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Hiring Without Borders: Mastering the Global Tech Talent Hunt
63 Plays13 days ago
In this episode of Marketing Spark, Mark Evans talks to MagicPace's Nick D'Urbano about his expertise on navigating the challenges and opportunities of helping hiring international technology talent.
From identifying the best markets for recruitment to overcoming legal and cultural hurdles, Nick provides actionable insights for businesses looking to build diverse, high-performing teams across borders.
You'll also hear real-world examples, common mistakes to avoid, and strategies to position your company as a top choice for global talent.
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Transcript
Introduction: Strategies for B2B SaaS Growth
00:00:10
Speaker
Welcome to Marketing Spark, the podcast where we dive into the strategies, stories and insights that help B2B SaaS leaders and entrepreneurs drive growth.
Challenges in Tech Team Building
00:00:20
Speaker
Fast growing technology companies face unique challenges when building and scaling their teams.
00:00:26
Speaker
The demand for specialized skills is higher than ever, while competition for top talent continues to intensify in local markets. In response, businesses are increasingly exploring different and innovative approaches to discover and source talent, including leveraging international outsourcing as a key part of their strategy.
00:00:48
Speaker
Today, I'm joined by Nick Durbano from Magic Pace, a company dedicated to helping technology businesses overcome these challenges by providing outsourced talent solutions. Nick has a ton of experience in team formation and scaling strategies that enable companies to stay agile, competitive, and efficient.
Interview with Nick Durbano: Team Formation Strategies
00:01:06
Speaker
Welcome to Marketing Spark, Nick. Thanks, Mark. Looking forward to being here.
00:01:10
Speaker
Can you share Magic Pace's story and what inspired you to focus on helping technology companies with staff? You've got a very interesting background that wasn't always ah HR focus. I would say I'm still not HR focus to some extent. Really, the the impetus for Magic Pace came because my co-founder and I run a B2B SaaS business. and Ultimately, we were hiring engineers, we were hiring SDRs, we were hiring folks in CX.
00:01:37
Speaker
And particularly with technology roles engineers in particular that's always a ah hot commodity and always hard to find exceptional talent we were remote first so we're looking at hiring folks across canada and then hiring folks in the us.
00:01:51
Speaker
And at some point we looked at ourselves and said, why not make the globe our our total addressable market here for talent and started experimenting with headhunters and ultimately magic pace came out of a need for us to find better talent at a better price.
Magic Pace's Outsourcing Model
00:02:05
Speaker
We ended up using one recruiter in Southeast Asia so much so that we effectively acquired the business.
00:02:12
Speaker
and spun out a separate agency project and rebranded it Magic Pace. So this project is pretty much a, it's like I've seen the light and I wanted to not only continue to hire exceptional folks from around the globe, but I wanted to make it available for our approach. It's quite unique having, you know, used a bunch of different services over the years. So that's at at a very high level the the story of of Magic Pace.
00:02:36
Speaker
It's a classic. You had a problem. You were trying to solve it. You looked at different approaches and discovered this approach and this particular staffing person and recognized that there was a huge opportunity here for you to step into the space. But international outsourcing has been around for a long time, whether it's the eastern europe or south america or the philippines outsourcing is a reality for many companies but how is magic pace taking a different approach to international outsourcing and what are some of the grid or the obstacles of the problems that you're attempting to solve that other companies are doing right now. In terms of what we're trying to solve we wanted to build the most founder friendly.
00:03:19
Speaker
recruiting shop on the market. And I think we've accomplished that. And I'll paint the picture of the market today. Because you're right, outsourcing has been around for a long time. If you were to go out and say, hey I need to hire someone, I need to hire a Dev in Asia or in Latin America, there are no shortage of options. you can There are websites that allow you to collect talent. Oftentimes, those organizations either have a talent pool or they're a marketplace solution, ah like top towel, etc. You will pay a premium for that talent. You're effectively getting embedded talent, and the organization is marking up that talent.
00:03:50
Speaker
appropriately so you're not getting the talent at cost you're getting them at a mark up so you might get a slight discount to usd or canadian employees but often not a steep then there are your kind of traditional placement agencies like the bear's devs of the world no often work with.
00:04:05
Speaker
Larger organizations because replacing teams replacing three four engineers at a time they won't do like a one off mandate is too small for them so really there are a handful of like boutique. Placement agencies if you fall into that bucket really what you're looking at is an organization that is. Effectively setting up a bunch of mouse traps on the internet to get a bunch of folks who are applying for job so you know you might get some interesting candidates applying.
