One of the hardest tasks I encountered when I started EasyBroker was finding and hiring talent in Buenos Aires. If I were to hire someone back home in the States I would have gone through my network of colleagues and friends and ask for recommendations. When you move to a new country you lose most of your work and school related connections and creating a building a new network can take quite some time. So without a network to fall back on I ended up posting our job openings to every job based website I came across. These are the websites that I found most useful for recruiting and finding talent in Buenos Aires.
Craigslist is the first place I went to and it’s a great source for looking for expat talent but very few Argentineans use it. I did get lucky and find an excellent Argentinean software engineer but overall it generated very few referrals for local tech and design talent. I also hired a few executive assistants from this site, all expats, but overall if you’re looking for local talent and in particular software developers or designers, you’ll probably have better luck with one of the sites below.
ZonaJobs is my top choice for looking for local tech talent, from designers to engineers. The site by far generated the most amount of candidates and I recall hiring at least one software developer from here. It’s also free but only in Spanish which is also true for all the websites except for Craigslist. If you don’t speak Spanish, find a bi-lingual assistant with Craigslist and then continue your search.
I also used CompuTrabajo and UniversoBit which generated quite a few candidates and I hired a designer from a response from CompuTrabajo. I can’t say whether one is better than the other but they’re both free and worth the time to post your job openings to.
All my recent hires have been through connections so I haven’t used any of the sites in a while and I imagine there are some other great options available now. One that I would definitely try out now is OLX. They have a lot of traffic and definitely generate a lot of real estate leads for our clients so I imagine they could do the same for job candidates.
If you’re looking to hire and have the time you should use all the sites. They’re all free and have worked for me in the past. I left out 15 or so other sites that we tried that turned out to be mostly a waste of time. If you think I’ve missed a good job website for Buenos Aires, please let me know by leaving a comment.
Best of luck hiring!
Quick Update
I received an email stating that I should include Bumeran.com. I didn’t because the site didn’t work well for us. We paid to place our job posts and see the CVs of candidates in their database but I found that the other sites worked better and didn’t charge anything or nag me with sales calls and emails after terminating the service. I’m not sure if they still charge or not but at the time it didn’t work for us.