I was Head of Recruiting for two different companies, and I think the comparisons are going to be really interesting here. One of those companies is a company that’s now public, called Lending Club. So, I was there during the pre-IPO days, a hot FinTech. And it was really interesting 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 around 19-20 engineers, despite being almost a unicorn valuation, unheard of, right? And I was trying to think, “Okay, we’re kind of struggling to find the right engineers.” 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. It looked like a law office, honestly. You go in and it’s like drab gray cubicles. Everybody in there was probably in their 40s and 50s. And I tried to think, “Okay, how do we make this an advantage?” So, 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 10:00 at night. They want to leave around 5:00 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. Okay. So, I kind of put all this together, and I started to see there was a pattern of not only the ones that work 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. Whether they move forward or not, the ones that aren’t there, that don’t make it that far, there’s probably something missing. So, long story short, I kind of circled this 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. And we spent, instead of spending 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 big giant 10-foot tall coding exercises. It was a big sign with a coding problem on it. And we put these little flyers together as a test.

**Seb:** On the street, you mean?

**Brian:** Yeah. And we put these flyers together like, “Only looking for senior-level talent. Normal business hours, visa sponsorship, competitive salary,” something like that. Just kind of nice and easy, “Apply here to get to Lending Club.” So, we go there, and every eight minutes, a train comes through. Now, the morning was a little challenging because people are on their way to work. They don’t really have time for this.

**Seb:** 4:00 from 4:00 to 7:00? Wow! It was a gold mindset.

**Brian:** Every eight minutes, a big rush of a couple hundred people. You get these 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. And we got so many applications, and it was right in that center thesis that we talked about.

**Seb:** So, was it for Plugg or for a client?

**Brian:** So, this is for this company, Lending Club. Just something for your audience: as you start to do pattern matching within your own company and candidates that go really far, you try to find an alternative way to recruit. Now, I took this same lesson to another startup that I worked at, which was eventually bought by Postmates, and then Postmates was bought by Uber. So, it was a 40-person, hip, little startup. Everybody there was 23 years old and stayed till midnight playing video games at the office. So, could I take some of these lessons to…? Well, what I did is we found a food festival, like a food and beer festival, made our own little coding puzzle. And, you know, same thing happened, but it was that right group of crowd. This is the kind of company where, you know, 9:00 on a Tuesday, your co-workers become your best friends. And that’s 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 worked like a charm. So, 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, “Where are my…?” And by the way, for a company, future employees were probably users too of the product. So, we went to where a user of a product might be. We went to where future employees would be, get offline. It 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. And then people kind of self-select in. Someone that worked at Lending Club has nothing in common with somebody that worked at Postmates and vice versa. 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.

**Seb:** That is so interesting. Thank you for sharing that, Brian. This notion, I almost feel that it’s kind of this default, this total default, that we say, “Of course we hire online, right? 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 our podcast here? Like, we have the workflows, we have the processes of knowing how to go about the hiring process online. We have seen success. 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. Have you operationalized this within Plugg? What is your recommendation for companies that are really trying to test this out? What are next steps? How do you even come up with the idea of where to position yourself knowing who you are and where your market hangs out?

**Brian:** Yeah. So, I think it’s still, as Ronald Reagan used to say, “It’s morning in America.” I think it’s still morning in nearshore in Latin America. So, you think about the books, like the early adopters and late adopters, the middle right here. I think we’re still very, very early for nearshore. So, as a result, we don’t have to do anything fundamentally crazy. We’re already in the early adopter, early mover frontier. We’re already deep into 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? But it’s to our advantage because they just don’t know enough about it. They’re not recruiting there aggressively. 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. But if that’s a bring-your-own-device type of thing, then it’s an amazing place. If you’re more concerned about cost than anything, and cost and English language are the most important things, I would steer you towards Nicaragua in Central America. If you want to have everybody in one country, and then one specific city, a place like Monterey, 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.

**Seb:** Yeah, it seems like Plugg 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. Coming from Germany, for us, it’s like you’re kind of running with this thing just over our shoulders, just like, “Where do I go now?” Not in Europe, of course. But if a company has rigorous processes right now, and doesn’t want to use Plugg as a service, which is totally fine as well. What are those, you know, stacks? What are those different methods of hiring that you just mentioned around having a booth outside the school, outside the train station? Again, they don’t have the refined processes to even understand how to go about it because their 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 inside Plugg? 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 Plugg related right now, but in general, what’s your recommendation in terms of other hiring strategies, places but online?

**Brian:** I think there are two lessons here. The first is, what did Warren Buffett always say? “When there’s blood on the streets, buy.” And when everything looks like rates, just heights, or when your taxi driver is giving you stock tips, it’s time to sell. So, there’s some analogy there: if your labor market is so overheated, you probably need something different, like a different way to attract talent, a different way to source talent. With Plugg, we’re not there yet with Latin America. It’s not that competitive or crazy. We’ve been able to focus on, again, who we are and who we’re not. We’re not a full dev shop. And maybe 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 Plugg and think about our values around that. 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 ask for a scope and you come back and say, “Okay, we’ll build this for half a million dollars and it’ll have it done in six months.” That all sounds great for a company, but you have no idea what’s really happening behind the scenes. The two developers that sounded so great, they might never touch your project again. And it’s all done by 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 massive overhead. Again, you don’t really know who’s working on the project. You’re talking to architects and project managers and all these people that are kind of in the middle. And that dev shop is really making money because the more junior people they can put on and charge a senior rate, that’s really how they’re making money. 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. They’re just burning a hole in the company’s cash. 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, we need a Java application built.” 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 Plugg around bespoke, on-demand Latin America recruiting. 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 are no middlemen, there are no architects, there are 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. Stop 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.

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 for a decade. We knew 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 from that.

**Seb:** Amazing, Brian. I want to thank you for your time. Amazing experience getting you on today. Thank you so much, and I hope our listeners have received a lot of value. If I reflect on this conversation, there are two things that really stood out for me. One of which is, “Know who you are, and when you do, you know who you’re not.” And 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 right hire. And the second point that stood out for me was this piece around, “Let’s try different things as well.” You spoke about video, you know, 12, 13 years ago. Nowadays, it’s kind of 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, at times, write down whatever you want if you’re creative,” right? Let’s be honest. But you can’t fake things in a video, right? You can see experienced hirers, or hiring managers rather, that see through BS. And try things that are different. 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… I mean, it depends on who you hire. But just let’s be a bit more experiential. Let’s try new things. The world hasn’t grown and evolved because we have been doing the same things over and over again, right? Definition of insanity. I think this also is a point that we may want to think about reinventing. So, thank you so much for your time, Brian. It was a pleasure hanging out, and have a nice day. Wonderful.