[Top Agency Series] Recruitment Strategies for Aligning Offshore Talent With US Company Values

Carlos Corredor is the Co-founder and CEO of Condor Agency, an ROI-driven digital marketing firm. He has 10 years of experience working in digital strategy and analytics and measuring the impact of marketing initiatives on business outcomes. Before Condor, Carlos was the Senior Manager of Digital Marketing and Analytics at Rise Interactive.

Antonio Santana is the Co-founder and President of Condor Agency, which also functions as a staffing agency connecting US businesses with qualified, English-speaking Latin American talent. As a sports entrepreneur, he is also the Founder and Director of Wahoo, a platform that helps MLB teams find optimal prospects in the international market.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• What is Condor Agency, and how does it serve the digital marketing and recruiting spaces?
• How Carlos Corredor and Antonio Santana’s previous agency experiences impact their work at Condor
• Fundamental criteria for identifying talent
• Condor’s recruiting process for evaluating soft skills and hiring top talent
• Antonio and Carlos share their clients’ ideal talent base and salary expectations
• Success story: how Condor helped an agency outsource talent in Mexico
• How to manage competing services

In this episode…

In a demanding talent market, companies struggle to acquire experienced staff who can provide value to the business. Some agencies leverage offshore talent to fill roles instantly. But these talent bases don’t always align with the company culture. So how can you develop a strategic hiring system to acquire people who suit your needs?

Carlos Corredor and Antonio Santana have established a scoring system for agencies to evaluate and rank potential candidates. This model incorporates soft and hard skills so companies can assess diverse applicants’ abilities to conform to US business culture. Following the scoring system, eligible candidates participate in a panel interview in which they answer situational questions that help businesses determine value alignment.

In today’s episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz welcomes Carlos Corredor and Antonio Santana, Co-founders of Condor, to discuss innovative hiring and recruiting methods. Together, they explain their fundamental criteria for identifying qualified talent, how they manage competing services within their agency, and their clients’ ideal talent base.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Carlos Corredor on LinkedIn
• Antonio Santana on LinkedIn
• Condor Agency

Special Mention(s):

• Jason Swenk on LinkedIn
• Jason Swenk’s email: [email protected]
• Ian Garlic on LinkedIn

Book(s) Mentioned:

• Principles by Ray Dalio
• Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol S. Dweck, PhD
• Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink

Related episode(s):

• “Building a Great Team and More Helpful Insights With Jason Swenk Host of the Smart Agency Master Class Podcast”
• “[One Question] Building a Platform to Empower Others With Jason Swenk Host of the Smart Agency Master Class Podcast”
• “How to Set and Achieve Goals With Ian Garlic, Founder of Video Case Story”
• “[Top Giver Series] the Power of Video Storytelling to Transform Your Business with Ian Garlic of StoryCrews”
• “[Podcast Series] 5 Types of Content You Should Be Creating Now (But Probably Aren’t)”

Episode Transcript

Jeremy Weisz 0:00

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here founder of Inspired Insider where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today is no different. I’m here with Antonio and Carlos of the Condor agency. And I’m gonna formally introduce both of you in a second. But I always like to mention other episodes people should check out of the podcast. One of the reasons we met was through Jason Swenk. So shout out to Jason Swenk. I’ve two episodes with him. One, how he built his company to over eight figures, and the other of what they’re doing, and what they’re how they’re evaluating agencies because they’re acquiring agencies as well. So check that episode out. I did an episode with Ian Garlic. And he talks, you know, he has video case story.com where he helps collect customer case stories from companies and he talks about some of the marketing advice he learned from his dad. They had live dolphins in a restaurant, and it wasn’t in Orlando was in Wisconsin. So listen to some of the things that he walks through in that episode, and many many others on inspired insider.com This episode is brought to you by Rise25, and at Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to your dream 100 relationships. And how do we do that? We actually are an easy button to help you launch and run your podcast we do accountability, strategy, and execution of your podcast. And there’s a great episode on the five different types of episodes every podcast should create and go check that out. But for me, Antonio Carlos, we know each other a little bit. The number one thing in my life is relationships. And I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships. And I found no better way to do that than to profile the people and companies I most admire and let everyone know what they’re working on. So if you’ve thought about podcasting, you should if you have questions, just go to Rise25.com to learn more. And without further ado, we have Antonio Santana and Carlos Corredor. They’re from Venezuela, and they’re cofounders of the Condor Agency. And they’ve been working together for over a decade. And they help make us companies more competitive. How do they do that? By helping you leverage the best talent in Latin America? Okay, they’ve grown the company over 70 people, and they recruit people directly for clients, but they also serve as a digital marketing agency with managed services as well. So thank you both for joining me.

