Brian Samson on Real LATAM Hiring Stories: Salesforce, QA & Data Talent in Brazil & Mexico

Brian Samson (00:01.15)
Welcome everyone to another episode of the Nearshore Cafe podcast. I’m your host Brian Sampson and I have done a lot of Nearshore hiring Latin America placements over the years and I want to tell you some real stories today about these hires, these placements, types of companies, types of candidates, how they all came together.

real stories from the ground. Before I do that, let me thank our sponsor, Plugg Technologies, PLUGG.Tech, great way to connect talent from all over Latin America with US companies. Today, I wanna tell stories from the recruiting front lines and one of our top senior recruiters, Zeomara Santana, she goes by Zeo.

has some really interesting stories that I wanna share for you. So the first story takes us to Brazil. We had a global client and this company was looking for a really senior project manager and it had to be based in Brazil. So Zio found someone who

had been a full-time employee for years and years. And if you know anything about Latin America and there’s certain countries that this especially speaks to, Brazil is one of them, where being a full-time employee means loads of benefits, healthcare, PTO. I think in some cases, it’s like a month of paid time off. So very nice perks for employees.

but the salaries don’t always match up with that. They don’t always correlate. So often it’s like low to medium salaries compared to the market, but really nice benefits. And in this case, we had a candidate named Anna who wanted to flip-flop that and optimize for compensation, cash salary, get paid in USD.

Brian Samson (02:26.546)
And you know, at this stage in her life, she wasn’t so concerned about all the benefits and perks. So Zio really built some nice trust with this person. She had a lot of great seniority as a senior project manager in the IT space and found out that it was really cash compensation that mattered. We put an offer together for this large global company that was operating in Brazil.

and just the right offer and Zio helped to close it. And months and months later, we have a very successful placement and the company, the client got what they needed from a talent’s perspective. And the candidate, Anna, is thrilled to be optimizing for what she’s looking for at this stage in her career. The next one I want to talk about is a QA role.

And in this case, this is a candidate we have placed twice. Zio has placed twice. One time it was for a large nonprofit that needed some QA work for an IT project. And that one wrapped up about a year after the kickoff. They got done everything they needed to get done. Candidate had wonderful references.

but we didn’t have a project ready to go immediately to place this candidate on for the next one. So Zio and this candidate named Alec stayed in touch. Alec is based in Mexico and they just kept building this relationship and few months later Alec happened to be available and Zio had a perfect fit, another QA role.

that was with a health tech company. And she immediately thought of Alec. Alec was so happy to hear from Zeo as they had stayed in touch, became really friendly. And it was super easy. We have wonderful references and this person had obviously worked for Plugg. So Zeo put it together.

Brian Samson (04:47.838)
And Alec is happy again at yet another project with plug.

The next one takes us to the tech startup world. And if you know anything about tech startups, there’s a mindset of hire slow, fire fast. And in many cases, the hiring bar is absolutely critical. Hard, complicated hiring bars seems like no one is ever good enough. And I used to be ahead of talent for a lot of tech startups.

And this is just another case of the hiring manager had a very clear idea of what they wanted, but it was so hard to find what they were looking for. Zio happened to find somebody based in Guadalajara, which is a big tech hub in Mexico. And this person named Gerardo happened to have this special mix of

great communication skills and not just English, but how to communicate clearly what they’re working on, KPIs, deliverables, timelines, process, all that. They happen to have that startup mindset of being scrappy, figuring stuff out and had all that special domain skill. They were a data analyst.

And wow, these roles are tough to find today. Data engineers, data analysts with this big AI boom. And Zio found this great candidate who had everything. And the startup a year later is still ecstatic and thrilled with this candidate. They really are making a difference, a high impact in an early stage small startup.

Brian Samson (06:48.866)
The next one, going back to the leadership world, Zio had a really tough role to fill. This is not only a Salesforce developer, but a lead at that. And finding a player coach in the tech world is difficult. Somebody who has great communication skills, the authority and respect to

run and lead teams, lead projects, and all the domain skills because people wanna work for others that know what they’re talking about. And Zio happened to find a woman named Brenda who has been just an incredible git. Brenda has strong leadership skills. She understands that respect goes both ways.

And Mexico, like a lot of places in the world, when it comes to technical candidates, the majority are men and Brenda knows how to navigate that environment and not only navigate it, but do it exceptionally well. So this client has been happy with Brenda for many, many months and Brenda’s built and retained a really fantastic team.

The next story that I want to talk about has to do with also Salesforce, but this time it’s QA and Salesforce admin type of candidates. And in this case, due to a existing relationship that Zio had, Zio was able to make not one, not two, not three, but four placements of brand new candidates.

and they happened to be candidates that were referrals from a prior placement. So we uncovered a need. This health tech company needed a whole team of Salesforce admin QA types. Zio, due to her relationship, learned more about it, scoped it out, and was able to…

Brian Samson (09:12.174)
put a whole team in place and that is rare. Companies often hire one at a time and Zio just found four standout people that were validated, vetted, referred from somebody that was highly trusted. And just to note, we can talk about LinkedIn all day, but referrals of great candidates that may or may not even be on LinkedIn.

can sometimes make or break a company. And you get referrals by treating your candidates like gold and continue to treat them like gold. So kudos to the Plugg team, the operations team and Zio for building and maintaining these fantastic relationships.

And the last one that I want to talk about was a late stage tech company that had a complicated tech stack. This is a FinTech company that had raised boatloads of capital. But FinTech is a highly regulated, highly complex space to make hires in. And they didn’t have an overly arduous interview process.

It wasn’t multiple, multiple steps forever. It was relatively quick, but we still needed to find candidates that met this excruciatingly difficult hiring bar for a very neat skill set. And this skill set happened to be closure with a lot of other technical aspects of the role. Very difficult candidate to find.

but Zio pushed hard. She really picked up her sourcing game. And this isn’t a case of let’s find hundreds of people, because number one, they didn’t exist. This is very much a sniper search where Zio bear down and found just a couple people that met the skill set. One of them was an engineer in Brazil named Kawe.

Brian Samson (11:27.346)
And he’s been a standout, know, fit that really hard, complicated hiring bar and in a, difficult environment to thrive, a regulated FinTech, small engineering team of top performers. This guy has stood out and he’s been a really amazing addition to the team. And this FinTech is very happy.

and using him as a model for other niche developers that they’re looking for to build the company. So hopefully you got some value out of this that these are real hiring stories with real candidates from the front lines doing Latin America recruiting. Big thanks to Zio for

finding all these amazing candidates. And by the way, these were just a small sample size. Zio made 39 hires in 2025, and many of them just like this story. So if you need software developers, QA, AI, data engineers, really niche roles, Salesforce, Zio and the rest of the plug recruiting team has your back.

and you can reach them at plugplugg.tech if you have a need and hopefully they’ll be able to turn your need into another successful hiring story. This is the Nearshore Cafe podcast. I’m your host, Brian Sampson. And again, plugplugg.tech is our sponsor and a great way to connect top talent.

from Latin America to US companies like yours. Thanks for listening and we will see you next time.