HIRING STRATEGY · JUNE 1, 2026 · 8 MIN READ
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- The first call sets the search brief. Whoever takes it determines how accurately the agency can find your hire.
- Most nearshore staffing agencies route discovery calls to sales reps or account managers who then translate the brief to a separate recruiting team. Every translation step loses signal.
- At RS Global, Ravi or Sunny Chhatani (the founders) take every discovery call personally. Both grew up in Lima and built careers at Morgan Stanley, Sinclair Broadcasting, and McCormick.
You are about to compare nearshore staffing agencies. You have three names from a peer referral, a Reddit thread, or a Google search. Each one has a slick site, the same 92 percent retention claim, and a similar pricing range. You schedule three discovery calls and assume you will pick whichever one feels right.
Here is the part nobody talks about. The three calls will sound similar because the same kind of person is taking each one. A sales rep with a script, an SDR working a quota, an account manager whose job is to qualify and hand off. The actual recruiters never enter the conversation. By the time your search brief reaches the team that will source your candidates, it has already passed through two filters.
This post is about what happens on a nearshore staffing discovery call, who should be taking it, and why the answer to that question correlates with the outcome of your hire more than pricing, retention claims, or country of operation. We will compare how the major models in 2026 handle the first call, what the founders at RS Global do differently, and the questions you should ask before you book a single call.
What Happens on Most Nearshore Staffing Discovery Calls
The standard nearshore agency discovery call follows a predictable script. The first five minutes are pleasantries and a quick read of the agency website to confirm what you already know. The next ten minutes are intake questions. Industry, role, headcount target, timeline, budget range, prior experience with offshore or nearshore. The last ten minutes are the agency pitching itself. Retention number, time zone alignment, language proficiency, and the closing ask for a follow-up call with a senior decision-maker.
What does not happen on a standard discovery call is recruiting. The person on the phone is rarely the person who will source candidates. They are not the person who reads through 60 to 100 resumes for your role. They are not the person who runs first-round interviews with shortlisted applicants. They are taking notes that will get summarized in a CRM, forwarded to a recruiting team, and translated into a search brief.
Translation costs accuracy. The person who took your call heard you describe your team and your culture in ten minutes of conversation. The recruiter who actually sources your candidates is reading a 200-word summary three days later. The thing you said about your last hire that did not work out, the way you described the personality traits you were looking for, the specific business owner anxiety you mentioned about job stacking. Most of that does not survive the handoff.
The result is a candidate package that is technically aligned with the role you described but emotionally disconnected from the team you described. The hire is competent. The hire stays for nine months. The hire was never going to be the right person, because the right person was never in the search brief.
The Difference an Owner Makes in the First 20 Minutes
When Ravi or Sunny Chhatani takes your discovery call at RS Global, three things happen that do not happen on a standard agency call.
First, the founder asks about your last hire that did not work out. Not in a generic “tell us about your team challenges” way. They ask for the specific story. The person you hired in 2023 who looked great on paper, the moment in month four when you realized it was not working, what the actual mismatch was. Pattern recognition from 100-plus placements tells them that the answer to that question contains 70 percent of the information needed to find someone better.
Second, the founder identifies things you have not articulated. A business owner who says they want a bookkeeper who is detail-oriented and proactive is describing every bookkeeper ever hired. What they actually need is someone who will push back on the founder when an expense category looks wrong, because the last bookkeeper was too deferential and let three months of misclassified vendor payments stack up. That is the search brief. Owners who have hired across five countries and built three companies of their own can hear what you have not said.
Third, the founder defines the cultural match before the search begins. Ravi and Sunny grew up in Lima. They know what professional norms look like inside a Peruvian workplace. They know which personality types in the Lima talent pool will adapt easily to a US owner-led small business and which will struggle. That match is decided on the discovery call, not after the candidates are shortlisted.
By the end of a 30-minute call with Ravi or Sunny, the search brief is already 80 percent built. Not as a CRM note that will get translated. As a working hypothesis the founders themselves will hand to the Lima recruiting team the next morning.
Three Things Founders Listen For That Sales Reps Cannot
1. The story of the hire that did not work
A sales rep asks for headcount and timeline. A founder asks for the story. Inside that story is the diagnostic information that defines a successful next hire. Owners who have done this themselves recognize the patterns immediately.
2. The way you talk about your team
The vocabulary you use when you describe your existing team tells Ravi and Sunny how you actually manage people. Owners who say “my team” mean something different from owners who say “my employees” or “the operations group.” That language shapes which personalities from the Peru talent pool will fit and which will not.
