The Elite Recruiter Podcast

Jay Veniard was the very first guest on the Elite Recruiter Podcast, back when the whole thing was one recorded conversation during COVID thrown on the internet to see what happened. This session is his first ever summit talk, pulled from the Elite Recruiter Community Library ahead of Finish the Year Strong, and it was the one that hit the audience hardest. Finish the Year Strong 2026 is a free virtual summit for recruiters running September 28 to October 5. Firm owners, coaches, and top billers on how to close out the year and set up 2027. Register free: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the CRMx that captures every call, email and message automatically and tells you the next action to take. See it at https://recruitwithatlas.com Jay ran the numbers on his own career. One missed deal a month at his firm's average fee comes to $360,000 a year in lost billings. Over ten years that is $3.6 million. Reinvested at 7%, it becomes $5.3 million. His number, his math, and as he tells it, the moment that changed how he runs his desk. He calls it the tax you never signed up for, and most recruiters are paying it in silence because nothing in this business ever forces you to stop. Jay pitched eight years of pro baseball before recruiting and he draws the line hard. In the minors, if you negotiate with your training, you get cut in front of your teammates. At a recruiting desk, if you negotiate with your dials, nobody takes your jersey. You don't get fired. You just get mediocre. You don't lose your job, you lose your legacy. From there he lays out the two kinds of recruiter he sees everywhere. The negotiator runs on feelings, hits snooze, justifies research to avoid dialing, and hides behind email because they're afraid of no. The operator runs on standards that never move: the day is planned the night before, a two hour phone block is protected first thing in the morning, research is after hours work, and there is a hard cap on digital back and forth before someone picks up the phone. He also has a blunt warning for anyone trying to run a desk on email, LinkedIn DMs and text. If you are not willing to get on the phone, you are going to be replaced. Jay owns Ventec Search Group, a search firm placing sales talent in industrial automation, still works an active desk, and runs a coaching program for recruiters. What You'll Learn The missed deal math and how to run it on your own last twelve monthsThe difference between a negotiator and an operatorWhy BD has to be the first block of the dayThe three digital touches rule before the fourth becomes a phone callWhy productive procrastination is the most expensive habit on your deskWhere the AI replacement line actually falls in recruiting Connect with Jay Veniard: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayveniard/

James Homer left a regional director job in Singapore with two young kids, a third on the way, and not enough savings to cover the risk. Eighteen months later his firm has billed just over a million dollars and takes retained searches off Korn Ferry, Egon Zehnder and Michael Page with a team of four. The number is not what makes this worth your time. The way he got there is. Before any of it worked, James spent ten thousand dollars on an AI outreach system that booked him exactly zero meetings in three months. He sat in cafes for sixty or seventy hours feeding in his ICP and his lists, and none of it returned a single conversation. Worse, the emails went out under his own name to people who had known him for a decade. One prospect wrote back to say he knew James had never been to Yale and had never had a beer at the bar the email invented. When James complained, the vendor told him the fake detail was the hyper specialization, and that a reply is still a reply. Then came four months with no cash coming in at all. One member of staff to pay, a mortgage, three kids, and nothing landing. That was the stretch where his mantra stopped being a quote on a wall and became the actual situation. Nobody was coming to save him. What pulled him out was going back to month one, which was him at night, after the kids were in bed, chasing job adverts and writing every email himself. In his first year that approach ran a twenty percent response rate and converted roughly eighty percent of meetings into job orders. It also produced his biggest client that year, six or seven placements from one cold email to a COO. He is not anti technology. He was an early Atlas user, builds tools with Claude, and pays eighty dollars a month for inbox warming he calls the best return in the business. His distinction is simple. AI is a tool that helps you, not a machine that replaces you, and nothing goes out without human eyes on it. The rest is the stuff nobody tells you. For his first two months, ninety nine percent of his emails went to spam because he had never heard of DKIM or DMARC. He set his entity up in the wrong country. He spent a hundred hours on a website he should have paid six hundred dollars for. And then the part that reframes everything. James could have hired fifty people. He decided not to. His clients told him plainly that what they pay for is him on the search, not a polished pitch from a big firm followed by a junior they never met. He calls this the decade of the boutique, and after this episode you may agree with him. Revenue figures in this episode are James's own. What You'll Learn Why his network did not follow him in year one, and what brought it back in year two The cold outreach routine that built his first ten clients from zero What ten thousand dollars of AI outreach actually bought him, in his own words How a four person firm wins retained searches against Korn Ferry and Egon Zehnder The email setup mistake that silently killed his first two months of business development Why he reset his ego about headcount, and what his clients told him they actually want The four quotes he runs his business and his life on Finish The Year Strong 2026, September 28 to October 5. All live sessions are free. https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the CRM that captures your calls, emails, LinkedIn messages and WhatsApp automatically so you can stop doing admin and get back to billing. https://recruitwithatlas.com/ Firm Leaders Summit, November 16 to 18. Live sessions are free. https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com Connect with James Homer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jahomer/ Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community Get the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Sign up for the Finish The Year Strong 2026 Summit (Sept 28 to Oct 5): https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ Check out Atlas, the AI-native CRM and ATS built for recruiters: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ What does the person who has sat across from some of the top billers in this industry actually see when he looks at them? In his first podcast appearance ever, Kevin Parker sits down with Benjamin Mena for a conversation that goes where recruiting content almost never goes. Kevin is a licensed clinical social worker and licensed clinical addiction specialist with 20 years in the psychotherapy world, and he has spent years in what he calls sacred spaces with high performers, usually as the one asking the questions. He has no website, no socials, and no digital footprint. On purpose. This time, he answers the questions. Kevin opens with what he sees in those rooms: brilliant, entrepreneurial people whose minds run ten steps ahead of everyone else, and who often have nowhere to take the wins, the losses, or the weight of it all. Recruiting is relational all day long, and it can still be one of the loneliest careers there is. The way through, he argues, starts with saying it out loud. Name it to tame it. From there the conversation moves through the four buckets of life, why work-life balance is a myth he abandoned in favor of tension, the real difference between success and significance, and why imposter syndrome is not a flaw to eliminate but a part of you that sometimes needs to be thanked and told to take a seat. He also speaks directly to working moms in recruiting, and closes with a challenge for anyone who is not feeling lonely right now: pick up the phone. What You'll Learn: What elite recruiters actually talk about when nobody else is in the roomWhy entrepreneurs and recruiters carry so much alone, and why naming it is the catalystThe three rules for deciding who deserves to hear what you are carryingThe four buckets of life and what happens when work is the only thing in yoursWhy work-life balance is baloney, and the tension model that replaces itThe difference between success and significance, and why one is steps and the other is hardHow to handle imposter syndrome without destroying the drive that got you hereWhy the candidate you placed will remember you forever, even if you forget the deal Whether you are grinding through your first year or twenty years in, this episode will find you where you are. Remember that you are significant. LINKS:

