How Delve Saved <span class="case-study_highlight">$578k</span> Per Year Scaling Their Team With Latin American Talent

Delve Deeper is a marketing and e-commerce consultancy that combines data science, digital media, and technology integration for clients like UNICEF and AT&T, and has a top-rated partner status with Google, Amazon AWS, and Meta. 

The company came to Hire With Near already hiring internationally, with its first global hire based in Belarus and a team there that grew to roughly 20 employees. Political instability in Eastern Europe and the time zone gap between its US headquarters and its European employees pushed Delve to start looking at Canada and South America.

Summary

• The problem: Delve Deeper was growing fast and constantly needed to fill new roles.
• The challenge: The US talent pool was narrow and expensive, and political instability disrupted Delve's Eastern Europe offices too.
• Roles hired for: Sr. Programmatic Media Trader, Marketing Automation Specialist, Data Scientist, Ad Ops, Sr. Marketing Data Agent, Marketing Data Agent, AdTech Solutions Consultant, Digital Marketing Consultant, Team Leader.
• Why Delve Deeper chose Hire With Near: Consistent professionalism at every level and proven experience filling similar marketing roles.
• Solution: Hire With Near filled three roles fast, then seven more after Delve saw the outcome. 
• Results:
  
  • Delve started saving $578,451 a year in payroll across its Latin American hires.
  • Hiring in Latin America gave them access to a large pool of high-quality candidates who work for reasonable salaries.
  • The specialists Hire With Near placed work just 1–2 hours off Delve's schedule, so real-time collaboration was never an issue.

The Challenge: Hiring to Keep Up With Rapid Growth

Delve is a fast-growing digital consultancy in the marketing and advertising industry, helping companies increase ROI on digital marketing, advertising, and branding efforts.

They’re a top-rated partner for some of the biggest marketing and tech names, including Google, Amazon AWS, and Meta. Moreover, their client list is full of high-profile companies, such as UNICEF, AT&T, and Wynn Resorts.

For years, Delve Deeper had sought to hire the best available talent to keep pace with growth. Over a 12-month period, they went from 97 to 139 employees, a 43% jump driven mostly by IT and marketing hiring.

Growing that fast meant Delve couldn't just fill seats. Every hire also had to fit a culture built around digging deep, asking sharper questions, pushing past the easy answer. 

That's a harder bar to clear than any job description, and the faster Delve grew, the smaller the pool of candidates who could clear it became.

The Problem: A “Narrow” Talent Market

To support their rapid growth, Delve Deeper needed to hire more world-class teammates. However, their hiring unit had encountered many issues sourcing and hiring great candidates:

• For the specialized marketing and data roles Delve needed, the pool of qualified US candidates was narrow, and competition for them was fierce.
• Salaries were exceptionally high in the US, which had increased overall costs for Delve and forced them to raise the prices of their offerings.
• While based in the US, Delve has offices in Warsaw, Poland and Minsk, Belarus. The war in Ukraine disrupted their Belarus operations and created uncertainty across their Eastern European presence.
• The situation further highlighted some of the ongoing issues that were caused by having staff in such different time zones.

Above all, Delve Deeper needed to find talent closer to home.

Why Delve Chose Latin America and Hire With Near

Delve admired the resourcefulness of Latin America's talent pool: the drive to grow and improve outside a rigid corporate structure.

Anton Lipkanou, Delve's President, compared it directly to what he'd seen building his own team in Belarus: a deep bench of “top 1%” talent, competitive enough that Delve could hire the best instead of settling. 

One difference mattered even more: in Latin America, much of that talent was actively looking for its next role, while comparable marketers in the US were usually already employed and off the market entirely.

While weighing all this, Delve learned that many companies were building centers of excellence in Brazil and Argentina. That's what put nearshoring to Latin America on their radar, and what eventually led them to Hire With Near.

Delve had already worked with other hiring partners in the region, and some had delivered disappointing results. Hire With Near stood out for two reasons: 

• Real specialization in the Latin American market.
• Direct experience filling similar marketing roles for other clients.

After a few initial conversations, Delve's president felt confident Hire With Near could deliver candidates who fit the job description and Delve's culture, a bar none of the earlier partners had cleared.

We felt confident in the competence of Hire With Near's team. Many times with professional services, when you're talking to senior management and founders, everything seems perfect. But then, when you get redirected to middle management or junior people at the organization, the quality is very different. I didn't see that with Hire With Near.

Anton Lipkanou

President of DELVE

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Aligning With the Company Culture

“Digging deep” is Delve's culture, literally the definition of the word delve.

“Is the person on the other side digging deep?” asked Anton Lipkanou. “Are they asking the right questions? Can they explain back to me what I should expect? Hire With Near's team gave us all of that.”

That's what stood out to Anton: the same depth and attention whether he was talking to Hire With Near's leadership or the recruiter sourcing candidates. 

For a company built around digging past the surface, that kind of follow-through mattered.

How Hire With Near Delivered Results

Initially, Delve Deeper engaged with Hire With Near to fill three roles: Sr. Programmatic Media Trader, Data Scientist, and Ad Ops. All three were top-quality hires at a much lower cost than equivalent US talent.

During the sourcing and vetting process, Hire With Near's recruiters made sure to select candidates who aligned perfectly with the values and principles upheld by Delve.

The consulting firm was impressed by the candidates we were able to recruit and decided to fill seven extra positions with us, ranging from junior to highly experienced candidates.

In total, Delve paid about $531,000 per year in salaries across its 10 Latin American hires at the time of this case study. By comparison, filling similar positions with US-based talent would have cost $1,109,451, based on Glassdoor, Indeed, Salary.com, and ZipRecruiter benchmarks for each specific role.

That gap works out to $578,451 saved per year, about 52% less than the US-equivalent cost.

Delve's Advice for Companies Looking to Hire in Latin America

According to Delve employees responsible for hiring, it’s important to actively look for the right person. Don't settle for someone who will simply “show up” and come into the office every day. 

Here are some other tips on hiring in Latin America:

• Just as with candidates anywhere, chemistry and alignment with your company's culture are important factors to consider. 
• Look for people (both recruiters and hires) who are driven by results.
• Most of all, it's key to find the right local partner that can bring you up to speed, especially in South America. The right partner can help you identify strong work and education experience, vet for strong English levels, consult on market salary rates for different roles, and more. 

Key Takeaways

There are three main takeaways from Delve's foray into the Latin American hiring market:

• Hiring in Latin America gave Delve Deeper access to senior marketing and data talent it couldn't find in the US, at salaries that saved $578,451 a year compared to equivalent US hires.
• Latin American professionals brought the growth mindset and results-driven work ethic that Delve's culture demanded, something previous offshore hiring partners hadn't delivered.
• Consistent quality across every level of Hire With Near's team, from leadership to the recruiter sourcing candidates, was what set the partnership apart from earlier attempts.

If your company is growing fast and the US talent market isn't keeping up, set up a free call with Hire With Near today.

To learn more about Delve, visit Delve's website.

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