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Key Takeaways
- Nearshore sits between onshore (US-based, highest cost) and offshore (distant, lowest time-zone overlap): it pairs near-full US workday overlap with salaries 30–70% below US rates.
- Nearshore outsourcing hands a process to a vendor. Nearshore hiring means directly employing a full-time remote professional who’s part of your team, which is why a growing share of US companies are choosing to hire rather than outsource.
- Companies hiring in Latin America typically see $35,000–$64,000 in annual savings per hire, and 84% of the placements Hire With Near makes are mid-level or senior professionals. The savings come without trading down on experience.
You posted a new position in the US three months ago. You’ve interviewed a handful of candidates, two accepted offers elsewhere, and the salary expectations keep climbing past what the budget allows. Meanwhile, your existing team is absorbing the work, the project timeline is slipping, and you’re paying a premium just to stay where you are.
That gap between the talent you need and the talent you can afford isn’t unique to you. The US is facing a deficit of over 1.2 million workers, with only 85 available workers for every 100 open jobs, according to the US Chamber of Commerce’s America Works Data Center.
The 2026 ManpowerGroup Talent Shortage Survey put it plainly: 72% of US employers report difficulty finding people with the skills they need.
For a growing number of companies, the answer is to look just south, to Latin America, where skilled professionals work in US time zones for salaries well below their US equivalents.
In this article, I explain what nearshore outsourcing is, how it differs from onshore and offshore, and how outsourcing a process to a vendor differs from directly hiring your own remote team. I also cover the benefits, the challenges, and how to get started.
What Is Nearshore Outsourcing (Nearshoring)?
Nearshore outsourcing is the practice of contracting your business processes or services to a third-party provider in a nearby country or region, typically one that shares a similar time zone. For a US company, that means sending work to a provider in Latin America rather than to a distant region like India, Vietnam, or the Philippines.
A team in Mexico City works the same hours as a team in Dallas for half the year, dropping just one hour behind during US daylight saving time. Meanwhile, a team in Colombia overlaps almost entirely with the US East Coast year-round.
The “near” is what separates nearshoring from offshoring. That proximity in time and culture is the entire point: it removes the lag, the late-night calls, and the handoff delays that come with putting an ocean and ten time zones between collaborators.
Nearshoring became popular in technical fields first. You might nearshore your software development to Mexico or Costa Rica, for example. But the model now spans nearly every function that can be done remotely, from finance and marketing to customer support and design.
If you want a broader view of the strategy, we cover it in our guide to the smartest way to cut costs and scale with nearshoring.
To fully understand nearshoring, it helps to see exactly where nearshore sits relative to two other models.
Nearshoring vs. Onshoring vs. Offshoring
Nearshoring is one of three sourcing models, and the differences among them come down to distance, time-zone overlap, and cost.
Onshoring delegates the work externally, but keeps it in your own country. Offshoring sends it to a distant region with little or no workday overlap. Nearshoring sends it to a nearby country that shares most of your business hours.
Onshoring carries the highest cost because US salaries are the benchmark everyone else is measured against.
Offshoring usually delivers the lowest hourly cost, but the savings come with a tax: the time-zone gap slows everything down.
Research from Harvard Business School and INFORMS, based on a study of more than 12,000 employees at a large multinational, found that real-time communication, such as phone calls and video chats, dropped by 11% for every additional hour of time-zone difference between coworkers. Stretch that across a 10-hour gap and live collaboration nearly disappears.
The founder of a Web3 gaming company described running into the same wall:
My QA is based in Sri Lanka, and I don't get her enough during my day to actually allow to keep on that high quality and high throughput for my team. So we often release without her.
Nearshoring to Latin America is the middle path that avoids both extremes: it provides meaningful cost savings with a north-south arrangement that keeps your team on the same clock.
The table below shows how the three compare:
For a deeper comparison, see our full breakdown of nearshoring vs. offshoring vs. onshoring.
Nearshore Outsourcing vs. Nearshore Hiring: Why More Companies Are Hiring Instead
Outsourcing and hiring solve the same surface problem in two very different ways.
Hire With Near is one of the companies that helps US businesses hire full-time remote professionals in Latin America. One of the questions we hear most often from companies researching nearshoring is: Should I outsource a process to a vendor, or hire my own people?
Nearshore outsourcing means handing a process to a vendor who runs it for you with their own staff. You pay for output, not people. For example, handing off a complete software development project to one of the many nearshore development companies.
