Founding a Customer Success function meant every early hire mattered. Maestra stopped running parallel agency searches and interviewing daily, and started interviewing only candidates with a real shot.
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“I’m very lucky in the people that we’ve been able to bring on, and I truly don’t think we would have found them without LatamCent.”
Julia Lo, Founding Director of Customer Success, US, Maestra
At a glance
- Company: Maestra
- Partner: LatamCent
- Role placed: Customer Success Manager, supporting US-market customers, remote in Latin America
- Hires placed: 2 CSMs
- Speed: First vetted candidates delivered within about 5 business days of kickoff, first CSM from kickoff to signed offer in roughly 3.5 weeks
- Headline result: Several full-hour mismatched interviews a week eliminated, so Julia’s calendar filled with candidates who had a real shot, and each new search reopens in hours instead of restarting from zero
- Cost: Maestra hired experienced CSMs at $80K to $100K. The same role with the same technical skills in the US runs $150K to $175K.
The challenge: a two-person mistake on a team of two
Maestra was standing up a US Customer Success team from scratch. When the team is that small, the first hires are not just headcount. They set the standard for how the function runs as the customer base grows.
That raised the cost of a miss. Get one of the first two hires wrong and the whole thing restarts: offboard, repost, rerun the funnel. Julia felt that weight on every screening call.
So she cast a wide net. She ran the search through multiple agencies at once and pulled referrals from her own network. Interviews were happening almost every day. The pipelines looked fine on paper and missed on the things that decide a founding hire: communication, judgment, and fit with US customers.
The other agencies had one answer to a rejection, which was more volume. Julia got waves of new profiles instead of better-matched ones. A few 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 stacked up. Julia stayed on interviews for the full hour out of respect for the candidate, even when she knew inside fifteen minutes it was not a fit. Several misaligned interviews a week pulled hours away from onboarding the people she had already hired and supporting customers.
“What I like the most about working with LatamCent is feeling heard.”
Why the hesitation about Latin America was smaller than expected
Sourcing in Latin America was not part of Julia’s original plan. She assumed her budget would cap her at a weaker pool, and she had not seen a screening process deep enough to justify the time it would save.
The market difference she braced for mostly did not show up. In her own words, she did not end up approaching the LATAM market very differently. The signal she watched was practical, not cultural: could this person cover US customers sustainably, and did the time zone line up. Time zones did. Any small language gap got closed by strong soft skills and how quickly good candidates adapt.
“It really opened our eyes in terms of who we can hire with the budget that we have, while still making good hires.”
What happened: requirements first, then a short and relevant pool
Maestra brought LatamCent in to run sourcing and screening for the Customer Success Manager role on the new US team.
Requirements were locked before a single candidate went out. Working sessions covered the technical profile, the soft skills, the time zone constraints for US coverage, and the exact questions Maestra would use to qualify candidates. Role descriptions, candidate notes, and interview criteria were saved as living documents, so the next search could start from a working baseline instead of a blank page.
Screening went past a phone call. Each candidate completed a video project and recorded an introduction. That gave Julia a read on communication, structured thinking, and English fluency before any live conversation. Profiles that did not clear the bar never hit her inbox. The pool stayed small and intentionally relevant.
When Julia rejected candidates, the response was a sharper search, not a bigger one. LatamCent reopened the brief, pulled apart what the last batch missed, and adjusted the sourcing criteria. Julia ran every interview. Julia made every hiring call. LatamCent’s job was to keep raising the quality of who reached her calendar.
Coordination lived in a shared Slack channel that ran like an extension of the internal team. When the next role opened, the kickoff call was scheduled within hours, prior docs were reopened, and vetted candidates were on the interview schedule inside a week.
“Instead of us having to spend hours on every single candidate, you had them do a video project and introduce themselves, and you did that pre-screening. It helped us save so much time on our end, but also get the quality of candidates we really wanted.”
The results: fewer interviews, better hires, faster restarts
The first CSM hire set the bar. Months in, Julia held that hire up as the profile to replicate for the next search, which is the clearest retention signal there is.
The interview load changed shape. Julia stopped burning full hours on calls she knew were wrong in the first fifteen minutes. The recovered time went back into onboarding her team and supporting US customers.
The budget question got an answer she did not expect. Julia assumed her band would limit her to weaker candidates. Instead she hired experienced CSMs with real technical depth, the kind of profile that commands $150K to $175K in the US market, for $80K to $100K.
And the second search proved the model was not luck. When a new CSM role opened, the search did not restart from zero. The role description, prior candidate notes, and interview questions were already in place. Within a week Julia was back to interviewing vetted candidates, and that search closed in a second placement.
“When we weren’t getting the results we wanted, you really tried to dig into it to adjust your approach and find the right people, as opposed to just throwing more waves of people at us.”
By the numbers
- Speed to first candidates: roughly 5 business days from kickoff to the first vetted profiles
- Time to first hire: about 3.5 weeks from kickoff to a signed offer on the first CSM
- Repeat search speed: second search reopened within hours of the request and had vetted candidates on the calendar inside a week
- Placements: 2 CSMs placed and live
- Retention and quality: first CSM held up as the profile to replicate for later searches
- US vs LATAM cost: a US SaaS CSM with the technical depth this role requires runs $150K to $175K in 2026, in line with job-posting data showing a median near $130K and top US markets reaching $140K to $185K (Recruiting from Scratch, Wellfound, 2026). Maestra hired the same profile in Latin America at $80K to $100K. That is roughly $60,000 to $75,000 less per hire, close to 45 percent.
What the savings compound to
At roughly $60,000 to $75,000 saved per hire against US comparable pay, two CSMs save Maestra about $120,000 to $150,000 every year those roles are staffed. Holding the team at two CSMs, the cumulative savings stack up fast:
- Year 1: about $120K to $150K saved
- Year 2: about $240K to $300K saved
- Year 3: about $360K to $450K saved
- Year 4: about $480K to $600K saved
- Year 5: about $600K to $750K saved
Over five years, keeping both roles nearshore instead of hiring the same profiles in the US saves Maestra on the order of $600,000 to $750,000, before counting the interviewing hours given back to Julia and her team.
Advice for leaders hiring in Latin America for the first time
Julia went in expecting a hard market to read and found the opposite. Her advice is to stop over-weighting the surface differences.
“Look past some of the small pieces and really dig into the potential someone has, and how quickly they can adapt.”
The market is not the risk. The screen is. If the top of your funnel is filtered on communication, judgment, and real adaptability before you ever get on a call, the geography stops mattering and the hire quality goes up.
Hire your next Customer Success Manager with LatamCent
Maestra’s takeaway is that hiring outcomes come from process, not luck. What changed was the quality of candidates reaching Julia’s calendar and the hours she spent getting them there, with screening, video projects, and Slack-based coordination handled before any live interview.
LatamCent sources, vets, and places pre-vetted Latin American talent in 21 days or less. We handle payroll, compliance, and contracts, and we back every placement with a replacement guarantee. The same workflow that built Maestra’s US Customer Success team works across customer success, sales, engineering, finance, and marketing.
Ready to hire? Explore our Customer Success Manager hiring page and book your next Customer Success hire at latamcent.com