90% of her business comes from referrals. She has never made a cold call, never sent a cold email, and never pitched herself at a networking event. And she built the whole thing in four years, starting with zero recruiting background. April Ben-Sabat became a recruiter by accident. She spent six years as the right hand at a transport company, told them in her first interview she would own a business within five years, and when they could not find a transport recruiter to backfill her, her own boss said the words that changed everything: why don't you start a recruiting agency? A year later the company went bankrupt and she was all in, whether she was ready or not. What she built next is the playbook this episode unpacks. April went from searching "business networking" on Eventbrite and showing up to anything free, to becoming the recruiter an entire city refers. She walks through exactly how she works a room she has never been in: standing at the door, finding the person who is alone, opening with "what brings you here," and shimmying into conversations without an ounce of pitch. She explains why she goes to every event alone, why bringing a wingman makes you less approachable, and the solo restaurant challenge she gave herself, one Friday night, no phone allowed, that trained her to be comfortable in any room. Then she goes deeper: why following up with "great meeting you last night" is the same as handing out a business card, what to reference instead, and how posting on LinkedIn keeps her in the feed of everyone she has ever met so the referral arrives eight months later. When the events around her felt empty, she built her own, with a curated guest list, a word-match game on the back of every name tag, and a room engineered for people who are scared of networking. And because standing still was never the plan, April is now tearing up her own playbook, taking her agency into the US market and a brand new niche while building her own AI sourcing agent with Claude Code. Job order in, vetted shortlist out, outreach in her voice, and an ATS she never opens anymore. As April tells it, the shortlists are finding people a human sourcer could not surface in two weeks of full-time searching. She also draws her hard line: the first message can be automated, but the moment a real conversation starts, the human takes over. Whether you are grinding without direction, sitting behind the screen wondering why BD feels broken, or curious what one non-developer recruiter can build in a weekend, this conversation is the push to get in the room. What You'll Learn: The exact first 90 seconds of walking into a room where you know nobodyWhy April never sells at networking events and how referrals arrive months later anywayThe follow-up message that actually gets remembered, and the one that gets ignoredHow to host your own networking event that people beg to return toHow she built an AI sourcing agent on Claude Code that searches her ATS and beyondThe one thing she refuses to automate, and why candidates thank her for it Finish The Year Strong 2026 (Sept 28 - Oct 5). April is speaking, and her session currently has the most RSVPs of the entire summit. All live sessions are free: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ Atlas, the CRM that actually understands context: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ Firm Leaders Summit (Nov 16-18): https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com

Ryan Sheppard mapped an entire market for a senior pharma search, tracked down the exact molecule types, built the shortlist, and then got one line back: sorry, we're on a hiring freeze. The fee that vanished was somewhere between eighty and a hundred thousand dollars, and it was not the first time. That was the moment he decided he could not keep working for free. Before we get into it, Finish The Year Strong kicks off September 28 through October 5. All live sessions are free, and if you want the replays or VIP access, this is your line in the sand for the rest of 2026. Register here: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the CRM that actually understands context. It captures every call, interview, email, and LinkedIn message automatically, then tells you the next action to take. Atlas customers are reporting 50% higher candidate response rates, 15 hours saved every week, and monthly billings up 85%. See it for yourself at https://recruitwithatlas.com/ Ryan is an executive search consultant in Tokyo placing country managers and senior commercial leaders for US and European healthcare companies. After sixteen years in contingency he made the switch to retained, and as he tells it, he went from barely hitting his number in 2024 to hitting his annual target by Valentine's Day 2025 and finishing the year at 280% of goal. The advice that changed everything came from a retained recruiter he admired: stop selling CVs, sell the process. He walks through exactly what that looks like. How he priced his very first retainer at 40% having never gone above standard, how the local decision maker signed without blinking while global TA asked who this guy thought he was, and what he said to get it across the line. Why he can now tell a client he cannot guarantee the perfect person but can guarantee the steps, and why that is what clients actually pay for. Then the book. Ryan wrote Sell Yourself Like a CEO during the six to nine month lull while his first retainers were slowly coming in, and he ran the launch like a search. He wrote down 180 names, scorecarded every one of them, worked the math backwards from twenty launch-day reviews, and ended up with thirty reviews and six endorsements, including one from Marshall Goldsmith. The book has since become his calling card with presidents, with executives' kids, and with people he has never met who show up at events having already read it. He also shares two things he wishes recruiters would ask him about. First, why reference checks are the most underrated practice in recruitment, and how a 25 minute call that goes well beyond did they work there turns into a business development conversation with a decision maker who would never otherwise take your call. Second, President's Drinks, the no-banner, no-pitch gathering he has hosted for a decade that puts him in a room with the people who actually make hiring decisions. Along the way he explains why fees in Japan run 35 to 40%, where AI actually makes him more valuable on a search, and what a case study looks like when you build it from a STAR story in under an hour. If you are still selling the output when you should be selling the process, this one is for you.

Greg Benadiba has been a recruiter for 21 years, and he opened his new book with the most expensive phone call of his career: the one he didn't make. In this return episode of The Elite Recruiter Podcast, Greg sits down with Benjamin Mena to put the principles from Recruitment Principles: Timeless Truths in the Age of AI to work, starting with the three he would keep if a recruiter could only live by three. Before we get into it, Finish The Year Strong 2026 kicks off September 28 through October 5. It is a free virtual summit built to help you close out 2026 with momentum and set the foundation for 2027. All live sessions are free. Register here: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/  This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the AI first CRM that captures every call, email, LinkedIn message and interview automatically, then tells you the next action to take. Atlas customers report 50 percent higher candidate response rates, 15 hours saved every week and monthly billings up 85 percent. Learn more at https://recruitwithatlas.com/  Then the episode gets tactical. Benjamin plays a candidate who just accepted a 15 percent counteroffer and Greg runs the conversation live, showing why counteroffers are won or lost in the very first call, not the last one. Greg walks through the roughly 25 touchpoints his team has mapped across the candidate journey, the post placement survey system he built for about $20,000 that flags a struggling placement inside the first two weeks, and the story of Nancy, a placement whose 5 out of 10 survey score triggered the call that kept her in the job. He shares the exact referral ask that leads a placed candidate back to the people they mentioned in their very first conversation, and why more than half of his firm's business now arrives that way. Greg is one of the most AI forward leaders in the industry, which makes his list of things he will never automate more interesting: the prescreen, the reference call and the offer call. He explains why he passed on voice agents, how his team runs a Notion knowledge base tethered to a custom GPT that he estimates has saved around 5 percent of the firm's business, and what he means when he says AI will reveal who was never really recruiting.   For the first time on the show, Greg tells the full story of how a 24 year old applicant who was rejected as too junior came back a month later, got the job, and years later became the owner of that same firm. As Greg tells it, it started with a small gift of shares from the founder, continued with a decade of buying more, and ended on the day his boss handed him a resignation letter. He closes with the question nobody ever asks him, and the answer is a plan of 100 mapped calls every single day.  Coming up in November, the first ever Firm Leaders Summit runs November 16 through 18. Live sessions are free. Registration link: Details soon

What if everything you were taught about growing a desk was optional? Finish The Year Strong 2026 kicks off September 28th through October 5th, and the live sessions are free. This is your line in the sand for the rest of the year: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ This episode is sponsored by Atlas, the CRM that actually understands context. Atlas captures every call, email, and message automatically, then tells you the next action to take. And whether you place permanent or contract, Atlas covers both with its new contract suite, so you never chase a timesheet again and you get live margin visibility on every single placement. Atlas customers are reporting 50% higher candidate response rates, 35% more new clients won, and monthly billings jumping 85%. See it at https://recruitwithatlas.com/ Almost every recruiter got the same day one instruction: business development is the job. Make the marketing calls, chase the ads, win the clients. Dan Lambert did the opposite. He skipped BD entirely, doubled his candidate metrics instead, and as he tells it, went on to post eight million dollar years before taking over ownership of Lambert Nemec Group. His logic was almost uncomfortably simple. Candidates are the inventory, and if you own the best inventory, clients have no choice but to deal with you. So while his colleagues left voicemails chasing ads, Dan interviewed 25 candidates a week against a target of 10, placed his people on his teammates' job orders, and waited. Those candidates became controllers, then CFOs, then the clients calling him with exclusive, hidden job orders no other agency ever saw. Dan walks through exactly how he did it, including the no pressure takeaway call he ran on week one job ads, the follow up cadence that turned cold postings into clients for life, and the story of telling a hiring manager to hire her own free candidate instead of paying him a $20,000 fee, a decision that won him every search she ran afterward. He breaks down his prep ritual too: the week is planned before Friday ends, and he never left the office without two Monday interviews booked, because a Monday without interviews is a day you never get back. You will also hear his honest take on AI and recruiting tech, why LinkedIn is a lookup tool and not a recruiting strategy, the candidate update call he believes is the most ignored moneymaker in every firm's database, and the order of operations behind his firm's low turnover: candidates first, clients next, the organization, then you. If you have ever believed there had to be another way to build a desk besides pounding out marketing calls, this episode is your proof, and your permission. And mark your calendar for the brand new Firm Leaders Summit, November 16th to 18th, with free live sessions: Details soon Finish The Year Strong 2026: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ Connect with Dan Lambert on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-lambert-57bb1110/ Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Sign up for Finish The Year Strong 2026, free for all live sessions, September 28 to October 5: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ This episode is powered by Atlas, the CRM that captures every call, email, and LinkedIn message automatically and tells you the next action to take: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ Join the Recruiting Agents Workshop with Seb Sharp, August 25 and 26, and build your own autonomous lead agent and placement agent live: https://the-recruiting-agents-workshop.heysummit.com/ Julia Arpag was laid off at five weeks postpartum with a newborn, a toddler, and two teenage foster sons at home. Two and a half years later, as she tells it, Aligned Recruitment has closed $1.3 million in revenue and 30 clients while she works 30 hours a week. And she built all of it having never sold a single thing in her life before starting the firm. This talk is pulled straight from the Elite Recruiter Community library as a primer for Finish The Year Strong, where Julia is coming back with a brand new session. It is the rare talk where she steps back from tactics and lays out the ten principles underneath everything: optimizing for time and money instead of money alone, hiring multiple coaches for different gaps, building an audience of 74,000 on LinkedIn, and the DM plus voice note sequence that turns profile views into discovery calls. She walks through the five CRM categories she works for just twenty minutes a day, why warm leads are the closest to the money strategy in the entire business, and how aiming to serve instead of sell keeps the anxiety out of your voice on every call. She also gets honest about the expensive misses, including a $30,000 mastermind that produced zero closed leads, and why she would still rather try and miss than sit frozen waiting for the perfect move. If you are heading into the final quarter wondering whether you can build a real firm without sacrificing your family, your health, or your sanity, this is the mindset reset before the summit. The year is not written yet. Register for Finish The Year Strong 2026 and catch Julia's next talk live.