Nearshore hiring, on the other hand, means bringing on a full-time remote professional in Latin America who works directly for you, reports to your managers, and is part of your team.
The term “nearshore outsourcing” is often used loosely to describe both, but the working relationship is fundamentally different, so we like to make a clear distinction.
Hire With Near’s research across more than 2,000 hiring conversations found that 12% of companies turning to Latin America are specifically moving away from outsourcing toward directly hiring their own people, and another 30% are switching from offshore regions to nearshore for real-time collaboration.
The core problem with the vendor model is integration. A RevOps leader at a mid-market SaaS company put it plainly:
The middleman is kind of, like, hard because we don’t manage them. They are managed by this agency. So it can be as simple as someone’s not going to go to work today because they’re sick, and it ends up not feeling like they’re part of the team.
When the people doing your work answer to someone else, they never fully become your team.
In the conversations our recruiting team has with US hiring managers, the pattern that emerges is consistent: the companies that get the most out of Latin America aren’t outsourcing a process, they’re building a team.
When I interview our recruiters and leadership, the recurring theme is that direct hires show up to standups, learn the products, push back on ideas, and stay for years, in a way that a vendor’s assigned staff rarely do.
That said, outsourcing has one honest advantage worth naming: redundancy.
As one US-based real estate investor running bookkeeping through a large firm told us, “With our current bookkeeper, if somebody quits, there’s no hiccup. They have 25 other people who are going to step into that person’s shoes and finish our books for us.” A vendor absorbs turnover for you.
The counterpoint is that for an ongoing, embedded role, that redundancy comes at the cost of the very thing that makes a hire valuable: someone who knows your business deeply and is invested in it. A good recruiting partner closes the redundancy gap by filling a vacancy fast, without taking ownership of your people away from you.
The rest of this article focuses on nearshore hiring, because that’s where most US companies are now headed and where the cost, retention, and integration advantages are strongest.
If you want help building a team this way, Hire With Near offers nearshore staffing and recruiting services that handle sourcing, screening, and compliance for you.
Further reading: Why Thousands of Leading US Companies Are Hiring Talent in Latin America
What Are the Benefits of Nearshore Hiring?
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Nearshore hiring gives US companies access to skilled, full-time professionals at 30–70% below US salaries, with the time-zone overlap and US-aligned working norms that offshore hiring can’t match. The advantages compound across cost, talent, and team performance.
Lower salaries reduce overhead
Hiring in Latin America can cut your cost per role by 30 to 70% compared with hiring domestically. The savings exist because the cost of living in Latin America is lower, not because the quality of the work is lower.
Check the example comparing Atlanta, Georgia, with three major LatAm cities:
Diversity of location and background also tends to broaden the ideas your team generates.
A geographically distributed team keeps operating when your main office can’t. If a disruption hits your headquarters, your remote teammates keep working, and you gain coverage on days your US team observes a national holiday.
Strong English and cultural fit
Latin America’s top professionals communicate fluently in English and understand US business norms, often from previous roles at US-headquartered multinationals.
Argentina, for example, ranks #26 globally and #1 in Latin America in the EF English Proficiency Index 2025, while the #2 spot belongs to Honduras (#32 globally). Both countries are in the high proficiency band.
That fluency, paired with shared cultural reference points, means new hires integrate into US teams with little friction.
Substance, not just savings
What differentiates Latin American talent is initiative. Hire With Near’s COO, Franco Pereyra, puts it this way:
What sets Latin American talent apart from other regions is that you’ll find people who are proactive and creative. People who come up with ideas and new solutions. If you’re looking for folks who can bring something to the table, who will push back if they think your idea doesn’t make sense, that’s what you find in Latin America.
You’re not just filling a role at a lower rate. You’re getting people who will improve the work.
Built-in business continuity
Source: Numbeo.com
A geographically distributed team keeps operating when your main office can’t. If a disruption hits your headquarters, your remote teammates keep working, and you gain coverage on days your US team observes a national holiday.
Diversity of location and background also tends to broaden the ideas your team generates.
What Are the Challenges of Nearshore Hiring?
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Nearshore hiring comes with a handful of real challenges, but each is manageable, and most dissolve once you work with a partner who knows the Latin American market.
Here are the ones companies run into most, and how to handle them:
Compliance with local laws
Every country has its own labor codes, tax rules, and employment regulations, and getting them wrong can mean fines or legal disputes.