00:04:30
Speaker
but it's certainly not ah active or an offensive approach to recruiting talent so what we thought was was missing in the market which is why we were so enamored with magic pace was. Ultimately the way that we recruit is actually taking like a head hunting approach to the business models if you're gonna go out and hire a CEO what do you do you.
00:04:48
Speaker
hire an organization, they come in, they understand your needs, and they go out and they solicit folks who are already working at jobs, and they bring them into the interview process. They're not just taking the CEO who's been fired for six months and who's waiting for their next opportunity. They're going out and saying, who is the best person that I can convert into this role, whether they are open to work whether they are already within a job or already working for an organization, how do I convince them that this is a better opportunity? How do I sell them on this organization and this role? That's ultimately what MagicPace does. So we not only take folks who are applying into roles and create those mouse traps, we go one step deeper.
Addressing Outsourcing Misconceptions
00:05:25
Speaker
We convert folks who fit the role perfectly that might already be worked for an organization and bring them in. The output of that is we have
00:05:32
Speaker
a much better hit rate and much better quality talent coming into our pipes as a result result. A lot of B2B SaaS leaders, HR leaders, CEOs, probably fall into a few buckets when it comes to outsourcing international talent. One is it's not anything they've considered they want to hire local. They want people that they can interact on a regular basis. Two is that they've had some experience with outsourcing international talent and it hasn't worked out because of inconsistent quality of work, the differences in time zones, communication difficulties, and ultimately it's been a sour experience. From a marketing perspective, how does Magic Pace address people who have been disappointed with outsourcing?
00:06:19
Speaker
and people who don't understand the dynamics, the economics, the benefits of sourcing international talent. The economics and the benefits are are like the easiest thing to overcome because I show you the rate and that's what you pay. Oftentimes it's 60 to 80% less than what you would otherwise pay in North America. That's an easy one to solve for.
00:06:39
Speaker
In terms of having been burned from the past or or not having good experiences, our whole approach is about de-risking the process for both parties. Especially when I'm going to go convince someone who's going to leave a cushy job and come and work for a different company, we want to make sure that is de-risked as much as possible. so Ultimately, it comes down to putting the right processes in place. One, we have a guarantee of 90 days. If, as an organization, you hire someone and they're not the right fit, it's culturally, whatever the case may be, we'll go out and we'll start the process over free of charge and and find you someone better. So that's the first thing, and that de-risks and takes a lot of stress out of the equation. Now, the second piece is assessments. we
00:07:15
Speaker
force all of our clients to deliver assessments to the folks before before they before they hire them. Obviously, with technical challenges, live coding challenges, or take-home assessments, that that's one piece. But for slightly less technical roles or where there's different EQ skills that need to be assessed here, whether it's attention to detail, communication skills, whatever the case may be, we have suggested assessments that folks can deliver. But that is an absolutely critical part of the assessment period. Not only are we assessing the candidates on their soft skills and their hard skills, but when we present them to the client, it's critical that they have their own very deep assessment that they're initiating as well. We helped structure that and and and ensure that's part of the of the process. Those two things tend to de-risk the hiring process quite a bit. We do other things too, which are a little bit more tactical. When we present a candidate,
00:08:07
Speaker
not only do we screen them but we we share a quick three minute video of them presenting themselves cuz you can get a lot of information from that first interaction house or communication house or professionalism etc if we send you five people you might say the first four were great but i'm not gonna waste an hour of my time even interviewing the last one.
00:08:23
Speaker
ah because i just I'm not not getting good a good feeling about it. So we try to de-risk and actually it's actually like a negative conversion process. We want the conversion rates to go down. We want you to say no. We want to find that perfect fit. It's our job to help you create a funnel that allows you to do that.
00:08:38
Speaker
To be clear, companies are hiring full-time employees, or is it contract, or is it part-time? Both. Ultimately, we have clients who are hiring full-time evergreen employees or contractors. Our job is to place them. How you hire them, whether it's a full-time equivalent contractor, whether you're using ah an an EOR-like deal to get them set up with your organization as an employee, that's up to you.
00:09:00
Speaker
but Most of our clients, I would say, are hiring them on a full-time or full-time equivalent basis. We do have what we call our embed option as well, where if you're looking for someone who's working 30 hours a week for nine months on a specific managed service project or contract, we can go out and we'll actually hire them and subcontract them out for you. We have some different models to accommodate contracting type work. We have a few different levers that we can pull to accommodate. But on the aggregate, it's either full-time or full-time equivalent contract-based work for a set period of time that we're optimizing for.
