We've been hiring in Panama and its not cheaper really at the end of the day but there's a lot more people to hire. I might do 10 interviews for a position there and find someone vs over 50 in the US and not find anyone.

In the past two years, it seems like the only quality US candidates come from active recruitment - job ads do not seem to produce a high quality of applicant. Even after initial screening I still get people who can't parse a simple CSV applying for senior dev positions (you can use google, you get full credit if you copy-paste from stack overflow, you get full credit if you launch into a monologue about how parsing CSVs seems simple but there are a lot of hidden pitfalls, you can use any language you want, you can use a library or read the file and parse line by line and split (no trick cells with commas, all numeric), it's not meant to be a hard test). Some of the interviews are just brutal.

So really the only difference I've been experiencing is it's a lot easier to passively recruit in less competitive markets (specifically overseas), in the US I have to spend a lot more time ensuring I do things like volunteering for pitch event mentorship so I can find people I can encourage to interview for us or keep in contact with so I can actively recruit them if they don't enjoy their job.