Leandro Cabrini

Leandro Cabrini runs a recruitment agency and had never run one before. His background is marketing, a performance marketing agency and an e-commerce brand, both of which he staffed out of Latin America. Clients and agency friends started asking him to hire for them the way he hired for himself. He said no for a while, then ran it as a side project, and three months later it was out-earning the marketing agency, so he went all in. Proppel now places marketing and operations people across LATAM, the US and Canada. Sixty percent of the work is marketing roles, the brand-to-agency split is roughly even, and the single most requested role is video editor, with graphic designer second. Those two alone are about thirty percent of revenue. The one growing fastest is creative strategist.

Mike has run the same play at a scale most founders never reach. Freshly ended with 2,500 full-time employees and more than 700 international ones, across Belarus, Poland, the Philippines, South Africa and Latin America, and Petfolk is building Latin American engineering teams now. Across all of those hires he never once recruited in-market himself, not even when Belarus was a hundred-person office with its own building. The reason is the argument of the episode. A mid-tier engineer in the US cost him $150,000 to $175,000, and that same budget in Belarus bought a person the US market paid $400,000. He is blunt that the saving was never the objective: the question was whether they could go and get someone they technically could not afford.

Leandro's version of the same idea is about time rather than headroom. The saving is real, he will say up to eighty percent on salary, but what it buys is the ability to hire earlier than revenue would otherwise allow, and three months earlier is three months of the founder's own attention handed back. He is precise about the numbers underneath it. A good creative strategist in the US is $100,000 to $150,000 base plus bonuses; the equivalent in Latin America is $6,000 to $8,000 a month, with no FICA or SUTA on top because these are contractors. He does no part-time and no temporary work at all, only full-time permanent people working exclusively for one company, on the grounds that anything else does not retain.

The method he gives away is the most useful part of the hour. Write the list of tasks before you write the job description, because the person who edits your video is not the person who runs your calendar, and asking for both is buying a lottery ticket. Know the purpose of every interview stage before you sit down, and always set a test project. Then build the onboarding, because everyone can hire and almost nobody onboards: SOPs, guides, a named person responsible. He priced the company the same way he argues, turning down the familiar model of charging $3,000 a month and passing perhaps $1,000 of it to the candidate, in favour of a one-off fee payable only on a hire, with a three-month guarantee.

Mike's closing note is the one to keep. Operators measure the cost of hiring and almost never measure the cost of not hiring, which is the larger number and the harder one to see. He also discloses the relationship plainly in the first minute: Proppel is the show's launch sponsor, he found them through Google and ChatGPT, and he was a client before he was a partner.