Why I Switched from U.S. Full-Time Employees to Remote Workers—and Never Looked Back

I run two B2B companies and have been interviewing and hiring employees for the last 7 years.

Long gone are the days when people go to work for a company right after school and stay with the same company for 40 years. Simply put, employee-employer loyalty is dead.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average tenure for salary workers is currently 4.1 years. Whether this is the fault of employees, employers, or the hyper-connected society we now live in is up for debate.

One thing is for certain though — hiring employees is an investment, and it’s extremely difficult to get a strong return on any investment in 4.1 years!

Combine this with the rising costs of healthcare, taxes, and recent state legislation, and business owners are now under more pressure than ever to find a way to get work done, at scale, while maintaining high margins.

The math is simple, either raise prices or cut costs.

I found a way to do the latter by hiring remote workers globally, for a fraction of what it costs to hire them in the USA.

Here are the average salaries for the roles I’ve hired for in the past:

  • Technical Recruiter — $70,000/yr
  • Talent Sourcer — $60,000/yr
  • Business Development Representative — $55–70,000/yr + additional comp of $10–30,000/yr
  • Account Executive — $90–200,000/yr
  • Digital Marketing Manager — $80–90,000/yr
  • Operations Manager — $60–100,000/yr
  • Executive Assistant — $65,000/yr

All of these roles can be performed remotely from the Philippines, Latin America, or Asia for $24–36,000/yr including healthcare and taxes, which are usually handled by business process outsourcing companies.

I’m not talking about hiring entry-level people, these are professionals who are fluent in English, have degrees from good universities, 5+ years of experience, and strong work ethic.

Why is this the case?

Massive differences in cost-of-living.

We can observe similar market dynamics within the USA — Salespeople in San Francisco are not better than salespeople in Miami, by virtue of location, but they are paid more because the cost of living in San Francisco is much higher.

Similarly, most employees in the USA are paid more than employees in Latin America, regardless of skill level, due to location alone.

More expensive doesn’t always = higher quality

I don’t have the official tenure stats for these countries, but based on what I’ve seen from my team in the Philippines, employees there have much longer tenure compared to the USA.

There are tons of other roles that can be done remotely from other countries, at a fraction of the cost:

  • Content Writing
  • Graphic Design
  • Video Editing
  • Accounting
  • Bookkeeping
  • Account Management
  • Customer Success
  • Customer Service
  • Technical Support
  • Research and Data Entry
  • Data Analysis
  • Software Development
  • Mobile App Development
  • Medical Transcription
  • Medical Coding
  • Instructional Design
  • Social Media Management

I wish I had known this years ago! In fact, this has worked so well for me over the last few years that I recently started helping other business owners hire globally as well.

Get in touch and we’d be happy to point you in the right direction.

I’m sure there will be some people who read this and claim that it’s unethical or a disservice to people in the USA to hire people from other countries.

I used to think that way as well until I really thought about the purpose of most businesses — is it to create jobs or some sort of altruistic social good? Or is it to create economic value (in the form of goods or services) for as many consumers as possible, while making as much profit as possible?

Let’s be real — we live in a capitalist society and you’ll be hard-pressed to find any successful business owners who quit their full-time jobs and risked their livelihood for the sake of providing jobs.

Jobs are a means to an end (company profit), and believing anything else is a disservice to both employees and employers.