My Secrets For Hiring Offshore Tech Talent
Typical tech screening doesn't work, here's what does
ImprovMX is not some fast-growing VC startup, so we have to be lean with our hires and salaries. Offshore tech talent promises great value, but finding good talent is the difficulty. There doesn’t seem to be much content about this, because otherwise I wouldn’t have had to make all the mistakes I’m going to talk about:
Throw out the resume
Nobody has a “good” resume in these locales. Nobody’s worked for any company you’ve ever heard of. Honestly, my best devs had zero professional coding experience. Anywhere they may have worked for probably had terrible coding standards, and coding is completely different with AI anyway. So you’re better off finding someone who has high potential to be trained.
Typing speed is such a cheat code
Best signal I’ve found by far. Not my idea, I got it from Nick Huber on some podcast.
Your typing speed naturally gets wayyyyy faster if you’re doing lots of real computer work and you’re an internet native — because you want to transmit thoughts to the machine faster. This is basically a 100% linear correlation with productivity for these remote tech roles.
My top dev and I both hit 120wpm cold, 160+ when trying. I’m experimenting with a hard 60wpm cutoff, and 80wpm for a full developer.
On the Zoom call, watch their eyes. If they dart between keyboard and screen, they’re hunt-and-pecking — not a computer native, no matter what they say.
Tech literacy
Ask them to share their screen for the typing test (I like monkeytype.com). If they struggle to find the “share screen” button, they’ll struggle with every SaaS tool you give them: Slack, Linear, GitHub, Claude Code, etc.
Hire young (under 30)
People in these countries got computers later than Americans. A 30-something American probably had a PC as a kid; a 30-something elsewhere may not have gotten one until their twenties. That’s a decade+ of technical experience that translates purely to productivity.
English proficiency
Accent is fine. Grammar and fluency aren’t. Consistent bad grammar or a struggle to express themselves means you’ll have trouble communicating work to them, and they’ll have trouble communicating back. Compounds horribly on a remote team.
Look for Hunger
Two types of candidates: “just looking for a remote job,” and hungry — genuinely excited at a chance to work for a Western company, chomping at the bit to learn and prove themselves.
Find the second type. You’ll feel it in the first 5 minutes of a call. And you’ll continue feeling it, or the lack of it for the rest of their time at your company.
Geography
You want a sweet spot in the country’s economic development. Too developed and the high labor costs and laziness will bite you. But too underdeveloped, and there won’t be good tech infrastructure for employees to be good at technology, and some of these hires will be too mercenary due to their environment being too harsh.
Eastern Europe is the best region I’ve found so far. Strong tech education and fundamentals, decent English, good work ethic, reasonable time zone overlap with the US.
I’m experimenting with Latin/South America too.
South Africa has good English and work ethic for finance, accounting, sales, but I’ve not found technical talent density.
Open to trying some Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam, Thailand, but we’ll see. East Asian is probably too expensive. While South Asian seems too underdeveloped.
Don’t touch North America/Western Europe with a ten foot pole—lazy, expensive, lots of labor compliance, I say this as an American :)
Just use a recruitment agency
~20% of first-year salary. I paid it for my first hire, that went great. I tried to save the fee for my 2nd hire and regretted it so hard — posting on all the boards, sifting hundreds of resumes, scheduling interviews, running typing tests. Not worth my time at all.
Happy to give a rec if you want — email me at matthew@improvmx.com.
All of the above criteria, I’ve come to from making the mistake myself once, i.e. I hired someone who didn’t type that fast, someone with only okay grammar, or someone older, etc. and in each case it was a huge waste of time and money, and worst of all, I had to deal with the emotional toil of letting someone go for a mistake I made (hiring incorrectly).
Don’t make my mistakes!
Thanks for reading! Got your own offshore hiring war stories? Comment below or hit me up.