Impact of Remote Work on Hiring
00:09:32
Speaker
I'm curious about the type of support that you might offer to companies that have never used international talent before, whether on a contract or full-time basis. Obviously, there's a different dynamic when
00:09:46
Speaker
You're working with somebody who's not a few hours away, but many hours away. They've got a different operating style, different culture, even different ways of of being compensated. What kind of strategic or tactical guidance does Magic Pace provide to these type of companies? If you don't do it yourself,
00:10:05
Speaker
Do you have partners who will help companies navigate this new international outsourcing model? I would say if you've not outsourced before, you haven't hired folks outside of your country, um but you have you are a remote organization. So you are working with remote employees. I would say the impact is very minimal in terms of from an operational standpoint. And I'll give you i'll give you a couple of examples. If you tell me, hey, Nick, I need someone who overlaps with me 100% of the time.
00:10:33
Speaker
right Now, I'll go find you someone either in Southeast Asia or Latin America that fits all of your criteria that overlaps with you 100% of the time. They're either going to be working late in the evening and early in the morning, or if they're in Latin America, they might be in the same time zone as you. I would actually posit that there's no difference if you're a remote company or a company that's used to remote work between hiring someone in a different state or hiring someone in a different country if that is your modality. Now, notwithstanding cultural differences, which we can double click on,
00:11:01
Speaker
from a nuts and bolts operational day-to-day operation, there's nothing really different about that. If it's your first time hiring remote, that's a different conversation. There are different challenges to overcome there and different learning curves. But if you're a remote business, most of the companies that we deal with already have remote employees. And I think the impetus to hire internationally is, okay, what's the difference between me going state to the state next door, or the province next door, or me going to a country somewhere else that there really operationally isn't that much of a difference?
Magic Pace's Role in Early-Stage Scaling
00:11:29
Speaker
I guess that the rise of remote work has really eliminated some of the misconceptions, the obstacles, the hesitancy around hiring international talent because what does it matter if they're an hour away or 15 hours away? As long as they do the work, that's all that you care about. One of the questions we get the most is, I need someone to work. The hour piece is a real blocker for a lot of folks. Ultimately,
00:11:52
Speaker
If you're working with a good recruiter, or you're working with a good organization, they should be a place talent for you that fits your needs. If you need someone who works, EST, or who overlaps 80% with EST, that shouldn't be an issue. That shouldn't be the reason you don't do it. A lot of the candidates in these markets, they are business process outsourcing markets. There 80% of the people like work in the night, but it's like though their whole economy is predicated on US organizations hiring them Accenture has big offices. Deloitte has big offices. All these big Fortune 500 companies are using these talents across different capabilities internationally. There's there's a huge talent pool. It's used to working for American organizations used to working American hours. And so it's it's it's less of an issue than than than you might think.
00:12:35
Speaker
When you look at the magic pace customer portfolio and other common threads in terms of the hiring needs or the type of companies that you're serving, is there a stage in which they'll turn to international talent? Maybe they're looking to scale or looking to turn an idea into a product they want to do in a cost efficient way. If you looked at your customers, do they fall into specific buckets?
00:13:03
Speaker
I would say eighty to ninety percent of them are either speak in venture capital terms here but bootstrap companies also very much take advantage of these but if you're in like the c to series a stage of your business life cycle that means you already have product market fit you're approaching or surpass a million dollars in revenue for your software business i think at that point you have a core technology team or a strong cto in place you understand what you're doing Once that rinse and repeat model has been executed and you need folks to come in and plug gaps and and help scale, I think that's really where these types of services become really valuable. It allows you to do a few different things. One, you can hire more people so you can go faster, or you can hire the same amount of people for less and increase your runway and reallocate capital. As a CEO or as an operator, you're always making these resource allocation decisions. You'd be remiss if you don't think about your team structure and how you're organizing your workforce as probably the most important input into that decision matrix, whether it's productivity, cost savings, or or just about going faster. Ultimately, those are all reasons to implement a solution like this.
00:14:11
Speaker
What we're not saying, Mark, is you're going to go out and save money by get worse talent, or you're going to go and become more efficient, but the efficiency per person is going to go down. So we're just throwing more humans at the problem. Let's talk economics in terms of the talent that you're bringing to the table. Obviously, there's this perception that international talent is less expensive, dramatically less expensive, which is a lure of not hiring someone locally or even regionally.
