How do you hire good employees in Latin America?

I'm asking the question about how to hire well in Latin America because of Red Hat's success in Latin America, as well as my own company's download rates and incoming leads from Latin America, but it could very well be generalized to, "How do you hire employees in areas where your company has no physical presence?"

I don't know. For months I've been meaning to hire a pre-sales engineer/consultant down in Brazil or Argentina, but I haven't the first clue as to how to find someone capable of working alone so far from the rest of the company's operations. If I wanted to do near-shore open-source development, I'd look at North-by-South, but I'm looking for full-time employees here.

In the US, Alfresco is widely distributed, but we all live in the same country. (Well, some of us live in Utah, some in Texas, and some in California, but theoretically they're the same country. :-)

We have people scattered throughout (Western) Europe, too. But this is different.

Anyone have a good experience hiring in a country far from most of your company's operations? Perhaps more particularly, anyone know if there are "gotchas" (tax laws, etc.) to hiring in Latin America, particularly Brazil and Argentina?

[royrubin]

Matt - We've had great success in Argentina and the talent is phenomenal. In fact, a couple of our key employees early on were based in Buenos Aires. It isn't easy though - with each success there are some failures but persistence pays (at least for us it did). We do have people scattered throughout the world and the AR folks were no different. The timezones are more comfortable than other parts of the world and the communication was flawless. They were (are) as part of the team as anyone else.

Buenos Aires is an incredible city and I loved the excuse to hop down and meet with the team.

Roy

[mcarpen]

Why dont you try asking Global Projects Resources, LLC?http://www.globalprojectresources.com/index.html

I just found about this company today! They give you advice on how to manage across borders and how to break down cultural/language barriers etc. I'm sure they the advice you are looking for, and if not, they know where to direct you.

[pablonhess]

Well, I live in Sao Paulo, Brazil and I know some people very capable of doing what you described.
Regarding taxes and gotchas, I assure you that Brazil will never disappoint you when it comes to this subjects: every municipality and state has its own taxes, which some times are cumulative over federal ones and those three instances aren't usually properly integrated.
Also, hiring someone to follow strictly Brazilian law is pretty expensive (you end up spending double your employee's salary).

That said, I have no experience in Argentina, but I'd guess it's a safer bet (mind you, I'm playing against my own country -- what a shame).

Also, in regard to talented professionals, I'd think that both countries should offer plenty of them, but Brazil seems to be more welcoming to Open Source (but this is purely speculative).

Feel free to ask me if you need any further "local" help.

[Matt Asay]

I need a Java-savvy pre-sales engineer, someone that might also be able to act as a consultant, too. If you know someone like this (in Brazil or Argentina), please email me at matt . asay _at_ alfresco .[REMOVETHIS]com.

[Spikezz777]

Well let me know if Alfresco has any openings in Costa Rica anytime soon ;-)

[elmagistral]

May I suggest that you also consider Uruguay? It's a small but very stable, calm and relatively developed country, sandwiched between Argentina and Uruguay. I may be biased being Uruguayan myself, but I know there's a very good and talented pool of software engineers and many followers of open-source projects. It's home of also very good open-source projects (I am related to jPOS.org ), but more important, Uruguay has some pretty nice laws that support software. Software companies are Income-Tax-Free, there is a signed agreement between USA-Uruguay for promotion and protection of reciprocal investments (gives you a nice legal protection environment), and also a developed free-trade zone where many companies that mainly work for outside Uruguay establish. (Tata Consultancy, Travelocity/SABRE, etc.)

[Matt Asay]

And Uruguay has some great football! Any other information you could email me (or post here)? Like links to some of this information? I'll search online myself, but it might be easier for a native Spanish speaker to find the information.

[CarlosAmaral]

I have started several subsidiaries in Latin America (Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and Chile) as well as established several long term partnerships. I ran the Latin America business for company such as Seer Technologies, Oracle, Texas Instruments, ACS, and others. You should start slow and what I always recommend is to find local partners first, before you start hiring locally. What the progression and then you can make the decision of where to hire the talent needed. There are a lot of countries to draw talent from such as Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. If you need any additional information, feel free to contact me.

[Pogue2525]

Hello Carlos. My company is looking to hire 3 people. 1 from Brazil, 1 from Argentina and 1 from Chile. Can you help me give info to my boss? Do we need to set up separate companies down there? Please email me at [e-mail]

[nxsryan]

My suggestion would be to hire a firm like North by South to help you do hiring in Latin America! We maintain a Developers Network that includes developers from Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia, Mexico and some Central American countries. And, everyone in our Developers Network has their own personal network ... especially since our developers almost exclusively come out of the open source and free software community in Latin America, hiring us to help you hire someone seems like a good idea. :)

[nparikh31]

we need web developers (1 or 2), graphics, asterisk/linux guy. What would i expect to pay?

[xagax]

Approximately 2 years ago I started an open-source oriented web development company. Since then we have grown briskly and now develop primarily in Magento and Drupal. For simple sites, we'll code it up in XHTML / CSS.

The first 18 months I lived in the US. Speaking spanish was a great help and the biggest problem was the difference in expectations for usability standards, etc. This was only temporary until I trained everyone for how I wanted things done. . Like you should do for all software development teams, set up an organized environment -- repository, unit testing, etc. -- and set coding standards. This will help keep quality high.

Regarding hiring practices, DO NOT settle. If you have any doubts whatsoever, keep looking. The quality of professional will vary greatly. I opted to train a few talented semi-sr guys and now bring on younger talent. That way, I ensure that they don't come with bad habits. I have had great success looking for very sharp, highly-motivated developers and designers with good temperament.

Regarding salary, you can expect to pay anywhere from 3,500 - 5000 for a semi-senior to senior guy. I pay benefits, which will run you about 500 pesos more. Again, the costs of doing business here "en blanco" are quite high (like Brazil with which I also have experience).

Hope this helps.