By Maximiliano Torres. “Passive Candidates”. I’ve been sourcing IT talent across Latin America for over 8 years. Most of the best hires I’ve been part of started with someone who wasn’t actively looking. If your searches keep coming up short, this is probably why.
Here’s something I tell companies when they come to us after months of searching: the problem isn’t your job description, your salary range, or your interview process.
The problem is that the person you’re trying to hire isn’t reading job posts.
They’re working. They have a role that pays reasonably well, a team they tolerate, and a project that keeps them busy enough. They haven’t updated their resume in two years. They’re not on job boards. And if they’re on LinkedIn, they’re not checking it looking for your opening.
This is the passive candidate. And in LATAM tech, especially for senior and specialized roles, they represent the vast majority of the talent worth hiring.
I work with companies across Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil that are trying to fill exactly these roles: SAP consultants, senior backend engineers, database architects, DevOps specialists, engineering leads. The pattern I see is almost always the same. The company posts the role, waits, gets applications from people who are actively looking, interviews a few, makes an offer or two, and either makes a mediocre hire or keeps the position open. Months pass.
What they’re missing is access to the 90% of the market that isn’t visible through standard channels.
Why this problem is worse in LATAM than you think
Senior tech talent in Latin America behaves differently than in markets like the US or Western Europe, where job-hopping every 18 months is standard practice and the market is constantly churning.
Here, experienced professionals tend to stay in roles longer. Cultural factors around stability and loyalty play a role. So does the fact that the internal market for truly senior positions is smaller, which means people don’t have the same constant pressure from recruiters that keeps North American engineers perpetually aware of what else is out there.
According to LinkedIn’s Global Talent Trends research, 70% of the global workforce consists of passive candidates. For senior and specialized tech roles in LATAM, that number is significantly higher. When I’m filling a senior SAP SD position or a database architect role, the realistic pool of people actively looking at any given moment might be five to ten people across the entire region. The passive pool is ten times that.
If you’re only seeing applicants, you’re seeing maybe 10% of who’s actually available. The other 90% are working right now and have no idea your company is hiring.
What happens when you only access the active market
This is worth being direct about, because I think a lot of companies don’t fully appreciate the selection effect at play.
The candidates who are actively looking are, on average, a different population than those who aren’t. Some are actively looking because they’re great and they know it and they want better. But a meaningful percentage are looking because something isn’t working in their current situation, whether that’s performance, culture, or a role that didn’t turn out as expected.
When your entire candidate pool comes from active applicants, you’re filtering out the people who are genuinely performing well and have no reason to be on the market. The best SAP consultant in Buenos Aires is probably not on any job board right now. Neither is the senior DevOps engineer in Medellín who built and runs a production infrastructure serving millions of users. They’re both working, being productive, and not thinking about your opening.
This doesn’t mean active candidates are bad. It means relying exclusively on them limits you to a subset of the market where the very best candidates are underrepresented.
Why this is hard to solve internally
Companies figure this out eventually and try to address it. They tell their recruiters to do more proactive sourcing. They buy LinkedIn Recruiter licenses. They start sending InMails.
The results are usually disappointing, and there’s a structural reason for that.
Reaching passive candidates effectively requires something that can’t be built quickly: a pre-existing network of relationships in specific technical communities. A passive candidate who gets a cold InMail from a company they’ve never heard of, with a message that could have been sent to a hundred people, has zero reason to respond. The cost of not responding is zero. They have a job.
The conversion rate on cold outreach to passive candidates is low. It’s not that the approach doesn’t work at all, it’s that it only works when the outreach is specific enough and credible enough for the person to believe it’s worth 20 minutes of their time. Building that credibility from scratch takes months, and most internal teams don’t have the time or the existing relationships to do it at the level that moves the needle for specialized technical roles.
What actually drives responses from passive candidates is warm outreach through a trusted intermediary, or outreach from someone who has an established presence in the specific technical community the candidate is part of. Those relationships take years to build. And they’re exactly what a specialized recruiting partner brings to the table.
The roles where this matters most
Not every hiring problem is a passive candidate problem. If you’re hiring junior developers or mid-level engineers in common stacks, there’s enough active-market supply that a well-run job posting process can work fine.
The passive candidate problem becomes critical in specific situations.
Highly specialized roles. SAP consultants, particularly in modules like SD, FICA, or ABAP, represent a small community. Most of the experienced ones are employed and not looking. The same applies to cloud architects, senior data engineers, and security specialists. For these roles, if you’re not reaching the passive market, you’re not really searching.
Senior and leadership roles. Engineering managers, tech leads, and staff engineers with strong track records are almost never actively looking. The ones who are periodically open to a move respond to relationships and specific opportunities, not job posts.
Roles that have been open for more than 60 days. If a position has been posted for two months and nothing has clicked, the active market has been exhausted. The only path forward is passive sourcing, and the longer the role stays open, the more damage it does to your existing team through workload and morale.
Roles where the market is geographically dispersed. When the best candidates for a role are distributed across Argentina, Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico, sourcing them requires presence and relationships across all of those markets. That’s not something you can replicate from a single location without the right network already in place.
What working with the passive market actually looks like
When a company brings a hard-to-fill role to us, we’re not starting a search from scratch. We’re accessing a network that’s been built over years across LATAM tech communities.
We know who the senior SAP consultants in the region are, where they’re working, and roughly what it would take for them to consider a move. We know the database architects, the DevOps leads, the engineering managers. Not because they applied somewhere. Because we’ve been building those relationships for years through technical communities, referral networks, and searches we’ve run in these same specializations.
When we reach out to a passive candidate about a role, it’s not a cold InMail. It’s a message from someone they already know, or a referral from someone they trust, with specific information about a role that’s actually relevant to them. That’s why our searches in specialized roles close faster and with better candidates than what most companies can achieve through direct sourcing.
The other thing we bring is market intelligence that’s hard to get any other way. We know what senior SAP consultants in Argentina are actually earning right now, not what surveys say from six months ago. We know which companies are seen as attractive employers by the passive market and which aren’t. We know when a candidate pool in a specific specialization has tightened because two or three companies are running simultaneous searches. That context changes how you approach a search and what you offer.
If your search isn’t moving, this is probably the conversation to have
If you’ve had a role open for more than 45 days, or if you’ve made offers that didn’t close, or if every candidate you’re seeing feels like a compromise, the most useful thing I can do is spend 30 minutes understanding what’s happening and telling you honestly whether it’s a passive candidate problem or something else.
Sometimes it’s compensation. Sometimes it’s the process. Sometimes it’s the role definition. But often, especially for senior and specialized technical roles in LATAM, it’s access. And that’s something we can help with directly.
📩 maxi@hroasis.com 🔗 Connect with Maximiliano on LinkedIn