00:14:39
Speaker
walk me through the economics that magic pace can deliver to customers. How much money can they save percentage wise? How quick is ah ROI? What's the success rate in terms of hiring people to see the cost benefit at some point as you hire international candidates, says that is that gap starting to shrink as international talent realizes that they're worth a lot more? There are pockets, geography, where the rates have gone up significantly. Brazil, for instance, you could still find great talent at a reasonable price, but it started to get closer and closer to US rates as more and more folks are taking advantage of that geography. I'll give you a couple of examples, some non-technical examples and a technical example.
00:15:21
Speaker
On the non-technical side, if you were hiring an executive assistant and or a marketing coordinator or someone in a customer service capacity, you can get someone who is senior, who has worked for seven to 10 years for big organizations, a reputable organizations, whether it's a service titan on the startup side, or whether it's an IBM or a Sony on a Fortune 500 side, someone who's cut their teeth, is educated, speaks English really well, works the ST hours for maybe 1500 US a month.
00:15:48
Speaker
So we're we're talking about twenty thousand less than $20,000 a year US s for a full-time equivalent hire. There's a range of folks that would fit into that bucket. And i'm I'm speaking specifically about Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia maybe represents a 60 to 80% discount.
00:16:03
Speaker
to North America and Latin America might represent like a 40 to 60% discount to North America as a very high ah rule of thumb. On the technical side, the rates are more expensive, obviously, but um still significantly less than what you would pay in the US or Canada. I think are a superstar senior or staff engineer here, full stack, like a Golang developer, whatever the case may be. um and You might be paying $120,000 to $160,000 a year here, Canada or USD, depending on coastal city, non coastal city, etc. That's just like the base pay when you start factoring in overhead, insurance, equity bonuses, like whatever the case may be that 150 very easily hits 200 200 plus on a fully fleshed out basis.
00:16:48
Speaker
In Southeast Asia, if we go back to those same markets, we can find someone who's got similar capability and experience for, and again, it ranges, but anywhere from 2,500 to 3,500 a month, full-time equivalents. We're talking $40,000, $50,000 a year here versus 100. So again, talking about like a 75% drop in cost as a result of that
Global Recruitment Strategy Focus
00:17:11
Speaker
decision. So the cost savings are very real.
00:17:13
Speaker
and can be felt immediately. On the question of like, all right, what am I getting 75% of the talent but for 75% of the cost? I would say you're getting probably the same amount of talent for the 75% of the cost. One example, we placed a ah data analyst in in New York for a client. And these individuals from the Philippines, they had all the tech stack under their belt. They worked for a couple of years with McKinsey Consulting in their business intelligence lab.
00:17:41
Speaker
and then spent a couple of years at Netflix in their data science teams. We're talking about a very prestigious set of experiences where, I don't know, that candidate in the US is probably like commanding a quarter million dollar base point. That's a very hot commodity. Yes, he was commanding a premium, but it was like 4,000 a month instead of 3,500 a month. So, ultimately, still a wild ROI relative to talent and relative to skill set and experience. Those are the types of arbitrage opportunities that you can get with with the right with the right recruiter and the right strategy.
00:18:11
Speaker
I think of the shoe industry, which bounced around a lot in the early days, started off maybe in Taiwan or China, moved to Vietnam, moved to Bangladesh as companies looked for low cost places to do manufacturing. From your perspective, when you look at the global international marketplace,
00:18:32
Speaker
Are there new and emerging places where talent can be arbitraged successfully? Places like Armenia or some of the South American countries, what are the new low-cost hotspots where where you can find really good talent? It's a good question today. The question is everywhere. like Good talent is borderless. You might have an Armenian who's living in Estonia. you might have so I think geography is like a a construct that is actually very limiting.
00:19:00
Speaker
when you're doing recruitment. Because LinkedIn has made it possible that the globe is your voice the globe is your recruitment channel. What we're looking for is skill sets, not geographies. I'm looking for skill relative to price, relative to availability, relative relative to all these other data inputs for us. And this is why I think working on an offensive basis is better than a passive basis where you're just saying, hey, let me recruit, let me put a job posting in India and see what happens. Let me use this organization that has a big talent pool in Argentina.
