Market opportunities for recruiting in Latin America: Insights

While a work-from-anywhere economy and remote working trends were already on the rise before the pandemic, 2020 opened the door for businesses to intentionally operate with a work anywhere, work in any way mindset. According to Global Workplace Analytics as reported by Forbes, 77% of the workforce wants to continue working from home after the pandemic ends.

CEOs of major companies are making note of this and adjusting accordingly, shifting to a remote-first work environment as a recruiting and retention tool. Major tech companies are leading the way, for example, Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and Square, recently told his employees that they can continue to work from home “forever”, but the trend isn’t isolated to Silicon Valley.

By the end of 2021, according to a report by Gartner, Inc, 51% of all knowledge workers worldwide are expected to be either hybrid workers - working most of the time in a local, physical office - or fully remote workers.

Businesses today are not only able to hire workers in different cities, but their potential employee pool can now span the globe. And they are already planning to capitalize on this opportunity; 80% of HR leaders feel that the global fluency and the ability to operate in different countries is vital to their organizations’ success.

Instead of thinking about what country or region to expand into , a work in any way mindset frees any HR team to recruit their ideal candidates, regardless of location. And one excellent region HR teams are recruiting from is Latin America.

While Latin America is not a monolith and circumstances vary widely by country, the region broadly has seen years of rapid growth in local infrastructure investment, economic growth, and foreign investment. Foreign companies have increased investment in the region at a rapid clip for decades. According to the World Bank, almost 70% of Latin American countries show levels of foreign direct investment (FDI) above and beyond what economists would expect based on their GDP. Brazil and Mexico are among the world’s top recipients of foreign direct investment, above India and South Africa. In the World Bank’s 2018 World Investment Report, FDI flows to Latin America and the Caribbean rose 8% to reach $151 billion in 2017.

Of course, the pandemic and recent instability in certain countries in the region have dampened these trends. The challenges to recruiting, hiring, and managing a workforce based in a region with political unrest can be overcome by a globally fluent organization with the right on-the-ground knowledge, systems for integrating that knowledge across the organization, and the agility to respond to changing situations can take advantage of the huge opportunity for recruiting talent in Latin America.

Not only is it cost effective to hire workers based in Latin America, but because its time zones are similar to those in the U.S., meetings and collaboration can occur more often in real time. English fluency in this region has also recently surpassed that of China; this increased proficiency is the result of a commitment to education in Latin America in order to increase economic development in the region.

While there is disparity among Latin American countries, broadband access has grown steadily for years across most of the region, bringing more people online as workers and consumers. Since 2010, the number of homes coming online in Latin America increased by an average of 14.1% every year, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) . From 2010 and 2015, the use of mobile broadband jumped from 7% to 58%, further expanding companies’ access to new markets, audiences, and labor pools in the region.

In addition, 80% of Latin America’s GDP growth over the past 15 years has come from a rise in available labor. And unlike other countries that are experiencing declining populations and of the general labor pool, the rate of employment growth in Latin American countries is expected to drop less than 1.1% by the year 2030, making the region rich with opportunities and possibilities for business growth.

The last year or so has seen an increase in unrest with political and economic challenges for some countries. When a region experiences political upheaval, regulations and laws can change drastically, and at the drop of a hat, so access to changes in the requirements for recruiting and hiring in a country, planning and managing risks, and adapting HR and management to accommodate changing situations is important.

Overall, however, for those businesses that have developed a Global Fluency skill set, hiring in Latin America is a sensible solution for organizations hoping to expand into the global playing field, especially for North American companies.

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