3. The unspoken non-negotiables
Every business owner has dealbreakers they have not consciously articulated. Communication style. Initiative level. Time-zone work patterns. Comfort with autonomy. A founder who has run hiring conversations for a decade hears these inside the first 15 minutes, even when the client is not raising them directly.
Why Boutique Agencies Can Operate This Way (And Why High-Volume Firms Cannot)
If founder-led discovery is so much more accurate, why do most nearshore agencies not do it? The answer is volume.
A high-volume nearshore firm like Howdy, BairesDev, or Turing runs hundreds of active searches at any given time. The leadership team cannot personally take 200 monthly discovery calls. Their model relies on a sales team to handle intake, an account management layer to translate the brief, and a recruiter pool to execute. The model works because the searches are mostly standardized. Senior developer, full-stack engineer, QA lead. The brief does not need to be highly customized because the candidate pool is largely interchangeable across clients.
A subscription VA service like Wing Assistant or Virtual Latinos solves the volume problem differently. They pre-vet a candidate pool of generalists and match clients from inventory in three to seven days. The discovery call is short because the matching is shallow. You describe your needs in broad terms, the agency picks the best available match from the bench, and the relationship begins.
A boutique like RS Global runs a different volume math. Each year, RS Global places dozens of professionals across industries, with the founders personally involved in every discovery and every final candidate package. The model does not scale infinitely. It is not supposed to. The founders are the constraint, and the constraint is the point. When Ravi and Sunny can no longer personally take every discovery call, RS Global will hire and train a small team in their image rather than handing the work to a sales floor.
The trade-off for the client is simple. A faster intake from a high-volume firm or a deeper intake from the people who will personally vouch for the hire.
Want to see what an owner-led discovery call sounds like?
Ravi or Sunny will take your first call personally. No sales rep, no script, no upfront cost. The call is free. The brief is built in the room with you.
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What to Ask When You Get on the Phone With Any Nearshore Agency
The next time you are scheduling discovery calls with two or three nearshore staffing agencies, ask each one these six questions before the call even begins. The answers will tell you more than the pitch.
Who specifically will be on the call? If the answer is anyone other than a senior recruiter or a founder, the call is intake, not discovery.
Will the person on the call be the person who sources candidates for the role? If the answer is no, ask how the brief gets handed off and how the agency prevents signal loss in translation.
How many active searches does the agency run per month? If the answer is over 50, the founders are not personally involved in your search.
What happens between the discovery call and the first candidate submission? The answer reveals the actual process. “We match you from our pool” means pre-built bench. “We custom-recruit 60 to 100 candidates from scratch” means a custom-built search.
Does the agency verify employment history through any source other than candidate-submitted documents? Peruvian government payroll records are the only verification that catches active job stacking before placement. No US-based agency can access them.
What happens if the hire does not work out? Free replacement, contract lock-in, or partial refund. The answer reveals risk alignment.
The Five Staffing Models in 2026 and Where Owner-Led Sits
Nearshore staffing is no longer a single category. The market fragmented into five distinct models. Knowing which one each agency operates under is the first filter when comparing options.
| MODEL | WHO TAKES THE FIRST CALL | HOW CANDIDATES ARE SOURCED | BEST FIT |
|---|---|---|---|
| Talent Marketplace (Upwork, Fiverr) | No call. You browse profiles. | Self-service search | One-off project work |
| Subscription VA (Wing, ClearDesk, Virtual Latinos) | Sales rep or onboarding specialist | Match from pre-built pool | Generalist admin support, fast turnaround |
| EOR / Compliance Layer (Deel, Remote, Oyster) | Account executive | You source. They employ. | Companies that already found their hire |
| High-Volume Recruiting (Howdy, BairesDev, Turing) | SDR or account manager | Recruiter pool draws from candidate database | Standardized tech roles, fast scale |
| Boutique Custom Search (RS Global) | Founder (Ravi or Sunny) | 60 to 100 candidates sourced fresh per role | Roles that need cultural fit and long tenure |
The first column is the part most buyers skip past. It is the most important column on the table. The person on the first call sets the depth of the search. Everything else in the relationship is downstream.
The RS Global Pattern: What an Owner-Led Discovery Actually Looks Like
Here is what happens in the first 72 hours after you book a discovery call with RS Global.
Hour 0. You book the call through the website or by phone at 410-694-7230. Sunny or Ravi responds personally to confirm the time, typically within 12 hours. No SDR, no scheduling assistant.
Hours 1 to 24. The discovery call. Ravi or Sunny takes 30 to 45 minutes. The conversation covers the role, the team, the culture, the prior hires, the unspoken non-negotiables, and the pace at which you want to move. There is no sales pitch at the end. There is a working hypothesis about who the right hire looks like.
