Nearshore hiring for creative agencies
You're capacity-constrained, not demand-constrained. A full-time editor or designer in your own city breaks the margin on the accounts you already have. This is the exact problem we built ACT Latam around.
The bind you are in
Agency margins don't survive a bad hire. Add a $95K designer to a book of business that assumed one, and the next quarter is spent finding revenue to cover a salary rather than doing the work.
So you freelance it. Which works until the freelancer takes a full-time job, or ghosts during a launch week, or delivers something that needs three rounds because they were never inside your process to begin with.
Neither of those is a staffing problem. It's a cost-structure problem wearing a staffing costume.
The most common first hire, by a wide margin. Production is almost always the bottleneck.
How it usually goes
A ten-person agency comes to us because they've turned down two projects in a quarter. We staff a mid-level editor first, because that's where the queue is. The editor works EST hours, sits in the same Slack, and joins the Monday production call.
About six weeks in, the conversation changes from 'is this working' to 'who else can we add.' That's the pattern. It's not a case study — we're a new company and we're not going to invent one — but it's the shape of the problem and the shape of the fix.
Yes, and we screen for it. We ask candidates to work inside a supplied brand system during the skills task specifically because agency work is never a blank canvas.
That's your call, and most agencies do. We'll confirm what your contract permits — white-labeling is standard in this model and we build the paperwork to support it.
We build a mutual NDA into the placement contract. If your client has their own template, we'll review and countersign. It's a common request and not a blocker.
30 days' notice means yes in practice. Whether we can re-place the same person depends on where they landed — we'll tell you honestly on the call.
The guarantee
If it doesn't work in 90 days, we replace them. Free.
No arbitration, no prorated credit, no argument about whose fault it was. We recruited the person, so the recruiting cost is ours to absorb. Bring back the scorecard we wrote together and we start again.
You can also just leave. Thirty days' notice, no exit fee, nothing clawed back. We'd rather earn next month than trap you in this one.
Ready to hire
Tell us the role. We'll tell you whether we can fill it.
Thirty minutes, no deck. If it isn't a fit, we'll say so on the call instead of following up for six weeks.