The 3 hiring mistakes founders make in Southeast Asia

Three mistakes we see almost every founder make on their first Southeast Asia hire. All three are avoidable. None of them are obvious until after they’ve cost you a good candidate, and by then you’ve usually attributed the loss to something else — comp, timing, “wrong fit” — rather than the actual cause. Here’s the pattern, and here’s how to break it.

Mistake 1: US-market comp bands, quietly applied

You’ve done your research. You know that a senior full-stack engineer in Manila earns significantly less than the same role in San Francisco. So you set your offer band at “generous by local standards” — say, 60% of the SF equivalent — and expect gratitude.

What actually happens: your top candidates look at that number and start doing the math. They wonder whether the 60% ratio will hold as Southeast Asian salaries continue to rise 8-12% annually while SF stagnates. They wonder whether, in three years, they’ll be paid 40% of the SF equivalent instead of 60%. They wonder whether you’ll adjust — and, more importantly, whether they’ll have to fight for that adjustment every cycle. And they quietly opt for a company with more consistent local positioning, even if that company is paying them less today.

The fix isn’t to pay SF numbers. It’s to publish a comp philosophy that anchors on local percentile (“top 15% for this role, this seniority, this city”) and commits to adjusting annually against a local benchmark. Candidates don’t need you to match SF. They need to trust that they won’t be quietly de-rated over time.

Mistake 2: Job specs written for the wrong audience

Almost every founder-authored SEA job spec reads like it was designed to filter out the best applicants. Some real phrases we’ve seen in the last six months:

• “US-based experience preferred.”
• “Native English speaker required.” (Written for a role where every teammate speaks fluent English but has an accent.)
• “BSc from a top-tier university” — with a list of five schools, four of them American.
• “Must have worked at a Silicon Valley company.”

Every one of these lines does two things: it filters out excellent local applicants who lack the specific proxy credential, and it advertises to the applicants who do match that the company hasn’t figured out yet what it actually needs. The best candidates read job specs carefully. If your spec suggests you’re screening for signals of foreign prestige instead of signals of ability, you’re going to attract candidates optimising for signalling and repel candidates optimising for craft.

Rewrite job specs for outcomes and evidence, not credentials. Instead of “Ivy-League CS degree preferred,” write “Comfortable owning a production system with 100k+ MAU end-to-end.” Instead of “US-based experience,” write “Fluent in async written communication and PR-based collaboration.” The former excludes people who could do the job. The latter selects for people who actually can.

Mistake 3: Interviewing at your time zone, not theirs

You book your “quick 30 minutes to chat” at 10am your time. That’s 11pm in Manila, 10pm in Hanoi, 1am in Sydney. The candidate says yes because they’re polite and they want the job, then quietly stops responding to follow-ups because you’ve signalled — before the first substantive conversation — that their evenings aren’t your concern.

Nobody complains about this. They just ghost. And you write it off as “candidate wasn’t serious.” The candidate was serious. You weren’t.

Book at the candidate’s morning, even if it means your evening, for at least the first two rounds. Set the tone that this is a two-way conversation and their time is worth your inconvenience. You’ll close a materially higher percentage of the top of your funnel, and you’ll have a much less painful onboarding experience with the ones who do accept, because they’ve already seen a small version of you respecting time-zone reality.

The candidate is evaluating you at every touchpoint. The interview slot you offer, the tone of the recruiter’s outreach, the speed of your response after the panel — every one of these is a piece of data about what working here will actually be like. Great candidates read all of it.

A fourth one, since we’re here

The one we didn’t put in the title, because we’ve only recently started calling it out: Slack channels named after your headquarters city. #ny-eng, #sf-general, #london-office — every one of these is a low-level signal to your distributed hires that they’re the branch office and the “real” company is somewhere they can’t be. Rename channels by function, not geography. #eng-general is inclusive. #ny-eng is a status hierarchy that no amount of DEI messaging will undo.

The pattern underneath all four

Each of these mistakes has the same root cause: designing the hiring experience for the version of the candidate you’d hire in your home market, and quietly forcing everyone else to accommodate it. It saves you a small amount of effort. It costs you a large amount of top-of-funnel candidate quality, and — more subtly — it sets the template for how those hires expect to be treated for the rest of their tenure.

Getting this right is not expensive. It’s mostly a matter of noticing the pattern and correcting it. But you have to notice, and most founders never do until they’re staring at an offer-accept rate below 50% and can’t figure out why.