• The following comments are also pertinent to our Caribbean search perspectives, but the details below focus on our recruitment for positions in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Latin America. 

• For details specifically regarding recruitment in the English-speaking West Indies or in the Caribbean region as a whole, please click here.

ART, an executive search firm founded in the United States in 1987, recruits non-bureaucratic, results-oriented senior managers and middle managers throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as Latin America- and Caribbean-experienced candidates globally for firms seeking to expand, develop, or harmonize their Latin American or Caribbean businesses.

We are especially well equipped to assist companies based outside of Latin America or the Caribbean seeking to either enter these markets or to grow and improve their business units.

We conduct senior management executive search assignments across Latin America and the Caribbean, on the Global, Pan-Americas, USMCA, CAFTA, Mercosur/ Mercosul, Caricom, Latin American, West Indies, sub-regional, or national levels.

Some executive searches are for mission-critical Sole Contributors, while other searches are for Organizational or Business Heads supervising as many as hundreds or thousands of staff members.

All candidates are fluent in English, or with strong English skills. In Latin America, our candidates most typically are bilingual in English and Spanish or English and Portuguese. Some are trilingual, while others have fluency in German, French, Italian, Dutch, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, or other languages.

In the Caribbean, our candidates are English-fluent, often also with language abilities in one or more of the following languages: Spanish, French, Kréyol or Dutch.

In all cases, our objective is always to find candidates who come into their roles with the same business mindset and industry and product knowledge as those of our client-companies, along with the critically important ability to successfully communicate effectively with local staff, suppliers and customers.

THE ART DIFFERENCE: WE HAVE 30 YEARS IN THE LATAM REGION & WE RECRUIT EVERYWHERE!

For many employers seeking candidates for Latin America positions, it can seem daunting to choose between different recruitment firms. ART offers the superior choice, wherever we are needed.




Many recruiters in the U.S., especially in Miami, San Diego, or Texas, for example, will insist to potential clients that they are specialists in Latin American recruitment, when in fact, they personally really are only familiar with candidates and target companies in their immediate cities.


Most commonly, our competitors will then subcontract searches to other recruiters in various Latin American cities or countries. Such 3rd party outsourced agents are often poorly trained, poorly paid, and it cannot be expected that they would "know everyone" either. For example, Mexico is a huge, very well developed market, having many quite varied regional economies, profit-centers, and diverse business styles and attitudes. A recruiter in Mexico City might have no knowledge of Monterrey, Tijuana, Pachuca, San Luis Potosí, Guadalajara, etc., when candidates in such regions might be most suitable for the client. And recruiters in El Paso or Júarez most certainly will have no strong contacts in Mexico City, etc.


And nearly no recruiters in Mexico have deep contacts in Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, etc.- nor do recruiters in those locations know Mexico or the other Latin American countries.





And what if the role involves Portuguese-speaking Brazil, either as the LATAM base or as an important country for the candidate to cover if s/he is not to be based in Brazil?


If the recruiter is based in Brazil, will that Brazilian recruiter thoughtlessly only present candidates for LATAM regional roles who might have good English but who significantly had rarely travelled to other LATAM countries and whose entire work history had been selling to companies only in their own city of São Paulo? Will that Brazilian recruitment firm warn you about certain old-style local mindsets that imagine Brazil as being more related to Europe than to its neighbors, of a "Brazil with its back to Latin America?"


Such candidates we would never think to present, even for Brazil-only roles. We are only interested in forward-thinkers who have the imagination to build larger, stronger markets.


If the LATAM role is based in Brazil, for example, we look for empathetic and culturally engaged Brazilian managers who have track records and strong interest in building the Latin American market as a whole. This is what we also would expect of candidates from Spanish-speaking countries who absolutely must have strong interest in Brazil along with Spanish-speaking countries and regions other than their own.





And we have not yet mentioned the obvious: that any good candidate in any Latin American country is of course not automatically experienced in or capable of handling the entire LATAM region. This should be obvious, but when a key search is done hastily, often this most basic matter is overlooked.

These are the kinds of mistakes that employers make every day because they relied on the wrong recruitment firm to selectively target and evaluate candidates for key LATAM roles.


That recruiters at these other recruitment firms speak Spanish is not adequate for employers who need a recruitment firm that knows all Latin American cities and that knows how to target the best candidates in those countries for their specific and unique business mission.


A recruiter speaking Spanish or being located near the Mexican border is not adequate experience for larger LATAM recruitment roles. Such skills equip them as little as it would an English-speaking recruiter in Cincinnati who might want to claim that his English fluency makes him an expert in "sourcing" candidates in Detroit, Houston, Silicon Valley, Boston, Toronto, London, Johannesburg or Sydney.


Such "Latin America recruitment experts" should similarly be viewed as being Latin America recruitment specialists in the same very limited narrow way that, for example, a mere local Frankfurt recruiter might try to claim to be a "pan-Europe Region expert" or a mere local Tokyo recruiter might pretend to be an all-knowing "Pan-Asia Region expert." Simply being located in Silicon Valley doesn't make you an IT Sector or a Semiconductor Sector expert; you have to train for years to make such claims. Same thing with recruitment on national, regional or global levels. Just being in a place doesn't make you any kind of expert.


That is the difference between ART and our competitors. We actually know what we are doing, and if we don't believe that we are equipped well to help a potential client, we will not take on their search.




ART was founded in 1987 to be Global Executive Search Firm with no local home territory.


When a client comes to ART for a key Latin America search, we start by asking where the candidate needs to be and what objectives that the employer has for that person and business unit several years down the road. Then we headhunt candidates using the "direct approach" method, which targets candidates with the right kinds of experiences, in the right locations, at the proper companies.





Unlike our competitors, we never use advertising, which is always by its nature a luck-based and risky strategy. Our clients do not pay us to be lucky. They hire us because we know what we are doing and because their business mission demands success, not luck.


Depending upon how the employer responds, we might need to focus our work on one particular city or country, or we might need to consider candidates across the entire LATAM region. It might also be useful for the client to consider certain LATAM-experienced candidates who are now in the US, Europe or other areas. We would be ready for all these strategies, which we can conduct simultaneously, usually in 3-4 weeks, because ART recruits everywhere!


When working with ART, the employer could be assured that our candidates would be the best possible available candidates for their specific search, not simply candidates chosen from some recruiter's limited geography that in fact might be the wrong one for that employer.


This is the value of ART. It's called trust, and that is the product of years of hard work, experience and professionalism.

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