A US Customer Success Team Built Through Nearshore Sourcing: How Maestra Hired Two CSMs

Table of contents

The Cost of a Wrong Hire on a Two-Person Team
How Pre-Screening Customer Success Candidates Cut Maestra’s Interview Time
A Hire That Changed CargoFax’s Product Speed
Find Qualified Customer Success Candidates With LatamCent

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Maestra is a SaaS company that recently opened its US Customer Success role.

The team is new, the bar for the first hires is high, and every addition shapes how the function will run as the customer base grows.

Julia Lo leads that effort as Founding Director of Customer Success, US. She owns the team build from the first hire forward, which means she also owns every screening call, every interview, and every hiring decision.

Before working with LatamCent, Julia was running the search herself and through multiple agencies at once. Two Customer Success Managers had been hired, but getting there had taken more interviews, more rejected pipelines, and more lost hours than the role itself should have required.

The Cost of a Wrong Hire on a Two-Person Team

Maestra was building a US Customer Success team from scratch, and the bar for the first hires was high.

Two wrong additions to a team of two would have meant restarting the entire process: off-boarding, reposting, and running the funnel again from zero. The cost of a misfire sat behind every screening call.

Julia ran the search through multiple agencies in parallel and pulled in referrals from her own network. Interviews were happening almost every day. The pipelines coming back looked acceptable on paper, but missed on the things that counted for a small founding team: communication style, judgment, and fit with the US market.

The other agencies responded to rejections by sending more volume.

Julia got waves of new profiles instead of better-matched ones. A few agencies grew visibly impatient when she kept saying no, even though saying no was the right call for the team she was building.

The time cost added up. Julia stayed for the full hour on interviews; she knew within fifteen minutes that the candidate was not the right fit, out of respect for the candidate. With several misaligned interviews per week, hours were pulled away from onboarding the team she had already hired and supporting US customers.

Sourcing in Latin America was not yet part of her plan.

Julia assumed her budget would limit her to a weaker candidate pool, and she had not seen a sourcing process that filtered candidates deeply enough to justify the time savings.

We tried a few other agencies and were taking interviews every day. We weren't finding the people we felt were right for the team, and any wrong choice would have meant starting over from step zero.

Julia Lo, Founding Director of Customer Success, US @ Maestra

How Pre-Screening Customer Success Candidates Cut Maestra’s Interview Time

Maestra brought LatamCent in to run sourcing and screening for the Customer Success Manager roles on its new US team. The first two hires came through this process. A third CSM search opened roughly six months later and ran on the same workflow.

Requirements were defined in detail before any candidate was sourced.

Working sessions covered the technical profile, the soft skills, time zone constraints for US customer coverage, and the specific questions Maestra would use to qualify candidates during interviews.

Role descriptions, candidate notes, and interview criteria were saved as living documents, so each new search started from a working baseline instead of from zero.

LatamCent never lost their patience with us. When we weren't getting the results we wanted, they'd dig into it and adjust your approach instead of throwing more people at us.

Julia Lo, Founding Director of Customer Success, US @ Maestra

Screening went deeper than a phone interview.

Each candidate completed a video project and recorded an introduction, which gave Julia a clear view of communication style, structured thinking, and English fluency before any live conversation.

Profiles that did not clear the bar never reached her inbox. The pool stayed small and intentionally relevant.

When Julia rejected candidates, the response was a more acute search, not more volume.

LatamCent reopened the conversation, pulled apart what was missing in the previous batch, and adjusted sourcing criteria. Julia did all the interviewing. Julia made every hiring call. LatamCent’s job was to keep raising the quality of the people who reached her calendar.

Coordination happened inside a shared Slack channel that worked like an extension of the internal team.

The same workflow is what made nearshore staffing for SaaS startups viable for a small founding team like Maestra’s. When the next role opened, the kickoff call was scheduled within hours, prior documents were reopened, and the first round of vetted candidates was on the interview schedule within a week.

A Hire That Changed CargoFax’s Product Speed

For Maestra, the first two hires through LatamCent were the foundation of the new US Customer Success function. Both came in fast, fit the bar Julia had set, and let her start running the team.

Within months, the interview load dropped to candidates with a real chance of being hired. Julia stopped spending full hours on calls she knew were misaligned in the first fifteen minutes. The recovered time went back into onboarding the people she had hired and supporting US customers directly.

The budget question also got an answer. Julia assumed her hiring budget would limit her to a weaker candidate pool.

Working with tech recruiting agencies in Latin America gave her access to candidates who met the salary bar she set for her band, a result she did not expect.

I truly don't think we would have found these people without LatamCent. It opened our eyes to who we could hire with the budget we had while still doing the right thing for the candidates coming in.

Julia Lo, Founding Director of Customer Success, US @ Maestra

When Maestra opened its third CSM role six months after the last hire, the search did not restart from zero.

Role descriptions, prior candidate notes, and interview questions were already in place. Within a week, Julia was back to interviewing vetted candidates, using the same workflow to do the same job as before.

Find Qualified Customer Success Candidates With LatamCent

For Julia Lo and the team at Maestra, working with LatamCent proved that hiring outcomes come from process, not luck. What started as a search for two Customer Success Managers became the basis for how Maestra runs every new US Customer Success search.

LatamCent did not make the hiring decisions. Julia did.

What changed was the quality of candidates reaching her calendar and the time she spent getting them there, with screening, video projects, and Slack-based coordination handled before any live interview.

Now we know the type of net we need to cast to find the right person, and we have a process that actually finds them.

Julia Lo, Founding Director of Customer Success, US @ Maestra

Maestra plans to keep working with LatamCent as the US Customer Success team grows.

The same workflow supports SaaS companies hiring for every function, including: