Eugenio del Solar started recruiting in 2010 at a small firm in Costa Rica, studied for a master's in Spain, and spent years inside a Big Four practice before founding IKS (I Know Someone), his own talent acquisition and career transition firm.
Nick Livingston sat down with him to talk about how the Latin American market actually works, why external recruiting firms are moving faster than enterprise TA on new tools, and why the answer to "do you have candidates for me?" is never just "not yet."
LATAM is not one market
Costa Rica, Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic look like one large talent pool from a headquarters spreadsheet. Eugenio's point is that they behave nothing alike. Costa Rica offers a skilled, bilingual workforce in a secure country with good weather, and a pool small enough that competition for strategic talent is intense. What you pay, what you offer, and what people already believe about your company all matter more when the market can compare notes.
"The things that you do around your own reputation as a business in a very small market is going to be critical."
Fortune 500 manufacturing and shared service centers in San Jose support operations in the US and Europe, and all of that talent is fed locally. Those companies run their own TA teams, and they still hit the ceiling of a small pool. That is where headhunters come in, searching Mexico or Colombia and bringing talent across, or absorbing requisition volume the internal team cannot cover.
Why external recruiting firms move faster on new tools
Local operations usually inherit a global stack. Eugenio spent four years getting one ATS approved, working through data encryption questions, data residency requirements, and layer after layer of global review. A tool that works at HQ does not automatically work in the local office, and the approval path for anything better is long.
Boutique firms and RPO teams can trial a tool, change a workflow, and keep what works. That gap is where a lot of the real innovation in LATAM recruiting is happening right now. Eugenio also makes the case that a fresh set of eyes on a client's recruiting process is a deliverable in itself, because an obsolete stack rarely needs a huge investment to move forward.
Recruiting as advisory work, not resume forwarding
Candidates are worried about being filtered before a human ever hears them. Companies are taking reputation damage from how they deploy AI. In a region where hiring runs on relationships, the tools that win are the ones that give recruiters time back rather than remove the recruiter. Eugenio's advice to anyone job hunting right now is that networking matters more than it did ten years ago, precisely because of that fear.
"Technology should be strengthening human judgment, not replacing it."
That leads to his clearest challenge to the profession. Talent acquisition has to be perceived as a business advisory service, which means knowing whether you are using the right technology, whether it is configured properly, and why candidates are reacting the way they are. On whether AI is coming for recruiting jobs, his answer is direct. The human skills used in recruiting cannot be reproduced by AI yet, and the role is moving toward advisory work rather than away from it.
Talent delivery and the data you already have
Sourcing tools find people. An ATS tracks them and keeps you compliant. Everything in between, the scheduling, the calls, the interview guides, the notes, the candidate presentations, the write-ups, and the scorecards, has historically been pieced together outside both. Eugenio learned the language of deliverables in consulting, and it applies exactly here: at the end of the day you have a client, and you need to hand them proof of your work and the quality of it. That middle is what they actually judge you on.
Which brings us to the closing exchange, the one to save. A hiring manager asks if you have candidates. "No candidates yet" is not an answer, because there is nothing behind it. From the moment a search opens you have data: who responded, what the market said about the salary, which locations disqualified themselves, what you have uncovered and unpacked. Even "I just started and I have reached out to nobody" is data. Most recruiters still do not use any of it.
Also in this episode
- Where LATAM sits on talent acquisition innovation, and why Costa Rica has room to leapfrog
- Why "we got an ATS" is not news anymore when you are talking to a consultant
- The missing recruiter and HR community in Costa Rica, and the case for building one
- Recruiters as real-time market intelligence on compensation and competitors
Connect with Eugenio
Eugenio del Solar, Founder, IKS (I Know Someone)
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