Opening a new GCC: Lessons from a 1.5-year scale-up

‍Building a high-performing technical team is a challenge.

Building one with over 90 specialists, in a new location, while being 12,000 kilometers away, is an even bigger one.

To do it well, you need more than just a standard hiring process. We believe it requires a people-first approach to talent.

Recently, Maxima Consulting successfully scaled a Costa Rican hub for a US-based enterprise while operating from Poland. By balancing deep technical expertise with business pragmatism, we turned a complex process into a measurable competitive advantage.

Market research and building the foundation

Before the first job description was posted, our team conducted exhaustive market research from our European headquarters.

Many companies just look at CVs, but we believe that’s not enough; you have to go the extra mile to make such a project work out. We studied the entire ecosystem of the Costa Rican talent landscape.

We started with identifying seniors who would become the brand ambassadors. But the size of the project required us to also source mid and junior level employees. Our research focused on:

• Educational pipelines: Identifying top local universities and technical programs.
• Candidate behavior: Discovering that, unlike in Europe, senior Costa Rican experts are highly proactive and frequently apply for roles directly.
• Local infrastructure: Understanding the most effective local job boards and recruitment tools.

By doing the groundwork remotely, we ensured that when we entered the market, we spoke with authority and local relevance.

Cultural alignment while working across 3 countries

One of the most significant complexities of international recruitment is the intersection of different corporate cultures. In this project, we successfully navigated a "cultural triangle":

1. European recruitment standards: Our rigorous, gatekeeper-focused approach.
2. US client expectations: A preference for high-speed, direct involvement from hiring managers.
3. Costa Rican talent pool: A market where stability and employer reputation are what candidates are looking for.

We bridged these gaps by establishing trust-based governance. We demonstrated to the US client that our specialized filtering process delivered higher-quality candidates, reducing the "noise" for their internal teams and accelerating the hiring timeline.

Building a brand from scratch in a new territory

Because the US client was unknown in Costa Rica, we had to build their employer brand alongside the recruitment pipeline. We moved beyond digital interaction to establish a physical presence. The local market has proved to be extremely interesting, it was one of the few times where we’ve seen such proactivity from candidates.

Our strategy included:

• Relationship-building: Our Polish leadership team flew to Costa Rica to forge personal bonds with the first 10 hires, helping them become local brand ambassadors.
• University partnerships: We engaged with lecturers and students to signal long-term commitment to the local economy, not just talent drainage.
• Outcome-obsessed delivery: By focusing on the candidate's long-term potential rather than just immediate skills, we achieved exceptionally high retention rates.
  

Extreme flexibility in talent delivery

In international recruitment, rigid processes often fail.

We encountered a common hurdle: highly skilled candidates who lacked recent English-speaking practice because they worked for local government or domestic firms.

Instead of rejecting these top-tier engineers, we applied business pragmatism. We worked with our client to provide a "ramp-up" period for language fluency.

This flexibility unlocked a pool of senior talent that competitors were ignoring simply because of a temporary communication gap.

Furthermore, we shifted our entire European team's operations to Costa Rican time zones. We believe that if you want to succeed globally, your process must adapt to the market’s reality, not the other way around.