Pandemic-era labor shortages made it hard for Austin-based Fetch Package Inc. to fill positions in the US. That led the company, which provides delivery services to marketers, to start looking for engineers elsewhere. Fetch interviewed candidates from Europe and Africa before settling on Latin American workers, in part because of the convenience of their being in the same time zone.
Now about 10% of Fetch’s engineering team is in Argentina, Brazil and Peru. “You can’t tell on a call or through their output who’s based in one location or another,” says Chief Technology Officer Boone Putney. Many résumés he reviews from Latin America often include stops at places including Amazon.com Inc. and PayPal Holdings Inc.
So-called nearshoring—hiring or outsourcing to workers in locales closer to a company’s home market rather than in distant Asia—is all the rage these days in Mexico, where new factories are springing up along the US border, built by US companies shifting operations from China. But nearshoring is also benefiting countries throughout Latin America that aren’t that close to the US.