Finish The Year Strong 2026 is coming September 28 through October 5, and it is packed with sessions exactly like this one. Register free now: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ The Recruiting Agents Workshop with Seb Sharp runs August 25 and 26. Build an autonomous lead agent, a placement agent, and connect your entire tech stack, with recordings, templates, and a week of Slack access to Seb included: https://the-recruiting-agents-workshop.heysummit.com/ This episode is sponsored by Atlas, the CRM that actually understands context. It captures every call, email, and message automatically, tells you the next action to take, and does the low value work that keeps you from billing. Atlas customers are reporting 50% higher candidate response rates and monthly billings jumping 85%. Learn more at https://recruitwithatlas.com/ He started the year with $500 left in his bank account. Overdrawn statements, credit card roulette, a baby on the way, a house mid build, and a failed financial division that drained everything he had. One year later, as he tells it, he had billed $870,000 as a solo biller. I pulled this session out of the Elite Recruiter Community library because somebody listening needs to hear it right now. Randee Staats, owner of S4 Search Partners, shared this at a previous summit, and it is the most honest talk I have heard about the side of recruiting nobody posts about. The days you have to talk yourself out of bed. The $26,000 deal that falls apart because a candidate cannot pass a drug test. The mental fight that every recruiter, including the successful ones, is fighting every single day. Then he hands you the exact system that pulled him out. The point system he built with coach Mike Anderson: 2 points for a submission, 3 for an interview, 5 for a new signed contract, and zero points for fills, because when the funnel is full the fills take care of themselves. He targets 20 points a week minimum, runs closer to 42, and knows his number is worth about $450 a point. He walks through his two daily non negotiables, business development every day and a minimum of 25 candidate calls, and the client rules that changed his business: no work without a signed contract, a required 15 minute biweekly recruiting call with every hiring manager, and the freedom to walk away from anything under a 20% fee. This is a session about consistency beating talent, relationships beating transactions, and drawing a line in the sand. If you know a recruiter who is struggling right now, send them this episode. It might be the thing that changes their year. Sessions like this are exactly what is coming at Finish The Year Strong 2026. Grab your free spot: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/

Has AI actually helped you make more placements this year, or has it just been noise? Before you dive in, this is your last call for The Recruiting Agents Workshop with Seb Sharp, August 25 and 26. Two live build-along sessions where you will create an autonomous lead agent, a placement agent, and connect your entire tech stack, plus recordings, templates, and a week of Slack access to Seb after the sessions end. Grab your seat now: https://the-recruiting-agents-workshop.heysummit.com/ In this episode Benjamin Mena sits down with Dan McCarthy, Senior Talent Engineer at Zapier and one of the founding members of the a16z Talent Engineer Fellowship, to break down recruiting's newest role and how you can step into it before the rest of the industry catches on. Dan's path into this seat is anything but typical. He was a jazz musician, a New York bartender, a wine educator, and a CrossFit gym owner in Brooklyn before Shopify hired him into tech recruiting at 40 years old. He had never heard of an org chart. By his own telling, he led the entire engineering recruiting team in hires his very first quarter. Two layoffs later he landed at Zapier, where he was handed a blank canvas: build our talent intelligence function. What he built instead of dashboards is the heart of this conversation. Dan walks through the talent intelligence MCP he assembled in about a month using completely free APIs, including Indeed Hiring Lab, the Department of Labor, O*NET, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and WARN Act data, so recruiters walk into every intake call armed with real compensation numbers, competitor hiring activity, and talent pool data. Then he gets specific about the agency version: what a solo recruiter or a two person shop can stand up over a single weekend to change their next client pitch. Benjamin and Dan also get into the ego build problem on LinkedIn and why screenshots of tools built yesterday are making everyone feel further behind than they actually are, the difference between building to learn and building to ship, who is reviewing your code and updating your API keys, whether a three person agency could really bill five to ten million dollars with a builder in one of the seats (Dan's honest answer: possible, but probably not in the next six to twelve months), the sales engineer ratio that may be coming to recruiting teams, and why Dan completely changed his mind about AI interview screens. If you have ever felt too far behind to start building, this episode is your permission slip. As Dan puts it, nobody is behind. This is day one. ⚡ The Recruiting Agents Workshop with Seb Sharp (August 25-26): https://the-recruiting-agents-workshop.heysummit.com/

4X Growth While Everyone Watched Their Inbox Die. Want to actually make money with AI instead of just talking about it? Join me and Seb Sharp for The Recruiting Agents Workshop, August 25th and 26th. Two live build-along sessions where you will create your own autonomous lead agent and placement agent, connect your entire tech stack, and walk away with recordings, templates, and a week of Slack access to Seb. Grab your spot: https://the-recruiting-agents-workshop.heysummit.com/ And mark your calendar for the Finish The Year Strong 2026 Virtual Summit, September 28th through October 5th. The best in the industry sharing exactly how they plan to close out the year on top so you can do the same. Register free: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the CRM that actually understands context. Atlas captures every interview, client call, LinkedIn message, email, and WhatsApp automatically, then tells you the next action to take. Atlas customers are reporting 50 percent higher candidate response rates, 35 percent more new clients won, and 15 hours saved every week. Check it out at https://recruitwithatlas.com/ Everyone watched their inbox die. The cold emails that used to land now get deleted in half a second because hiring managers can smell AI from a mile away. While most agencies doubled down on the very channel that was failing them, Brian Abrams took his boutique project management staffing firm in the completely opposite direction. He went old school. Real handshakes, real conversations, real presence. The result? He 4Xd his revenue over the last few years, and he now attributes 30 to 40 percent of his gross profit to one channel almost no staffing firm takes seriously: industry conferences. In this episode Brian lays out his entire conference playbook with zero secrets held back. You will hear the four part system he has refined over a decade: how he builds his year long conference slate and decides which events actually deserve his marketing dollars, the pre work almost nobody does including the exact no pressure LinkedIn message he sends 30 days out, how he works the floor and captures every quality conversation before it evaporates, and the follow up cadence that turned a thirty second booth chat into one of his biggest clients ever. You will also hear the story behind the legendary Run PMO shirts, why 1,500 of them disappear by day two of every conference, the moment a flight attendant asked Brian if he had just come from a concert, and the sneak peek at what his team is bringing to Detroit this fall. Plus the honest stuff: the mistakes that cost him money, the booth tactics that flopped, why being memorable beats being everywhere, and his advice for any recruiter thinking about going out on their own. If your BD strategy is drowning in an ocean of ignored AI messages, this is the episode that shows you the door everyone else forgot exists. Because while your competitors fight for inbox attention, the decision makers are standing right there at the conference in your niche, waiting to meet someone real. Finish The Year Strong 2026 Virtual Summit: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ The Recruiting Agents Workshop: https://the-recruiting-agents-workshop.heysummit.com/