This is the most common reason companies work with a LatAm staffing partner or an employer of record (EOR): the partner carries the compliance burden so you don’t have to build local legal expertise in-house.
Verifying skills and competency
Assessing credentials across different educational and professional systems takes a more deliberate process than a domestic hire.
Be ready to recognize that some hard skills transfer: a candidate who knows SAP rather than being a NetSuite or QuickBooks expert, for instance, will typically come up to speed quickly, because Latin American professionals tend to be highly adaptable.
A structured screening process, or a recruiting firm that runs one for you, removes most of the guesswork.
Finding the right candidates
A US-style hiring process usually won’t hold up when a job board in Latin America can return hundreds of applicants. You need a screening funnel built for volume, including a check on professional English before you ever get on a call, not just self-reported proficiency.
This is where a partner like Hire With Near, who already has a vetted pipeline, saves the most time.
Reading Latin American resumes
A Latin American resume looks different from a US one. They tend to run longer than a single page, and may include details like a photo, address, or marital status that US recruiters would never expect. Pull out the information that matters for the role and disregard the rest.
None of these are reasons to avoid nearshore hiring. There are reasons to either build a deliberate process or work with a partner who already has one.
What Is the Financial Impact of Nearshoring?
Companies hiring in Latin America typically save 30–70% per role versus US salaries. According to Hire With Near’s 2026 State of LatAm Hiring Report, that translates to $35,000–$64,000 in annual savings per hire, and 84% of those placements were mid-level or senior professionals, not junior, low-cost labor.
The savings are real, and they come without trading down on experience.
There’s a simple rule of thumb Franco Pereyra shares with companies trying to benchmark what to pay:
Take whatever you’d spend on a US salary and divide by two. Fifty percent of a US salary tends to be very competitive across the board. For more niche software engineers, you might need to go to sixty percent. For more commoditized roles, forty percent of a US salary still gets you top talent.
It’s a fast way to sanity-check a budget before you ever post a role.
What nearshore savings look like in practice
The clearest proof of the impact is what happens at scale. When CyberFortress, a San Antonio cybersecurity and data recovery company, doubled its headcount in twelve months, the US labor market couldn’t supply finance and accounting professionals at a sustainable cost.
CFO Seema Chacko had previously used talent from Europe, India, and the Philippines, but she chose nearshore Latin America specifically for the time-zone overlap.
Through Hire With Near, she built a 20-person finance and accounting team, including a director of accounting, an accounting team lead, and a director of global tax. The result: an estimated $1.2 million a year in savings and a month-end close cut from 15 days to 10. As she put it:
"We hired 20 team members who share our core values: great attitude and desire to learn, resourcefulness, and adaptability. Hire With Near’s team was very responsive, and their easy-going communication fostered a smooth hiring process."
The savings show up at a smaller scale too.
Northstar, a full-service accounting and CFO firm, set out to hire a bookkeeper and ended up scaling an entire remote team of 12 Latin American hires across finance, accounting, operations, and admin, saving over $250,000, up to 70% per hire.
Digital consulting agency Delve started looking to fill three initial roles in Latin America and has since expanded to ten skilled LatAm team members. This move has allowed them to save roughly $500,000 a year while successfully sidestepping the time-zone problems of their Eastern European operations.
What roles typically cost in Latin America
The table below shows salary benchmarks for common roles hired through Hire With Near, compared to US equivalents.
These are mid-level figures based on 2026 compensation data.
For a full breakdown by role and seniority, see the US vs. Latin America Salary Guide.
What Are the Top Nearshoring Locations for US Companies?
Colombia is now the single most popular nearshore hiring destination for US companies, having surpassed Argentina, with the top three countries accounting for well over half of all placements. The mix has shifted in recent years as more of Latin America has come online as a serious talent market.
The leading destinations are Colombia at 23%, Argentina at 21%, Brazil at 14%, and Mexico at 9%, with the top three countries together making up 58% of all placements.
Each has its own strengths: Colombia offers deep US East Coast overlap and a fast-growing tech and finance talent base, and Argentina leads the region in English proficiency.
Meanwhile, Brazil brings the largest overall talent pool and Mexico’s shared border and time zones make it a natural fit for real-time collaboration.
If you’re weighing a specific country, our guides go deeper on each: hiring in Colombia, the #1 nearshore talent market; hiring in Argentina for its talent and savings; hiring in Brazil for its scale; and why more companies are nearshoring to Mexico.