Carlos Corredor 1:28

Jeremy, thanks for having us.

Jeremy Weisz 1:31

So let’s start off with a little bit about Condor Agency and what you do.

Carlos Corredor 1:38

Yeah, well, I think you summarized it pretty well, full service, digital marketing. So you know, the usual channels, website, design and development, SEO, pay media, in particular, since we’re focused on b2b That’s heavy on Google ads and LinkedIn, but also some Facebook, Instagram and the other ones. Email marketing. And marketing automation is a big one. And also, we’re heavy on analytics, web analytics and reporting. And more recently, especially after going, like you mentioned, also simply recruiting talent directly to our US clients. So they can you know, if they know what, what they want to do, they can just hire somebody directly and have those cost savings by working with our Latin American folks.

Jeremy Weisz 2:25

With the agency, you know, a lot of times people start off doing one thing and things evolve. When you first started the agency, what was the service that you started with other services?

Carlos Corredor 2:39

We will do is manage services. We, the reason why we started is we, before the agency, and like you mentioned, you know, more than 10 years ago, we had our own products, we were essentially the owners, we were on the owners use on their laptop on the client side, right. So you know, the agencies that we work with, you know, they will take forever, they were really expensive, they didn’t really understand what we needed or the business. And then you know, living in Chicago and seeing the service that USA uses were giving to, let’s say, medium-sized companies or growing companies that were not enterprise or fortune 1000 Yet, you know, we saw that opportunity. So we started Condor, leveraging Latin American talent, and passing on those costs as VMI service across those channels. And then you know, especially, you know, after COVID that people felt more comfortable working remotely, you know, we started growing the recruiting and staffing side of things.

Antonio Santana 3:41

And typically, I mean, with managed services, we’ve been working with b2b companies, typically in consulting, finance it because they have I mean marketing team where they want to maybe handle things with an agency, but in the recruiting and staffing side services, it’s more oriented to digital marketing agencies, because they typically have a know how they just won people, and they want to leverage these talents with Latin American people, of course, it’s going to be more affordable, but it’s not going to be that you sacrifice quality. Because I mean, you will have better skill or maybe with more years of experience, and even with those qualities, you will still save like 50% costs. So that’s I mean, the the marketing agencies are typically are Yeah, target audience in the recruiting. Yeah, services.

Jeremy Weisz 4:53

I want to ask a little bit we’ll talk about we’ll get into because I want to hear your thoughts on recruiting the recruiting process. The hiring process. But I’m Carlos I’ll start with you, you know, you worked in agencies for probably over five years before you even started your own. Do you have a lot of experience there? What were some of the lessons you took from the previous agencies that you worked at that you brought to Condor?

Carlos Corredor 5:19

Well, I think there are a few. One is that USA, as I mentioned, they are really built to serve fortune 1000 clients, what I mean by that is that they charge you know, $200 an hour or more, all of their teams and their structure and their day-to-day, if it’s a $30,000 project. It’s small for them, right? Always, you know, when you when you pay $100,000 a year, in salaries for our for, you know, either a senior analyst or junior manager, you know, that’s what you have to charge to make it profitable. So that’s coming from Venezuela, where are you know, I’m being from Latin America, in Venezuela, where salaries, especially at a time of crisis, when I left are so much lower. I was, you know, shocked by how expensive some of these days were, and how little attention they paid to clients that were not fortune 1000. Right. So that’s what I mean, on the other one, obviously, you know, the US and the economy, you know, they moved fast, they move fast they do they do a great job, they do help clients with strategy, and add value, you know, to the right clients, right. So that’s something that we have tried to put on our DNA in Condor, because, you know, in the rest of the world, people, let’s say, move a little slower. Right. So that’s a learning, you know, we cannot sacrifice that, you know, we cannot we definitely need to be, you know, playing the same league with this as in terms of the quality of the service, the speed of response. And really, how everyone moves here in, let’s say, corporate America and in the competitive side of the US economy. And I’m sure there are more, but those are the those were, those will be the two ones that come to mind.

Jeremy Weisz 7:26

Yeah, you saw the opportunity, because the there were certain clients, they were serving their certain clients they weren’t serving to Antonio you. What about you, before you met in your previous business? What lessons did you learn there?

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