Country Does Not Decide A Good Media Buyer
Zack AllenNovember 7, 20261:11
Founders love a rule like "only hire from Brazil" or "never from the Philippines." It's the wrong filter.
At my recruitment firm we've vetted over 40,000 candidates in the past three years and interviewed people from roughly 100 countries. One thing that has never predicted how good someone is at media buying: the country they live in.
I still hear it on calls all the time. "I'm only hiring media buyers from Brazil." "I'd never hire a media buyer from the Philippines." When I push on where that belief comes from, it's almost always one of two things.
Where country rules come from
One bad hire. They hired one person from that country, it didn't work out, and the whole country got the blame.
Twitter. Someone with a big following said it with confidence, and it stuck.
Neither is a hiring process.
The local-hire test
Sometimes I flip the question around: what if you hired someone local, from the US? Would you just assume they're good?
Usually the answer comes back quickly. No. You'd still have to figure out whether they can actually do the job.
So how do you figure that out? Here's the process I see most often: read the resume, skim a few case studies, do a 30-minute interview, hire. Then the hire doesn't work out, and the country gets the blame.
What actually tells you if they're good
For a media buyer, and honestly for any role, you need actual proof they can do the job. Not a resume. Not a case study you can't verify. Give them real work that looks like your ad account and see what they do with it.
Once you have that proof, the passport stops mattering.
Drop the country filter. Keep the proof filter.
Transcript
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The country a media buyer lives in does not determine how good they are at running ads. In my recruitment firm, we've vetted over 40,000 candidates over the past three years and taken interviews with people from like 100 different countries. And you know what didn't determine how good they were at their job, especially for media buying, is what country they're from. Sometimes I'll talk to a business owner who was like either pro or against these certain countries.
They're like, oh, I'm only going to hire from Brazil for a media buyer or I would never hire a media buyer from the Philippines. And once I dive into it, challenge that belief, it usually comes from firsthand experience. Maybe they hired one guy and they ended up not being what they expected. Or two, they saw it on Twitter and ran with it. Now, sometimes I'll take it a step further and and reframe around hiring from the US, hiring locally.
You think that if you were hiring someone locally, they would just already know everything and then they're like, oh, no. No, they wouldn't. I'd still have to figure out if they're actually good or not. What do you use to figure out if they're good or not? And the process I've seen so many people follow is just like, oh, I looked at their resume and I read some of their case studies and I took a 30-minute interview with them and then they wonder why the hire didn't work out.
With a media buyer or put especially any role, you have to have actual proof they can do the job.
