BACKMany teams consider one hire to “cover everything” – one person expected to handle everything from SEO and content to social media, video, and strategy. That’s the unicorn myth: the all-in-one employee.
But hunting for that perfect all-rounder often causes more harm than good. In reality, these candidates are extremely rare, costly, and unsustainable. Chasing them drags out hiring, inflates salaries, and sets individuals up for burnout while leaving critical skill gaps unfilled.
That’s why many U.S. companies are shifting focus. Instead of searching endlessly for unicorn hires, they’re building structured offshore teams in Vietnam, where diverse skills come together to drive scalable growth. This shift is redefining how companies scale with confidence and clarity.
Table of contents
The reality of unicorn hires
1. The impossible expectations
Leaders often design roles that expect one person to “do it all” – an all-rounder in marketing, or a hybrid admin/operations/finance role where one person is expected to juggle too many disciplines. On paper, it looks efficient, one hire handling invoices, contracts, budgets, and logistics.
In reality, these job descriptions don’t reflect ambition. In practice, it exposes overloaded teams, blurred lines between roles, and cost pressure crowding out capability. The effect: slower cycles, inconsistent quality, and limited headroom to expand, exactly what ambitious companies want to avoid.
When someone wears too many hats, deadlines slip, quality suffers, and focus is lost. Creativity in campaigns suffers, financial accuracy weakens, and admin tasks pile up. It’s not laziness, just human limits. One person can’t excel equally across too many domains for long.
2. The real cost of unicorns
Even when companies manage to hire such “perfect” candidates, the cost is steep. In the U.S., senior generalists command premium salaries and benefits, plus recruiting overhead, tools, and retention spend.
Take this as an example: A digital marketer expected to lead SEO/PPC, write content, design creatives, and build and launch landing pages. That breadth forces trade-offs: slower campaigns, thinner creative, and stalled experiments, even with a premium package.
Burnout adds to the problem: overloaded roles lead to stress, declining productivity, and high turnover. One person spread across multiple disciplines can’t sustain quality, which erodes both morale and output.
The cost of one overextended hire could fund a full offshore team, with specialists dedicated to Admin, Customer Support, Digital Marketing/Design, Finance, and IT. These teams not only reduce expenses but also create room to scale. Surveys show that 65% of companies outsource to focus on core functions, while 63% highlight cost savings as a key advantage.
Why one person can’t replace a team
1. Depth vs. breadth
When companies try to fold too many disciplines into a single role, depth is the first thing to disappear. Take digital marketing as an example: asking one person to manage SEO, content, paid ads, and social media may look efficient, but it quickly stretches them thin. None of those areas gets the dedicated time and focus it requires, leading to inconsistent performance and missed opportunities.
Specialists, by contrast, bring dedicated expertise. A full-time SEO professional can track algorithms, optimize site structure, and refine performance with precision. And within a team, responsibilities are shared, eliminating single points of failure and creating space for collaboration and peer review.
The outcome is more resilient, consistent, and higher-quality work than any one person could sustain alone.
2. Sustainability and scalability
Relying heavily on a single person for many critical tasks is brittle. If that person leaves, falls ill, or becomes overwhelmed, the business can lose not only output but also institutional knowledge and continuity. That causes delays, disruptions, and strategic drift.
On the other hand, an embedded offshore team, spanning industries such as Financial Services, Healthcare, Professional Services, Retail and eCommerce, and Technology, compounds expertise over time and makes scaling far more predictable. With this structure, growth becomes manageable: onboarding is faster, roles are well-defined, handovers run smoothly, and expansion happens with fewer disruptions.
A smarter alternative: Building offshore teams
1. Why Vietnam makes sense
Vietnam has a young, digitally fluent workforce with a median age of 33.4, making it well aligned with the evolving needs of U.S. businesses. Each year, around 60,000 IT and computer science graduates enter the market, ensuring a strong pipeline of engineers, developers, and analysts, alongside professionals in marketing, finance, and design.
These strengths are supported by long-term education reforms and initiatives like the National Foreign Languages 2020 Project, which raised English proficiency to global standards. Combined with competitive labor and infrastructure costs, this talent base offers both quality and scalability, with professionals increasingly recognized as technically capable and culturally adaptive for U.S. businesses and international markets.
2. Outsourcing 2.0 in action
Outsourcing has moved beyond cost-cutting toward Outsourcing 2.0 – a value-driven model that builds offshore teams for expertise, innovation, and long-term impact.
Rather than relying on freelancers or “whatever’s available”, businesses embed full-time offshore staff in tailored, purpose-driven roles that act as true extensions of their in-house teams, ensuring consistency, alignment, and accountability
Recruitment in this model is intentional and role-specific, with teams trained and integrated into company systems from the start. Collaboration and knowledge sharing become seamless, handovers smoother, and scaling predictable. For U.S. companies, Outsourcing 2.0 combines efficiency with resilience, offering a smarter way to grow in today’s global market.
Real-world example: From unicorn chasing to team building
A mid-sized eCommerce business once searched for a “do-it-all” marketing manager to handle SEO, content, design, paid ads, and social media. Despite months of interviewing, the candidate pool was thin: the few promising hires demanded high compensation, and none could deliver the full scope with the depth required. Performance was inconsistent, some campaigns underperformed, and costs were mounting.
Rather than continuing the hunt, the company shifted strategy. They built a Vietnam-based marketing support team consisting of full-time professionals focused on specific disciplines: one SEO specialist, a content writer, a graphic designer, and a social media specialists. They onboarded these team members, integrated them into their internal tools, set KPIs, and aligned workflows as though the offshore team were part of their staff.
Within six months, results showed up clearly: content output doubled, website traffic from organic search climbed by over 40%, and cost per lead dropped by nearly 35%. Additionally, campaign turnaround times improved, there were fewer bottlenecks and handovers, and the business could plan growth more reliably rather than scrambling every quarter for “the perfect hire.
What leaders should be asking instead
When shifting focus from unicorn hires toward offshore teams, senior leaders need to rethink the questions they bring to the table. Instead of “How do I find a unicorn?”, these three questions guide smarter decisions:
1. Which skills do I need constantly, and which are occasional?
Break down which competencies truly drive daily performance. Many U.S. companies outsourcing to Vietnam rely on web developers, QA, and digital marketing specialists for consistent demand, while occasional needs, like seasonal campaigns or data spikes, are better handled by flexible roles or external support.
2. Where can a team improve quality and free up senior staff?
Embedding offshore staff removes routine burdens from senior leaders, allowing them to focus on strategy and growth. Vietnam-based teams bring technical proficiency, good English communication, and reliable output, reducing errors and improving workflow efficiency.
3. How can offshore support turn cost pressure into ongoing capability?
In the U.S., rising salaries, office costs, and benefits make scaling expensive. Offshore teams in Vietnam reduce staffing costs, but the benefit goes beyond savings. With full-time staff, clearly defined roles, and shared workflows, businesses build predictable, sustainable capacity that scales smoothly while reducing turnover risks.
Conclusion
Unicorn hires may sound tempting, but in reality, they are rare myths carrying steep price tags. Building embedded offshore teams offers a practical path to sustainable, consistent, and scalable growth.
Vietnam’s talent pool: strong in English, technically skilled, and cost-competitive, enables U.S. companies to move beyond the quest for perfection toward structures that truly support long-term capability.
The next step is partnering with Away Digital Teams in Vietnam to build enduring teams under the Outsourcing 2.0 model. Discover what U.S. teams need to know about offshore collaboration, and how this modern framework drives efficiency, strengthens operations, and creates a true competitive advantage.