Before we get into it: The Recruiting Agents Workshop with Seb Sharp is happening August 25th and 26th. Two live build-along sessions where you will build an autonomous lead agent, a placement agent, and wire your entire tech stack together, with recordings, templates, and a full week of Slack access to Seb included. Sign up here: https://the-recruiting-agents-workshop.heysummit.com/ This episode is sponsored by Atlas, the CRM that actually understands context. Atlas captures every interview, client call, email, and LinkedIn message automatically, then tells you the next action to take. Atlas customers are reporting 50% higher candidate response rates, 15 hours saved every week, and monthly billings jumping 85%. Learn more at https://recruitwithatlas.com/ What happens when the only way forward is outworking every degree in the room? David Fishman spent eight years in the Coast Guard, started on a temp desk, and launched Sparrow Company in 2009 when the alternative was going broke. Thirty years into the business, his desk regularly produces $1.5 million a year, his longest client relationship has lasted three decades, and he recently ran a streak where ten straight presentations turned into ten placements. First candidate presented, first candidate hired, ten times in a row. In this conversation, David breaks down how he built all of it without a college degree and why the chip on his shoulder became his biggest advantage. He shares the intake questions that shape every search, explains why he reads a resume like a photograph, and reveals how patience let him win back clients he lost three or four times by simply outliving the tenure of the HR leaders who cut him. He also unpacks why he stopped tracking dollars and started tracking deals, how the wave cycles of recruiting punish anyone who gets comfortable, and why the first three days of your week decide whether you have any momentum left by the next Monday. You will also hear how David expanded into the temp business by recruiting his own business partner, what it means to have his son and daughter working inside the company, and why at 58 he still wakes up feeling like something is chasing him. What You'll Learn: The resume-reading method behind a 10-for-10 presentation-to-placement streakThe intake questions that tell you if the wind is at your back or you are digging through mudHow to win back a lost client by outliving the tenure of the person who cut youWhy tracking deals instead of dollars protects you from the summer complacency trapThe Monday-through-Wednesday work rhythm that keeps your momentum aliveHow to turn a no-degree chip on your shoulder into a 30-year career Sign up for The Recruiting Agents Workshop (Aug 25-26):

Recruiters, do not limp into December. The Finish The Year Strong 2026 virtual summit runs September 28 through October 5, with the top producers and leaders in recruiting, including Pinnacle Society's Michelle Flynn, sharing exactly what is working right now to close the year with momentum. Grab your spot: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the CRM that actually understands context. Atlas captures every interview, client call, email, and message automatically, then tells you the next action to take. Agencies building on Atlas are reporting 50 percent higher candidate response rates and monthly billings jumping 85 percent. See it for yourself at https://recruitwithatlas.com/ What actually separates a recruiter who plateaus in the mid six figures from one who breaks a million? Kimberly Laipple spent years stuck between $500K and $600K before she found the answer, and it was not a new sourcing tool or a script. In this episode she tells the story most top billers never tell, starting with the moment at 18 when, as a pregnant single mom, someone told her she would never get a degree. She went on to survive foreclosure, stand in line at food banks to feed her kids, and pour herself into a recruiting desk at Scientific Search, the firm she joined 18 years ago as a recruiter and now leads as president. Kimberly personally billed $1.4 million in her best year while running a team of nearly 20, and she is one of only 80 recruiters admitted to the Pinnacle Society, where she serves as vice president of the board. But the heart of this conversation is how she got unstuck. She walks through the inner work that took her from years of plateaued billings to her first million dollar year, why she believes the one constant in every stuck recruiter's story is the person in the mirror, and what happened when she stopped blaming the market and started examining how she showed up for clients, candidates, and her own team. From there it gets tactical. Kimberly breaks down the Mr. Miyagi deal she makes with every new hire, six months of painting the fence and waxing the car before they ever freelance, and the repeatable process that turned her desk into what a fellow Pinnacle member called a production line, stacking $100K months back to back. She explains why nobody on her team is allowed to source a single candidate until their pitch, email, and voicemail are written and reviewed, how she reads hiring managers that everyone else misreads, and the exact playbook she used to grow from recruiter to president inside one firm: prove yourself, then ask for it. She also shares why she still chooses contingent search at the highest level, how she builds a culture where recruiters stay seven and eight years, and the philosophy that reshaped her career: you cannot keep what you do not give away. If you are sitting at a plateau right now and wondering whether the problem is the market, this episode will challenge you in the best way.  Links:  

Right now a hiring manager is typing "accounting recruiter near me" into ChatGPT, and somebody is coming up. Steve Gipson's argument is that the recruiter who gets named is almost never the best one. It is simply the most visible one. Benjamin sat in a room at the Pinnacle Society conference adding up numbers as top billers casually mentioned inbound work arriving through their websites. Two hundred thousand here. Four hundred thousand there. Another hundred somewhere else. Roughly a million dollars in placement fees that nobody chased. That is the conversation that led to this episode. Steve grew up in the industry listening to his father close deals from a home office, spent seven years on a direct hire desk in insurance, then got recruited out of recruiting by his brother Jeff. Recruiters Websites enters its fourteenth year this December and has worked with over a thousand firms. The number that anchors this episode belongs to one of those clients. A two person firm that had billed four hundred and four thousand dollars of inbound business as of the day this was recorded. They pull twenty to thirty leads a month from people who have never heard of them. Steve is careful with the caveat. That firm planted its tree seven or eight years ago, and they still had to vet the client, sell the fee agreement, and do the work. Then they get into what actually changed. Steve explains why the doom posts claiming Google killed search got it backwards, what an AI snippet is really pulling from, and why the models reward specificity in a way the old ten blue links never did. He breaks down topical authority in plain language, why a page for accounting recruiters in St. Louis should link back to a page for accounting recruiters in Missouri, and how that structure becomes the answer when someone asks a model who to call. He also gives away the tactics most agencies charge for. Directories and industry associations. Publishing your own comparison lists and putting your competitors on them. Three hundred dollar press releases through the newswire. Answering questions on Reddit and Quora, where the models go looking. The uncomfortable part is Steve's estimate that maybe five percent of the people who hear this will act on it. He is fine with that, because the five percent who move have an open field. What You'll Learn Why visibility beats quality in who gets the job order What Google actually changed and why SEO did not die How topical authority works on a recruiting website The listicle and directory play for showing up in AI answers Whether Wix and Squarespace can rank The single on page fix to make this week Finish The Year Strong 2026 runs September 28 through October 5. Free live sessions with the recruiters who are actually finishing the year in front. Register here: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the AI first recruitment platform built for modern agencies. Atlas remembers every email, every interview, and every conversation, and makes all of it instantly searchable. With Magic Search you can ask who mentioned relocating next year or who wanted a four day week, and get the answer without digging through notes. Atlas customers have reported over 40 percent EBITDA growth and over 80 percent increase in monthly billings. Unlock your listener offer at https://recruitwithatlas.com/ Thank you also to Recruiters Websites. Mention Elite Recruiter and get 10 percent off any new service at https://recruiterswebsites.com/ Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community Get the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe Figures shared in this episode are self reported and have not been independently verified. Connect with Steve Gipson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/recruitingwebsitedesign/ Listen and subscribe: [APPLE LINK] [SPOTIFY LINK] [YOUTUBE LINK]

Across more than 5,000 recruiters, Michelle Flynn has run the same values exercise. Not once, not a single time, has money come up as a core value. So if money is not your real driver, what is? And what happens to your career, your business, and your health when you finally find out?

