MAX: Hello.  Welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster and today we have a special episode where we are going to talk about how the recruitment experience and the candidate experience differs for Latin America and Latin America in the high volume space in particular but Latin America in general, which is a big market for us, where we have spent the last four or five years, preparing and adapting to it.  And I thought there would be no better person to come and discuss this market than our very own Carolina Vargas, who is the Head of Customer Success for Talkpush, based in Costa Rica.  Welcome to the show, Carolina.  

CAROLINA: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. 

MAX: Thanks for coming.  The first time we are having an internal discussion on the show.  But, you know, I don't think that there are too many TA practitioners in Latin America who have experience necessarily at the regional level.  I mean I couldn't think of a few, of course, some of whom we serve, but a lot of them is country by country, right.  Recruitment is a domestic game for most companies.

CAROLINA: Yeah, exactly.  And we still have the chance to make the comparison with Latin America and North America.  And that groups to be very different.  Honestly, in terms of their behavior and the way we see they adapt their sourcing strategies.  So I think that has proven to be very effective in terms of analyzing how these companies are doing what they are doing today.

MAX: Yeah, it's like the big brother of the biggest market in the world is right North of the border, if you are in Mexico, but if you look in terms of headcount Latin America has a much bigger talent pool than any.  I don't know if you can measure the sort of diversity and complexity of a market but would you say that North America is more uniform than Latin America?  I would assume Latin America is much more diverse in terms of candidate behavior.

CAROLINA: It is absolutely.  Yeah, I mean, North America itself has a lot of diversity but I suppose Latin America as a whole, you have to consider the difference between the northern part of South America for most people, the Caribbean, behaves in a completely separate way.  We have countries in Latin America that speak only English, then that speak French, Portuguese and Spanish for the most.  So of course we have diversity in terms of ethnicity, in terms of how these countries interact with one another.  I mean, as we were saying, without a doubt, Latin America has a skilled workforce with relatively low cost compared to other regions, even our own neighbors, like the US and Europe, Brazil and Mexico are pretty powerful economies on their own.  But I think the rest of Latin America or the smaller countries, rely a lot on our neighbors to export our services, and I think something that happened especially during the pandemic is that we managed to remove all the remaining carriers that made outsourcing for services, so attractive.

MAX: Okay. Okay, so the Latin American, the smaller countries are booming, finding ways to sell their services to the region.

CAROLINA: Pretty much, yeah.

MAX: Cool.  What about those who aren't aware, you said some countries speak English and French but I guess the majority of the space is in Spanish.  Is it fair to consider this whole region is generally Spanish speaking and to apply the same language settings for all candidates?

CAROLINA: Well, I suppose you could potentially discuss something about Latin American Spanish and it's something that you for example using Word.  There is an understanding of what Latin American Spanish is, but on its own, it's very different, we use different ways to treat people.  So for example, just something that we've considered in our bots.  It's not the same, to create a bot for a Mexican audience and of Costa Rica, or an Argentinian audience.  They use completely different ways to speak to their candidates.  One can be considered extremely formal in the country and extremely informal in another, so these are things that we have to be cautious about.  Of course, you're going to get your messages across, we all understand Spanish even if it comes from Spain or Argentina we'll understand it, but it's not the way you want to present your brand.  You want to take care of these minor things when you're creating or conversing with these candidates.

MAX: Okay, so could you illustrate that.  You said the formal versus more colloquial style.  Would it be rude to address someone in Mexico, in a way that is more formal in Costa Rica, or vice versa?

CAROLINA: Yeah, for example in Costa Rica it is very common to speak to people in usted.  That is the way we speak to everybody I would speak to my parents like that, and this is considered extremely formal in Mexico, it would create a barrier or a distance between candidates and recruiters that would be considered a little harsh rather cold, they would put you in a defensive position.  So this is something that you have to be mindful of.  They can absolutely understand that but it does change the way you are interacting with people.

MAX: So as an employer brand, if you said usted to candidates in high volume recruitment in Mexico, you would come off as distant and too formal.

CAROLINA: Absolutely.  We consider this in the way we shape, or for the conversational designing team is preparing these bots, right.  They want to make sure they adapt to the way people are expecting to connect with these brands.

MAX: So for our listeners who don't know Talkpush, we design and provide chatbots/conversational AIs, which have to speak the local language and adapt to local behaviors.  So that's an extra layer of work and complexity for us.  But I guess beyond the conversation and the language components, we can look into a little bit more of the differences in behavior.  Maybe starting from the corporate side.   Is there a good division of labor between recruitment Marketing and Recruitment operations as you may have, in Asia, or sometimes in the US, they use a lot of agencies to manage their ad-by and employer branding work?  What is the lay of the land for Latin America?

CAROLINA: I suppose it's pretty diverse as well.  We do find that it's more common that these companies do it in-house, so most of their marketing purposes and marketing are managed in-house.  There is a difference though.  The stronger companies that we see are the ones that are being able to chase the top talents while other ones that have a stronger connection between their recruitment or their talent acquisition department, and their marketing departments and of course, the way that they generate their employer brand can, of course, create a huge impact in the way that they're addressing these candidates.  The candidates sometimes reach on their own.  We have clients that do no advertising and have massive amounts of volume because of what they have done and the services they provide.  People want to work for them.  Maybe they don't have the best benefits of the region but the power of their brand is so visible that candidates are looking for them.  So yeah, I suppose, to answer your question, we do see all kinds of behavior in terms of in...