Hi Reader, Daria’s here.

In 2018 I was looking for a business development manager in Nicaragua, and I approached it just like I did in my home country.

Did I succeed? No.

What helped me succeed was finding a local partner to help with the search, and learning that when someone said mañana, it didn’t always mean tomorrow. I really needed to ask for the date.

Lots of companies I know are planning to hire people in the U.S. Most of them will start where I started, with the search itself. But whether that hire works out depends on what you set up before their first day, and that part usually gets skipped.

The Pre-Hire Foundation

In the latest Built by People Leaders episode, I talk with Jolene Risch, Founder & CEO of Risch Results, and Shira Hovav, who leads the firm’s Israeli practice from Tel Aviv, about what breaks when a company hires in the U.S. while headquarters sits 8 to 10 hours away.

Their approach is to finish four pieces of groundwork before your first hire in a new country starts.

Define success at 30, 60 and 90 days. Before you start hiring, write down what this person should have achieved at each point. The role may still change during the search. One Israeli tech company started a search for one role in Dallas, and halfway through it became a different role in a different state. That can happen. What matters is that once you know what you need, you’re clear on what success looks like before the person starts. As Jolene puts it, it helps you find the right person, “and also probably even more importantly, it’s gonna help you onboard that person.”

Build a minimum playbook. Your first U.S. hire shouldn’t have to build everything from zero. Give them a starting roadmap and clear decision rights: what they decide alone, and what you decide together.

Benchmark pay by location. Every country has its own pay levels, and some countries are many labor markets. In the U.S., pay in New York is very different from pay in Kentucky or Louisiana. Price the role with compensation data for the city the person will live in.

Set the communication rhythm. Before day one, agree on a weekly meeting across time zones with a fixed structure, so every open issue gets covered.

Why it works

Two reasons.

First, improvising doesn’t work across a time difference. With an 8 to 10 hour gap, your SDR in the U.S. can’t call the founder and ask, “Should I do this?” A hire with a playbook and clear decision rights keeps moving. For Israeli founders, this takes structure and patience, because U.S. sales cycles run longer.

Second, the same groundwork that improves the hire also helps you keep the person. Success criteria give you something concrete to test candidates against, and later they become the onboarding plan. That matters because the first U.S. hire is often alone, with no office and maybe one colleague in another city.

Try it this week

Take the role you plan to open in a new country. On one page, answer these questions:

“What must this person deliver by day 90? What does progress look like at day 30 and day 60? Which three decisions do they make alone, and which three do we make together? What does this role pay in the city where they’ll live? When is our weekly meeting, and does that time work for both sides?”

Any question you can’t answer yet shows you where to work before the job post goes live.

Continue the conversation

The full episode covers the rest: why the best person for your job won’t apply to your post (Jolene calls it “post and pray”), why a sales hire who sold into your target customer beats one who worked there, and why the CHRO’s job in market expansion is to be the translator. You can listen on your favorite platform.