Michelle Flynn was living the recruitment dream. Twenty placements a month as a solo recruiter. Working 9:30 to 4:30. Every single client on exclusive, no staff, no cold calls, and a seat inside her clients' offices where offers closed almost on autopilot. Then, three months after her wedding, at age 39, she woke up with a severe pain down the left side of her chest and hit the floor. Her husband thought he had lost her.

The AI Recruiting Summit 2026 is happening now with free live sessions. Grab your spot: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ This episode is brought to you in partnership with SourceWhale. Most recruiters will send outreach this week that is already dead and never know it. Benjamin Mena sits down with Dougie Loan, the man behind billions of recruiting messages at SourceWhale, to break down exactly what has stopped working, what is quietly winning in 2026, and why the pre-AI playbook is falling apart in real time. Dougie has a vantage point almost nobody in recruiting has. From the data behind billions of messages, he can see what actually moves the needle and what just feels like progress. He explains why the three-step spec-out sequence that used to book interviews has fallen off a cliff, why deliverability and flooded inboxes have gutted cold outreach, and why reply rates on truly cold campaigns are collapsing toward zero. He also gets specific about where recruiters bleed time. Between hunting for contact data, trawling record numbers of applications, and logging notes for hours every week, the modern desk hides close to a full workday of lost time. Dougie walks through where that time actually goes and what the highest performers do differently, from taking conversations offline fast through roundtables and dinners to investing in relationships that make the next call get answered. There is a clear split between high-growth and high-profit firms, and Dougie has data on both. He covers the playbooks behind the fastest-growing agencies, why US recruiters out-win the UK on sheer activity volume, the embedded and retained shift, and the one non-technology trait that separates average recruiters from elite ones. It is not what most people expect. If you have looked at SourceWhale before and written it off, his closing point is blunt: if you have not seen it in the last three months, you have not seen it. The platform now spans sourcing, CRM and ATS, dialer, and note-taking in one place, and Dougie argues that single-platform context is the whole game for making AI actually work on your desk. Whether you want to build a high-growth firm, a highly profitable one, or simply be a recruiter whose messages get read, there is something here to take offline and act on. 2026 is your year. Dougie Loan left school at sixteen, was on a cold recruiting desk in Glasgow by eighteen, and went on to become a rec-tech leader. He is now a driving force at SourceWhale, which has grown from an eighteen-person business to a one hundred fifty person company across the UK and US.  

The AI Recruiting Summit 2026 is happening now through July 20th, and registration is free for every live session. Recruiting engineers, operators, and recruiters actually running AI on their desks are showing what is working behind the scenes. Do not miss it. Register here: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ This episode is brought to you by Atlas. The resume never tells the full story, and most of what candidates share ends up buried in notes and forgotten. Atlas is the AI first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin. It captures every conversation automatically, and with MagicSearch you can ask things like who mentioned they are open to relocating and pull the answer from your entire database instantly. Atlas customers have reported over 40% EBITDA growth and over 80% increase in monthly billings after adopting the platform. Unlock your exclusive listener offer here: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ Holly Dary spent nearly 20 years becoming everything she set out to be at a large global staffing firm. She oversaw eight markets, built teams that produced, and made very good money. Then she hit her 20 year mark and a question she could not shake. Keep doing the same thing on repeat until retirement, or bet on herself and build something of her own. She chose the second act. At the end of 2019 she launched Tarbos Talent in Austin, put all of her chips in the middle of the table as the sole provider for her family, and started making placements right away. Then, three months in, COVID shut everything down. Every job order died. Offers were rescinded. For a brand new firm with a database built from nothing, it should have been the end. Instead she doubled down. While competitors furloughed and let go of long time producers, Holly hired the best of them. She built her tech stack and her database through the quiet months, got her team back in the office the moment Texas allowed it, and came out of the shutdown twice as strong. From zero she has built a team of 26 across two offices in Austin and Houston, in a business where most firms take 12 to 18 months just to turn a profit. Tarbos was profitable inside of two. None of that is the most remarkable thing she has survived. Fifteen years ago, when her daughter had just turned one, Holly was diagnosed with AML leukemia and told to get to the hospital within 30 minutes. She was not scared. She was furious that anything might take her from her kids, and she carried the same positive mindset that runs her business straight through treatment. Her oncologist later told her that her attitude was half the reason she made it. In this conversation Holly breaks down how she builds firms that win. Why the human touch is what separates an elite recruiter from a replaceable one. Why she recruits like a sniper instead of blasting 500 people at once. Why speed and sitting shoulder to shoulder with her team is a real advantage in a remote world. And why, after 26 years, doing the reps is still the whole game. If there is a quiet voice in the back of your head telling you it is time for your own second act, this is the episode. Connect with Holly Dary on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/holly-dary-aba2952/ Listen to the full episode:

Gary Stauble started his firm in 1998 and almost immediately lost control of his mornings. Circumstances at home meant he could not rely on being at his desk on any given day. He had less time than his competition, and he was not hitting his goals. So he stopped measuring hours and started measuring what the hours produced. He compressed his workday, front-loaded everything that mattered into the morning, and produced more, not less. This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the AI-first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin. Atlas captures every conversation automatically and turns it into something you can use, so the detail that never fits in a resume field does not get buried in your notes. Ask MagicSearch who mentioned relocating next year and it searches your entire database instantly. https://recruitwithatlas.com/ This lands right before the AI Recruiting Summit 2026, and that is deliberate. Next week will throw more tools and change at you than anyone can absorb in a sitting. None of it matters if you cannot hold a morning together. Register: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ Gary was last on the show in Episode 178, on performance systems and where his career started. This session is where he explains what forced him to build them: https://www.eliterecruiterpodcast.com/peak-performance-of-7-figure-billers-with-gary-stauble/ He opens with the problem, and the numbers are uncomfortable. The average knowledge worker is productive for 2.3 hours a day, interrupted fifty-six times, once every eleven minutes, taking up to twenty-three minutes to recover focus each time. Gary's view is that recruiters score worse than average, not better, because the business is chaotic by nature. He calls it constant partial attention. You are never fully present, so you end the day exhausted and unsure what you moved. Then he builds the answer. The morning gets a boot-up sequence you execute without thinking, because there is no time for thinking at five in the morning, only time for running a script you wrote the night before. Clothes laid out. Coffee preset. A fixed appointment early enough that you cannot negotiate with it. Gary's own block runs six to eight forty-five, nearly three hours of work before most desks open. The middle of the day gets a boundary. Gary separates exploration from execution and gives you somewhere to put every shiny tool and half-formed idea so it stops eating your morning. He covers accurate project selection, why scheduling interviews is the first, second and third most important thing you do, and what ten marketing actions by ten does to a pipeline. The end of the day gets thirty minutes. Most recruiters skip it, and it is the part that makes everything else work. Gary calls it engineering an epic tomorrow. Plan Monday on Friday afternoon and you get a weekend. Skip it and you carry low-grade static through every hour you are supposed to be off. You still have to win the morning to win the desk. Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe Connect with Gary Stauble: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garystauble/