00:19:27
Speaker
Ultimately, you might find someone great in Argentina. We're going to go out and we're going to find you the right person that hits all these different criteria, irrespective of where they come from, as long as they meet your needs. Ultimately, that's the answer, not answer to your question. Ultimately, I can give you some generalizations around. Yes, there's obviously a ton of developers in India and there's a ton of CX folks in Philippines and there are pockets where The bpo market is like specialized or a lot of big organizations as a lot of talent being strewn together within a specific geography i wouldn't say that is limiting in any way shape or former that's how we should focus our search for companies that are just starting to explore the idea of.
00:20:06
Speaker
looking at hiring international talent what are some of the best first steps to ensure success and making sure they hire the right people i really feel like within this market you need a sherpa you need someone who's guiding you through the wilderness here.
00:20:21
Speaker
In one respect, like you need to understand the market, you need to understand what geographies are best suited, how to approach the search, what you should expect from a compensation standpoint. In a lot of cases, these folks are are very familiar with English, but having the ability to recruit on the ground and speak their native language will especially if you're looking to convert someone into a a new role, like that's also a very important piece. So I'm obviously incredibly biased, but I think like hiring support is incredibly helpful. Finding the right organization, and look, it it could be a magic pace, it could be a different type of recruiter, it could be like an online platform. All of them have different pros and cons. You need to weigh but you need to weigh them and and do some research. But ultimately, finding an organization that you have faith and trust in, I think is really important.
00:21:04
Speaker
I would not recommend folks go out and try to do it themselves. You might get lucky. You might find someone fantastic. Someone might just fall on your lap. like A unicorn employee who costs 80% less is super qualified and you have a great experience. But I think that's very much an exception and not the rule. and That's why a lot of people have really bad experiences. is like They tried it or like their Uncle Jim suggested someone that they heard of. And when you don't have a strategy to attack the problem,
00:21:29
Speaker
It's unlikely you're going to get a really great outcome from that so i think part of it is really just having the right support system to go out and and execute the search appropriately. And then the second thing i would say is making sure you have a really good screening process making sure you really understand what the role that you're looking for is and what's important it's amazing to me that when we talk to clients.
00:21:51
Speaker
It's like peeling an onion. Maybe they say they need something and as you start rolling it back, actually, this seems to be more important, but you didn't really mention this. Really going two or three layers deeper to understand what's actually important, what makes this rule successful. And especially with software companies, I think we're like always very quick to make decisions. and go, everything needs to be done yesterday. Take a pause moment, really reflect on what you need to get out of this role. Because if you understand that, you understand how to screen, you understand what to optimize for, that's going to give you a better outcome. You don't need to do this process again, once and
Trends in Profitability and Efficiency
00:22:24
Speaker
delay yourself. Those are two frameworks that I think are incredibly valuable.
00:22:27
Speaker
but Final question would be, as you look into your crystal ball at 2025, what are some of the most interesting trends that you see around the recruitment of international talent? I'm seeing a lot of companies that are now I'm not saying shunning the venture flywheel or the the hamster wheel. but Over the past few years, we have overcorrected on the free money, cheap money, going super fast on the venture side. to hey Now we need to start thinking about profitability. Ultimately, what I'm also seeing is a lot of new entrepreneurs saying, hey, you know what? I'm actually going to finance this business with revenue. I'm actually going to use AI and agents to build something you know really efficient. and I think that's a great thing. If you could find a way to build more companies,
00:23:12
Speaker
and require less capital and finance those with actual revenues. It's a really beautiful thing. I think that helps create more projects, more competition, better prices, better outcomes for consumers. And ultimately, part of that equation is finding the right kind of talent. So if you're going to hire 10 people, ah you have more money to hire really great talent locally, and maybe a few folks that are going to be supporting internationally and plus AI, and all of a sudden the team that could that needed to be 30, 40 people and cost many millions of dollars a month can now be done with a team of six or seven, three people in North America, two people internationally, and some AI and some co pilots and boom, you have the productivity of a 30 person
Conclusion & Connecting with Magic Pace
00:23:51
Speaker
team. ah That's to me, what's really exciting and and how kind of our business model fits into the future. Final question, where can people learn more about you and magic pace? Yeah, magic pace.com. There's a form you guys can book a meeting have a call with with someone from our team and we'll be happy to support answer any questions.
00:24:07
Speaker
Thanks, Nick, and thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, rate it, subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. If you're a B2B SaaS company with a million to $10 million dollars in revenue and you're looking for traction and to scale, we should talk about how I can help you as a fractional CMO and strategic advisor. You can reach out to me by email, mark at markevans.ca. Connect with me on LinkedIn or visit marketingspark.co. I'll talk to you soon.