Pablo Gerboles Parrilla grew up playing golf in León, a mid-sized city in northwest Spain. Had he stayed, he would have spent years beating the same forty players at the same regional tournaments. He left because the competition he needed lived somewhere else, and long after he traded golf for company building, he noticed that most founders still hire as if the opposite were true.
Nobody really decides to hire locally. It happens because the posting goes on a local board, the referrals come from friends of friends, and interviews are easier when everyone can find the office. Gerboles Parrilla runs several companies from Costa Rica with people scattered across a dozen time zones, and he thinks the habit costs founders far more than they realize. There are usually warning signs. Here are five.
- The Role Has Been Open for a Quarter
Ninety days is a long time for a position to sit empty. At that point, the local market has told you what it has, and it doesn’t have the person you’re looking for. The skill set may be rare. Maybe the three people in town who have it are happily employed and expensive. Either way, reposting the same job with a fresh date changes nothing, and the usual next move, quietly loosening the requirements, just trades a hiring problem for a performance problem you’ll meet again in six months.
Gerboles Parrilla, an athlete-turned-founder who built his companies without outside investment, sees a stalled search as an opportunity. “There’s no reason to limit yourself to local talent when you can build distributed teams across the world with specialists who’ve already done what you’re trying to do,” he says. Somewhere out there is a person who has solved your exact problem, probably more than once. It would be a strange coincidence if she happened to live twenty minutes from your office.
- You Are Paying for the Zip Code
Salaries in expensive cities are expensive mostly because the cities are. A senior developer in Miami or Austin costs what she costs because the cost of living is brutal, and companies pay it, which then becomes the market rate. When the job requires being in the building, this structure makes sense. But it becomes much harder to defend when the entire job happens inside a laptop.
Hiring globally reprises the role of what the person can actually do. For some lean companies, a single salary might be a tenth of payroll, and that difference is real. Gerboles Parrilla runs the same concept across his entire portfolio, from software infrastructure to the performance marketing agency he deliberately keeps small. In his experience, the savings rarely get pocketed, they usually become a second hire, that the original budget never could have covered.
- Every Problem Gets Solved the Same Way
Hire ten people from the same city, and there’s a good chance they’ll share similar backgrounds—many went to the same schools, worked at the same companies, and approach problems in similar ways. That can feel like great chemistry until the business runs into something no one on the team has dealt with before. A global team brings a wider range of perspectives shaped by different industries, economies, and ways of working. When people feel comfortable sharing those perspectives, teams uncover better ideas, challenge assumptions, and often find solutions that wouldn’t have surfaced otherwise.
A marketer in São Paulo has probably worked through economic ups and downs that most US teams have only read about. An engineer in Warsaw may have already solved scaling problems your company hasn’t run into yet. Businesses spend thousands bringing in outside experts for that kind of experience, while overlooking people who could bring it to the team every day.
- Your Company Sleeps Eight Hours a Night
With everyone in one time zone, deploys wait for the morning, support tickets age overnight, and the bug someone spots at 11 p.m. gets fixed the next day after coffee. But if you spread the team out across timezones, and the clock starts working for you. When the day ends in one country and it picks up in another, and the coverage stops depending on working hours.
It takes real discipline to make this structure work, though. Gerboles Parrilla leans on the automation-first thinking, ensuring handoffs run on documented systems rather than on memory and goodwill. Without that clarity layer, a global team mostly means confusion in more languages. Implementing project management tools and clear communication protocols can effectively bridge that gap, and leverage teams across time zones.
- You Hired the Best Person Available
Most founders have been there. A role has been open for weeks sometimes even months, and the pressure to fill it starts to outweigh the search for the right person. Eventually, someone who checks most of the boxes gets the offer because the team needs help now.
For smaller companies, that decision carries more weight than it does at a large organization. On a team of eight, every hire has a noticeable impact on how quickly the business moves and how well the team works together.
As Gerboles Parrilla puts it, “Stay small long enough to become big enough.” That philosophy only works when every person on the team adds real value. Sometimes the best candidate isn’t the one who’s closest to your office, but the one with the right experience, regardless of where they live. Searching for talent beyond a single city or country gives you a much better chance of finding the person you actually want, instead of the best person who was available nearby.
Redrawing the Map
Sometimes the best person really does live across town, and you should hire her. The real challenge is when geography makes the call before anyone has looked further. All five signs trace back to the same thing: a search area that was created years ago, and nobody has questioned since.
Gerboles Parrilla left Spain because he knew the people who would push him to improve weren’t all in one place. The strongest competition and the biggest opportunities to learn, were somewhere else. He approaches building companies the same way.
For him, geography isn’t the first filter, their ability is. Expanding the talent search beyond your local market means you don’t have to compromise when the right person isn’t close by. Over time, those hiring decisions compound and shape the quality of the team and, ultimately, the direction of the company.