The AI Recruiting Summit 2026 kicks off July 13th and runs through July 20th, and this episode is your preview of exactly what you will see there. Live sessions are free, so you can pop in and out around your desk. If you want the replays, grab the VIP option or join the Elite Recruiter Community, where every summit replay lives permanently. Register now at https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ because 2026 is the year you draw your line in the sand. This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the AI first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin. Atlas captures every candidate conversation automatically and turns it into something you can use. With MagicSearch you can ask questions like who mentioned they are open to relocating next year, and it pulls answers instantly from real conversations across your entire database. Atlas customers have reported over 40 percent EBITDA growth and over 80 percent increase in monthly billings. Unlock your exclusive listener offer at https://recruitwithatlas.com/ Pulled straight from the Elite Recruiter Community library, this session is a taste of the summit format: a real recruiter walking through a real AI powered desk, screen level detail and all. Nick Poloni of Cascadia Search Group billed 1.3 million dollars last year, his first time crossing the million mark, with only about half a year on his current AI stack. This year he is already around 700K and climbing. And here is the part that should stop you mid scroll: he rates his own coding ability a one out of ten. He cannot write a line of code, and he still built his own recruiting bots, rebuilt his firm's entire website from scratch in Claude, and wired his ATS into Slack so a pipeline bot flags every stalled candidate before breakfast. Alongside Jake Price of PIN, Nick breaks down the full system. He records hiring manager intake calls, feeds the notes into Claude, and has AI write his AI sourcing prompts. His outreach is short, specific, and so personalized that candidates reply just to ask if he is real, at one point pulling around a 70 percent response rate across email and LinkedIn on over a thousand candidates. He has done zero traditional business development, no cold calls to HR, ever. Instead he gives away candidates, floats resumes for free, and lets value do the selling, a philosophy that landed him a 20K a month retainer and a 100 rep sales build. You will also hear how he sourced an entire salesforce in two and a half weeks, ran 500 to 800 interviews over three months without a single no show, and turned a Philippines based assistant into the chief of getting stuff done. If any of this feels out of reach, that is exactly why the summit exists. From July 13 through July 20 you will get walkthroughs, tools, and tech you can steal for your own desk. Nick's billing figures are his own account of his results, shared as he told them. Register for the AI Recruiting Summit 2026: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe Connect with Nick Poloni: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickpoloni/ Connect with Jake Price: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacob-price-05a6562b/ Listen on Apple Podcasts: Listen on Spotify: Watch on YouTube: This episode is sponsored by Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/

In this second part of a two part conversation, Danny Cahill takes Benjamin Mena behind the scenes of how he builds million dollar billers, why AI is quietly turning recruiters into commodities, and the one skill he says you cannot teach. This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the AI first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin and turn every candidate conversation into something you can use. Atlas customers have reported over 40 percent EBITDA growth and over 80 percent increase in monthly billings after adopting the platform. Get started and unlock your exclusive listener offer at recruitwithatlas.com Danny is not anti AI, and he opens by drawing a sharp line between where it helps and where it hurts. AI is a gift for market research and mapping, but the moment recruiters hand it their messaging, they start to sound exactly like everyone else. Clients are already telling his office that you all sound the same, and Danny argues the real threat was never AI replacing recruiters. It is recruiters using AI so lazily that they make themselves replaceable. That leads into the idea he most wanted to talk about. As everyone races to become a player on social media by outsourcing their voice to a bot, the ability to write and think originally becomes the last real advantage. Referencing Pree Sarkar, who framed it as capture, not create, Danny explains why your narrative and reputation are the one thing generative AI can flatten, and why that makes original language more valuable, not less. Then Danny takes on a myth this audience needs to hear. You do not have to have no life to be great at this. The million dollar billers he mentors are not obsessive versions of him. Many stop at four in the afternoon to be a parent, run nonprofits, and pour into their families. As he puts it, they do not die sad and lonely, they die happy and rich and having helped a lot of people. The heart of part two is mentorship. Danny explains why he still does it when he does not need to, why top billers become a protected class that no one will push, and why there is almost always a wound behind a high achiever. He tells the story of a twenty two year veteran who slumped and confessed she thought she had just gotten lucky, and how he answered her. You do not luck into twenty two years. He also walks through what mentoring actually looks like, from taping calls to weekly accountability. He closes with a challenge. Everyone talks about how technology changed recruiting, but almost no one questions the infrastructure, the pricing, or the sales DNA underneath it. And in one of the most honest moments of the conversation, Danny answers a question no one has ever asked him. What You'll Learn: Where AI helps a recruiter and where leaning on it makes you sound like everyone else Why writing and original thinking are becoming the last real advantage in recruiting The truth about work and life balance among actual million dollar billers Why your best biller becomes a protected class, and the hidden wound behind high achievers How Danny structures mentorship, from the first intake to weekly accountability The infrastructure and pricing questions almost no recruiter is asking If you missed Part 1, go back for how Danny survived four recessions and a pandemic and built a firm of recruiters who last. Connect with Danny Cahill on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danny-cahill-a6797a/ Listen to Part 1: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7AaKC3JrP3Y0eeu9SESsHp?si=5xQfHvygTFimUKEhCU5LOg Listen on Apple Podcasts: Listen on Spotify: Watch on YouTube: Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community Register for the AI Recruiting Summit 2026: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe Sponsored by Atlas: recruitwithatlas.com

Danny Cahill is one of the biggest names in the history of the recruiting industry, and in this first part of a two part conversation he sits down with Benjamin Mena to unpack forty years of building a firm, surviving every disruption thrown at him, and developing recruiters who last entire careers. This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the AI first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin and turn every candidate conversation into something you can use. Atlas customers have reported over 40 percent EBITDA growth and over 80 percent increase in monthly billings after adopting the platform. Get started and unlock your exclusive listener offer at recruitwithatlas.com Danny owns Hobson Associates, the firm where he started six days out of college, became rookie of the year, billed as top producer for four straight years, and then bought the company at twenty seven. He has never had a resume and never been out of a job, which he calls the great hypocrisy of a man who got wealthy helping other people change theirs. The conversation opens on something Danny believes most recruiters are getting wrong in 2026. Leaning on AI to handle your messaging, your outreach, and your tough sales conversations is quietly making you passive and worse at the actual work of selling. As Danny puts it, all we have really done is find a way to make more noise faster. From there he and Benjamin walk through how he has navigated four recessions and a pandemic. During the Great Recession he watched his fintech heavy niche collapse, raised his fees while everyone else cut theirs, and moved his firm into biotech. When Covid shut Connecticut down in a single afternoon, he bought thirty laptops, called in two million dollars of receivables, and had his team working remotely by the end of the day. But the heart of this episode is people. Danny explains why he believes the best recruiters are frustrated social workers, why money is a great early motivator that never sustains anyone, and why his people want his approval more than they want to buy a house. He breaks down how he manages a recruiter differently across their career, and why he spends more time with his veterans than his rookies, because senior people need recognition their entire lives. He closes part one with the fundamentals even twenty year veterans still butcher, the sales approaches working right now, and a hard truth about your pipeline. When you think you have four job orders, you really have one. What You'll Learn: Why leaning on AI for your outreach and sales conversations is making recruiters passive and worse at selling How Danny survived four recessions and a pandemic, and the counterintuitive move he made during the Great Recession What he did in a single afternoon when Covid shut everything down Why the best recruiters are frustrated social workers, and what actually motivates top performers over the long term How to manage rookies and veterans differently, and why your senior people need more of your time The sales fundamentals even twenty year veterans still get wrong Why you probably have far fewer real job orders than you think Make sure to listen to Part 2, where Danny goes deep on AI, the writing skills that set elite recruiters apart, and how he builds million dollar billers behind the scenes. Connect with Danny Cahill on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danny-cahill-a6797a/ Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/danny-cahill-on-building-a-40-year-career-pt-1/id1547241660?i=1000774681186 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7AaKC3JrP3Y0eeu9SESsHp?si=5xQfHvygTFimUKEhCU5LOg Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community Register for the AI Recruiting Summit 2026: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe Sponsored by Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/