For a wider view, see our roundup of the top nearshore outsourcing locations for US businesses.
What Nearshoring Trends Should US Companies Watch?
The clearest trend in nearshore hiring is demand outpacing almost every other talent strategy, driven by a tight US labor market and the maturing of Latin America as a talent hub.
What started as a cost play has become a default growth strategy for US companies that can’t fill roles at home.
Two data points from Hire With Near’s 2026 State of LatAm Hiring Report capture the momentum.
First, demand for engineering talent in Latin America grew 250% year over year, a sign that companies now treat the region as a primary source, not a backup.
Second, Colombia overtook Argentina to become the #1 nearshore destination, a milestone that reflects how quickly the regional map is being redrawn as new markets mature.
As more companies discover that a remote hire performs the same whether they sit in Georgia or in Colombia or Honduras, the question shifts from whether to hire nearshore to how fast they can build a nearshore team.
How To Hire Talent in Latin America
The fastest way to hire nearshore workers is to partner with a nearshore staffing firm that already knows the Latin American market, because it removes the sourcing, screening, and compliance work that slows most companies down.
Hire With Near’s nearshore staffing and recruiting services can take on as much of the hiring, onboarding, payment, and local compliance as you need.
But, if you’d rather run the process yourself, here’s the workflow we recommend, step by step:
1. Define what you need
Spend real time here. The best outcomes come from clients who narrow down exactly what the role requires before they start. A clear picture of the role and the must-have skills makes screening and interviewing faster and sharply reduces the risk of a bad hire and its associated costs.
2. Attract the best candidates
Get your job description in front of the right people by posting where your ideal candidates look. This is where a recruiting partner earns its keep, because an executive search and recruiting firm knows which boards to post on and how to surface the right candidates fast.
If you go it alone, remember that every additional job board adds cost.
3. Screen candidates
After applications come in, run an initial sift against your basic requirements, then review the remaining resumes in detail, request references, and run skills assessments.
Build in an English check before any live call, because professional fluency isn’t always clear from an application.
4. Interview candidates
Keep the interview process smooth and accommodating to candidates’ schedules. It’s a chance to show what your company values.
If you want a sample of work or extra information, say so in advance, so candidates have time to prepare and give you their best.
5. Make an offer
Once you find the right candidate, make a strong offer that stands out from competing ones, shortens your hiring time, and improves your odds of retaining the person. Spell out the compensation, perks, benefits, and the details of the role.
This is also where you decide how you’ll engage the person, whether as a direct employee, through an employer of record if you lack a local legal entity, or as an independent contractor.
6. Onboard your new hire
Onboarding largely determines whether a nearshore hire sticks. A good onboarding process makes the new hire feel welcome, sets clear expectations and goals, provides the tools and information they need, and builds early relationships with their manager and peers.
The same care you’d put into onboarding an in-office hire applies here, just delivered remotely.
A quick word on tooling: you don’t need anything exotic to make nearshoring work. A communication and collaboration tool (Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom), cloud storage (Google Drive, Dropbox), a project management platform (Asana, Notion, ClickUp), and an HR and payroll system that handles international contractors (Deel, Gusto) cover the essentials.
Most companies already use these in-house, so a remote hire in Bogotá collaborates no differently than a colleague in Boston.
When navigating this process, knowing what to avoid is half the battle. See the 10 most common nearshore outsourcing mistakes US companies make before you start.
Final Thoughts
Nearshore outsourcing and nearshore hiring both give US companies a way to access skilled Latin American talent at 30–70% below US rates.
But the trend is clear: increasingly more companies are choosing to hire their own people rather than outsource a process to a vendor. A direct hire who joins your standups, learns your business, and stays for years delivers value that a managed-service contract rarely can.
Getting there takes a solid hiring process or a partner who already has one. The companies that get the most out of Latin America tend to either build a deliberate recruiting funnel or work with a firm that takes care of the process for them.
Hire With Near is a nearshore staffing firm that helps US companies hire full-time remote professionals in Latin America. We handle the sourcing, screening, and compliance so you don’t have to. Most clients see their first candidates within 3–5 days of kickoff and hire within 2–3 weeks.
If you want to explore building a team in Latin America, the best next step is to book a free consultation to talk through your specific requirements with our team.
We’ll give you salary benchmarks and explain the process so you have the information you need to decide whether it’s right for you.
Nearshoring FAQs:
Here are some of the most common questions US companies have when it comes to nearshore hiring:
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