Hiring & Retaining Top LatAm Software Talent – with Sergio Murillo of Coderland

In this week’s episode of the Outsource Accelerator Podcast, Derek is joined by Sergio Murillo, VP of Sales and Marketing at Coderland. 

They converse about Coderland’s strategies in employing good developers as well as the overall direction of the industry. 

Coderland

Sergio is Coderland’s VP of Sales and Marketing, and has been at his role for over two years. He starts by introducing his company, Coderland. 

“Coderland is a rapidly growing Panamanian-Spanish group specializing in staff augmentation and software development.” 

The company is headquartered in Panama City, but also handles production centers in Spain, Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador. From beginning with seven clients at its founding in 2019, Coderland has now expanded to deal with more than 75 partners in 21 countries. 

Sergio asserts that “Our main focus is the developer wellbeing, and we’ve been able to scale and build long-lasting partnerships with this model.” 

Coderland promotes remote work, which Sergio explains enabled them to weather through the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“The business model is 100% remote work. The company grew a lot during COVID and now we maintain the same clients. We were already prepared for the COVID situation.” 

Coderland primarily focuses on its staff augmentation services, using an approach of establishing a team to help oversee operations. 

“We offer to the client a team of three people; a project manager, sales director, and account manager. The client can hire more developers, but those three form the team.” 

Finding and retaining the top IT staff in Latin America

Sergio explains that Coderland mostly caters to Latin American companies to keep their developers happy in their comfortable time zones. 

“If you want to hire good talent… they receive a lot of offers from different companies, and they don’t want to start the day working at 3 AM because they’re going to receive another job offer [where] they can start at 10.

So that’s why we keep the time zone within ours, because it’s important to keep [and] retain the talent.

He goes on to outline Coderland’s other strategies for retaining talent. 

“We created a new concept called Software Talent As A Service model. And it’s not just about connecting companies with IT talent, but creating an environment where developers want to stay, grow, and innovate.

Our approach is simple and based on perks and benefits that we provide to our employees, such as first-rate co-living and co-working spaces.” 

Additionally, they also offer different salary payment options, health insurance coverage, professional growth, and personal wellbeing. 

Sergio says that this strategy has produced excellent word-of-mouth, enabling them to find new developers when needed. 

“It’s a small industry, and [there are] really a small market of developers in Latin America.

Word of mouth is really important. 

So when developers join Coderland, they explain to their friends about the benefits, how good this is working for [us], and our developers become Coderland ambassadors in that market.”

Innovating with AI

Coderland is keeping in step with AI’s evolution in the industry. 

“We’re creating an AI laboratory in the Canaries. We’re going to train and educate our developers in innovative AI methods and programming. 

And we can promote these developers in AI projects [to] different companies. So we are really concerned about the new languages, technologies, [and] AI.” 

With his perspective on the developer side, he cautions clients to set expectations. 

“Everyone wants to know about AI [and] include these new strategies in the business model, but the reality is it’s going slowly.

That’s why companies such as Coderland are investing in generating teams of AI developers.” 

Feel free to reach out to Coderland through their website here. You can also get in touch with Sergio via his LinkedIn profile.   

As always, if you want to ask us anything, you may drop us a line at [email protected].