Half the year is gone. That single fact is why Benjamin Mena pulled this talk out of the Elite Recruiter Community and put it in the feed. It is a reset, a line in the sand, and a challenge to decide right now what the rest of the year is going to look like. Brent Orsuga has spent 23 years in recruiting, the last 16 in logistics and supply chain, and 11 of those years running his own firm, Pinnacle Growth Advisors. He says it took him four years to hit a million dollar desk, and that he has now done it seven years running, to the point where it has become his floor rather than his ceiling. He is candid that there is no secret sauce and no magic pill, only a set of behaviors that the biggest billers share. This conversation lays out ten of them. This episode is brought to you by Atlas. The resume never tells the full story. Candidates share what really matters in conversations, on calls, in interviews, and over email, their motivations, salary expectations, and plans to relocate, and most of that detail ends up buried in notes and forgotten. Atlas changes that. It is the AI first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin, capturing every conversation automatically and turning it into something you can use. With MagicSearch you can ask who mentioned wanting a four day week or who is open to relocating next year, and it pulls answers from across your entire database instantly. Atlas customers have reported over 40 percent EBITDA growth and over 80 percent increase in monthly billings after adopting the platform. Get started and unlock your exclusive listener offer at recruitwithatlas.com. He starts with belief, because nothing else matters if you are quietly convinced a million is out of reach. From there he moves into identity, arguing that every serious biller has claimed a niche and built a brand around it, and that there is a real difference between a recruiter who sends fifteen resumes and a headhunter who sends three. Money follows attention, and the recruiters who get known for one thing become a magnet for the companies and candidates who want the best. The rest of the talk is the engine room. Brent covers doing business development on the right clients and becoming a partner rather than a vendor, chasing the big at bats that produce forty and fifty thousand dollar fees, and obsessing over your average fee until the math of a million stops feeling impossible. He explains why he works in quarters rather than months, why he counts the Mondays he has left, and why a referral system beats cold starting every search from zero. He is blunt about removing negativity, increasing outbound when most people let it slide, and holding firm on fees instead of lowering the bar for everyone. He closes on what he calls the real talk, the lifestyle behind the number. The people he knows who do this consistently are not sloppy, are not sleeping in, and are not built on social media. He frames the journey through three phases, the underdog with a chip on the shoulder, the villain who mutes the noise and works with dark focus, and the favorite, which he says is the hardest place of all to keep winning. If you have looked up and wondered where the time went, this is the wake up call. Draw the line and run for it. A note on the figures in this episode. Brent's billing numbers are his own account of his track record and are shared as he told them. Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community Register for the AI Recruiting Summit 2026: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe Get started with Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com

Most recruiters think AI is coming for their job. Allie Milbrath thinks it's coming for one kind of recruiter — the one whose value was sending LinkedIn messages faster than the person next to them. If that was ever the whole game, she says you should be worried. If it wasn't, this episode is the way out. This is Part 1 of a two-part retained search masterclass. Allie Milbrath of the Quinn Roberts Company returns to The Elite Recruiter Podcast to walk through the shift she believes our industry needs most: moving from contingent to retained, and from transactional order-taker to trusted advisor. She has built her career entirely in retained search, and not by being the most aggressive salesperson in the room. She won it by delivering so well that clients simply stopped shopping. That distinction is the spine of this conversation. The part that will stay with you is what Allie calls "emotional exits." Contingent recruiting, she argues, quietly trains you to bail. When a search gets hard, you have fifteen others on your desk to retreat to. When a client is difficult, you move on. When the market turns, you move on again. Over time it compounds, and you lose the ability to operate from any real depth. Retained takes the exit away. It forces you to stay in the discomfort long enough to actually solve the problem — and that, more than any script or pricing model, is the real mindset shift she thinks recruiters are afraid of. They are not afraid of the work. They are afraid of commitment. Benjamin and Allie also get honest about who retained is not for, why "the fear holding you back" and "a market that genuinely can't bear retained" are two different things, and how AI is quietly closing the escape hatch on transactional recruiting. Then they move into the mechanics — fee structures, guarantees, fall-off and cancellation terms, off-limits clauses, and the protective language Allie now writes into every agreement after learning the hard way. Part 1 ends mid-mechanics. Part 2 drops tomorrow and finishes the masterclass: pipelining projects, the real math on how many searches one recruiter can carry, and why she believes great delivery is your best business development. If you take one thing from this episode, let it be the question Benjamin opens with. As AI gets better, you have to figure out why clients will still pay you. What part of your process actually adds value? You don't have to go fully retained to answer that. But you do have to answer it. What You'll Learn: Why panicking about AI is the wrong response, and the harder question to ask yourself instead What "emotional exits" are, and how contingent work quietly trains you to bail Why clients return again and again to an advisor, not an attack dog How to tell the difference between fear that's holding you back and a market that can't support retained Who retained search is genuinely not the right fit for The contract terms that actually protect you: guarantees, fall-off, cancellation, and off-limits language This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the AI-first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin. Atlas captures every candidate conversation automatically and turns it into something you can use, so the details that usually get buried in notes are searchable in seconds. Atlas customers have reported over 40% EBITDA growth and over 80% increase in monthly billings after adopting the platform. Get started and unlock your exclusive listener offer at recruitwithatlas.com. Connect with Allie Milbrath on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alliemilbrath/ Part 2 drops tomorrow — make sure you're following so you don't miss it. Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community Register free for the AI Recruiting Summit 2026: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ Get the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Most recruiters think AI is coming for their job. Allie Milbrath thinks it's coming for one kind of recruiter — the one whose value was sending LinkedIn messages faster than the person next to them. If that was ever the whole game, she says you should be worried. If it wasn't, this episode is the way out. This is Part 1 of a two-part retained search masterclass. Allie Milbrath of the Quinn Roberts Company returns to The Elite Recruiter Podcast to walk through the shift she believes our industry needs most: moving from contingent to retained, and from transactional order-taker to trusted advisor. She has built her career entirely in retained search, and not by being the most aggressive salesperson in the room. She won it by delivering so well that clients simply stopped shopping. That distinction is the spine of this conversation. The part that will stay with you is what Allie calls "emotional exits." Contingent recruiting, she argues, quietly trains you to bail. When a search gets hard, you have fifteen others on your desk to retreat to. When a client is difficult, you move on. When the market turns, you move on again. Over time it compounds, and you lose the ability to operate from any real depth. Retained takes the exit away. It forces you to stay in the discomfort long enough to actually solve the problem — and that, more than any script or pricing model, is the real mindset shift she thinks recruiters are afraid of. They are not afraid of the work. They are afraid of commitment. Benjamin and Allie also get honest about who retained is not for, why "the fear holding you back" and "a market that genuinely can't bear retained" are two different things, and how AI is quietly closing the escape hatch on transactional recruiting. Then they move into the mechanics — fee structures, guarantees, fall-off and cancellation terms, off-limits clauses, and the protective language Allie now writes into every agreement after learning the hard way. Part 1 ends mid-mechanics. Part 2 drops tomorrow and finishes the masterclass: pipelining projects, the real math on how many searches one recruiter can carry, and why she believes great delivery is your best business development. If you take one thing from this episode, let it be the question Benjamin opens with. As AI gets better, you have to figure out why clients will still pay you. What part of your process actually adds value? You don't have to go fully retained to answer that. But you do have to answer it. What You'll Learn: Why panicking about AI is the wrong response, and the harder question to ask yourself instead What "emotional exits" are, and how contingent work quietly trains you to bail Why clients return again and again to an advisor, not an attack dog How to tell the difference between fear that's holding you back and a market that can't support retained Who retained search is genuinely not the right fit for The contract terms that actually protect you: guarantees, fall-off, cancellation, and off-limits language This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the AI-first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin. Atlas captures every candidate conversation automatically and turns it into something you can use, so the details that usually get buried in notes are searchable in seconds. Atlas customers have reported over 40% EBITDA growth and over 80% increase in monthly billings after adopting the platform. Get started and unlock your exclusive listener offer at recruitwithatlas.com. Connect with Allie Milbrath on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alliemilbrath/ Part 2 drops tomorrow — make sure you're following so you don't miss it. Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community Register free for the AI Recruiting Summit 2026: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ Get the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Your best biller is the person bringing in the most money. So how could promoting them be the most expensive mistake your firm ever makes? That is where Benjamin Mena starts with Duncan Taylor, a healthcare staffing veteran who has spent more than 30 years on the executive side of recruiting and built his career around one unusual specialty: recruiting for recruiting companies. Duncan lays out the producer-manager trap in brutal math. Take your million-dollar biller, move them into leadership, and you do not just risk the million they were producing. You risk the top billers who walk rather than report to them. By his estimate, five million in gross profit can leave through a single promotion that everyone mistook for a reward. The AI Recruiting Summit 2026 runs July 13 through 20, free for all live sessions: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the AI-first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin. Atlas captures every candidate conversation automatically and turns it into something you can use. With MagicSearch you can ask questions like who mentioned they are open to relocating next year and pull the answer from your entire database in seconds, with no keyword guessing and no digging through old notes. Atlas customers report over 40% EBITDA growth and over 80% increase in monthly billings after adopting the platform. Unlock your exclusive listener offer at recruitwithatlas.com From there the conversation becomes a map of where recruiting leadership is heading. Duncan argues that dialing for dollars is fading, not because the phone stops working, but because buyers research before they ever pick up, and the firms that win will be the ones whose leaders are known as the authority in their space. He describes the future leader as tech-fluent, consultative, and an architect of growth rather than a manager of activity, then names the uncomfortable problem underneath it. If AI absorbs the entry-level grind where recruiters used to earn their instincts, the industry faces a junior talent cliff with no obvious place for the next generation of leaders to come from. He also walks through a business-model shift already underway in IT and government contracting that staffing is only starting to feel: the move away from arbitrage and billing by the hour toward selling outcomes, guaranteeing fill rates, and pricing reliability instead of headcount. He gets candid about the risk that worries him most, the absence of AI governance in healthcare staffing, where an unsupervised agent can invent a credential and clear a clinician for a shift they are not qualified to take. He explains the data behind his gut, the Hogan-based assessments he uses to surface the derailers a strong interview hides, and the one habit he credits for turning candidates he never placed into his biggest clients: the Friday follow-up. What You'll Learn: The real math behind promoting your best biller, and what it actually costsWhy dialing for dollars is fading, and what replaces itThe profile of the recruiting leader who wins over the next five yearsHow AI is creating a junior talent cliff, and how to bridge itThe shift from billing hours to guaranteeing outcomesThe Friday follow-up that turns lost candidates into clients The AI Recruiting Summit 2026 runs July 13 through 20, free for all live sessions: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/