Hours 24 to 72. The founders meet with the Lima recruiting team (Manuel Castillo-Luna leads recruitment, Leticia Contreras Dominguez manages operations) and hand off the brief in person. The recruiting team understands the brief because the founders explained it directly, not because they read a CRM summary.
Days 4 to 21. Custom search runs across 60 to 100 candidates. Three rounds of internal screening. Full government verification stack including Peruvian national payroll records, national ID, academic transcripts, background check, credit check, internet speed test, and workspace photograph. Out of 60 to 100, three or four finalists survive.
Day 22 or so. Three or four candidate packages arrive in your inbox. Each one has a written summary, a custom video interview with questions written specifically for your company, and the full CV. You interview the candidates. You select your hire. RS Global runs onboarding and handles payroll, contracts, HR, and compliance.
The pattern only works because of who took the first call. Everything downstream is shaped by that initial 30-minute conversation. When that conversation happens with the people who own the company, the search brief carries weight from the start.
The Honest Limitation of Owner-Led Discovery
Founder-led discovery has one real cost. Calendar availability. Ravi and Sunny are not on demand 24 hours a day. The typical wait for a discovery call slot is two to five business days, and the call itself runs longer than a sales-rep intake. If you need a candidate sourced by the end of the week, RS Global is not the right partner. Subscription VA services or high-volume firms can move faster on shallower briefs.
If you need a hire who stays for two years, who absorbs higher-judgment work in year two, and who fits the culture you have spent years building, the 30-minute call with the founders is the most important meeting in the entire process. The two to three week search timeline that follows is the process working correctly.
What the First Call Is Actually Worth
A discovery call is not a sales meeting. It is the moment when the agency either invests its most experienced talent in understanding your business or it does not. The cheapest moment in the entire engagement is the moment with the highest impact on the outcome. Every agency knows this. Most agencies still hand the call to a sales rep because the volume model demands it.
Boutique exists to operate against that grain. RS Global was built to put the founders in the room every time, because the founders are the ones who built the playbook and the founders are the ones who will personally stand behind the hire.
The next time you compare nearshore staffing agencies, ask one question before you ask any other. Who is taking the call. The answer will tell you everything.
Book a discovery call with Ravi or Sunny directly
No sales rep, no upfront fees, no contract. A 30-minute conversation with the founders to see if RS Global is the right fit for the hire you are about to make.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is a nearshore staffing discovery call?
A discovery call is the first conversation between a US business and a nearshore staffing agency. The purpose is to define the role, the team culture, the timeline, and the search criteria before any candidates are sourced. The depth of the discovery call directly correlates with the accuracy of the candidates that follow.
Who normally takes a nearshore staffing discovery call?
At most nearshore staffing agencies, the discovery call is handled by a sales development representative, an account executive, or an onboarding specialist. The recruiting team almost never joins the call. At RS Global, the founders, Ravi Chhatani and Sunny Chhatani, personally take every discovery call.
Why does it matter who takes the first call?
The first call sets the search brief. The person on the call interprets your culture, your pain points, and your non-negotiables and translates them into criteria the recruiting team uses to source candidates. Every translation step between you and the recruiters loses signal. The more senior and experienced the person on the call, the less translation is needed.
How long should a nearshore staffing discovery call take?
A genuine discovery call runs 30 to 45 minutes. Calls under 20 minutes are intake, not discovery. The agency is collecting data points to populate a CRM rather than building an actual understanding of the business.
Does RS Global charge for the discovery call?
No. The discovery call is free, with no setup fee, no retainer, and no commitment. RS Global charges nothing until a hire starts. The discovery call is part of the firm’s investment in qualifying whether RS Global is the right fit for the client.
What questions should I ask on a nearshore staffing discovery call?
Ask who will source the candidates, how many candidates the agency typically reviews per role, what verification process the agency runs, what happens if the hire does not work out, and what the timeline looks like from discovery to first candidate submission. The answers will quickly separate boutique custom search firms from high-volume recruiting agencies.
About RS Global Staffing Services
RS Global is a boutique nearshore staffing firm headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland with a recruiting office in Lima, Peru. The firm was founded by Ravi and Sunny Chhatani, both born and raised in Lima with corporate careers at Morgan Stanley, Sinclair Broadcasting, and McCormick. RS Global custom-recruits remote professionals across accounting, administration, customer service, marketing, software development, operations, and HR for US small and mid-market businesses. The founders personally take every discovery call. The firm’s retention rate across placements is 92 percent.
Contact: 410-694-7230 | connect@rsglobalstaffingservices.com | rsglobalstaffingservices.com
RS Global Staffing Services | 1026 South Highland Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21224
rsglobalstaffingservices.com | 410-694-7230 | connect@rsglobalstaffingservices.com