She runs a three-person team. She places 7 to 12 people a month. She charges 18% of annual salary — right in line with the market. And somehow she's the preferred childcare provider for the LA Rams, the LA Chargers, and a meaningful slice of the Forbes 400. There's no SDR. There are no paid ads. She's not on LinkedIn. Every deal is referred or inbound. After 20 years. Rebecca Stewart is the founder of VIP Nannies. What she's built in high-end household staffing is the relationship-driven, niche-locked business most agency owners say they want and almost none actually build. This episode is how she got there — and what she'd tell a recruiter sitting in the wrong niche, or no niche at all. This episode is brought to you by Atlas — the AI-first recruitment platform that captures every candidate conversation and makes it searchable. Atlas customers report 40%+ EBITDA growth and 80%+ billings increase. Unlock your listener offer at recruitwithatlas.com The AI Recruiting Summit 2026 is back July 13-20. Free live sessions with recruiting engineers, operators, and tool-builders showing what's actually working. Register at https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ Rebecca didn't plan this. Small California town, college basketball, Cal State Fullerton, then three months in the Peace Corps in Paraguay because her friends were getting master's degrees. She came home needing a job. A friend told her about a Bel Air nanny role. She interviewed. She was hired before she got home. She worked Friday through Monday for a year, then walked away because she wanted her weekends back. Inside a few weeks she'd researched every LA nanny agency, called her hometown bank for a loan, and started VIP Nannies at 23. The first family she met tried to hire her as their nanny. She declined and never sat down with a family again. Early on she chased anyone who could afford a nanny. Then she pulled up to a Beverly Hills Hotel event in her Honda Accord and realized she was at the wrong altitude. She read a marketing book, rewrote her pitch, raised her fees, and rebuilt the website. It took seven years for the pivot to fully show up. Today the business runs on relationships that compound for decades. The LA Rams reached out about childcare ten years ago after she sent a single congratulations message on LinkedIn — the only time she's used the platform. The Chargers came later. Most placements come from nannies calling her when a job ends. The episode pulls apart how — the fee structure that filters wrong clients, the $450 registration fee LA agencies wouldn't charge until she did, the six-month replacement guarantee, the nanny socials she runs to fight isolation. And the deeper thesis: there's a niche for everything. Find the one you'd run toward if nobody paid you, then learn to charge for it. If you're a recruiter stuck in a niche you fell into, this is the conversation that argues you can change that. What you'll learn: How a three-person team places 7 to 12 people a month with zero outboundThe Honda Accord moment that triggered Rebecca's seven-year pivot upmarketWhy a $450 registration fee filters better than any qualifying callThe single LinkedIn message that won the LA Rams account ten years agoHow to turn "do what you love" into a real business model in a recruiting nicheThe 12-minutes-for-12-days exercise Rebecca uses to find clarity on direction

In Part 1, Tom Kelly walked us through how EVONA scaled from four founders to 80 recruiters in three years, then deliberately cut back to 30 — and per-head revenue doubled. In Part 2, he hands over the framework that explains how he manages the leaner team. And it starts with a number most agency owners have never been forced to confront. If you haven't heard Part 1 yet, listen to that one first — it sets up everything Tom unpacks here. Brought to you by Atlas. The AI-first recruitment platform that captures every candidate conversation automatically. Atlas customers report 40%+ EBITDA growth and 80%+ increase in monthly billings. Get your exclusive listener offer at recruitwithatlas.com. Tom segments every sales team into four brackets. The top 10% who don't care about anyone else — they just want to bill. The next 20% who aspire to be that top performer. The bottom 10% who were never going to make it. And then the middle 60%. The bracket nobody manages correctly. Because the middle 60% don't measure themselves against the top performers. They measure themselves against the bottom 10%. As long as they're doing enough not to be the worst person on the team, they think they're fine. That's the bracket quietly sinking most agencies, and most owners can't see it because they manage everyone on the team the same way. The second framework Tom hands over is the activity benchmark EVONA uses to define elite. 25 interviews on a rolling four-week period. Reverse engineered from a 12-to-1 interview-to-placement ratio, the number means a recruiter hitting it consistently is doing two placements a month at minimum. Drop below 25 and Tom is direct — you are not fit to play at the top level. Tom also unpacks why he would hate to be running a big recruitment company right now. AI governance is about to break the firms that can't police what their recruiters are doing with dashboards, prompts, and outreach automation. LinkedIn is heading into a tidal wave of AI-driven spam. Vertical platforms are about to replace the way candidates look for jobs. And recruitment is now an IQ-over-EQ game — the people leveraging the tools and staying sharp are pulling away from everyone else. He opens the conversation with the moment that built all of this. Tom had a stutter so bad as a kid he was afraid to pay a phone bill. He chose recruitment specifically because it would force him onto the phone every day. That fear is the engine behind eight years of building EVONA — and the reason "evolving" is the company's core value. Tom closes with the books that shaped him (the Rockefeller Habits, Ronnie Wood, Alex Ferguson on man management), why Claude is the tool changing how he thinks, why he's not crazy about Bullhorn, and the one piece of advice he'd give every recruiter facing the next 18 months. Don't be a lone wolf. What You'll Learn: - The four-bracket framework Tom uses to manage every sales team, and why the middle 60% is the bracket quietly sinking most agencies - The 25-interview rolling 4-week benchmark that defines elite at EVONA, and the ratio behind it - Why Tom says recruitment is now IQ over EQ, and what that shift means for average recruiters - The vertical-platform shift coming for LinkedIn, and how candidates will find jobs in the next two years - Why a stutter became the engine of Tom's career, and what that says about the recruiters who succeed - The tools, books, and habits that shape Tom's leadership at EVONA Connect with Tom Kelly: LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/evonatom/ Email — tom@evona.com EVONA — https://evona.com

Tom Kelly scaled EVONA from four bootstrapped founders in a tiny Bristol office to eighty recruiters in three years. Then he made the call most agency owners never make. He cut the team back to thirty. And in doing it, per-head revenue doubled.   This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation that pulls apart exactly how that happened.   Brought to you by Atlas. The AI-first recruitment platform that captures every candidate conversation automatically. Atlas customers report 40%+ EBITDA growth and 80%+ increase in monthly billings. Get your exclusive listener offer at recruitwithatlas.com.     Tom came up on the inside track at one of the biggest STEM recruiters on the FTSE. He spotted space as a high-growth vertical before almost anyone, pitched it internally, got shut down, and walked. He linked up with three other recruiters in the same office — Jack, Rich, and Ryan. They sketched the company out on a whiteboard at Tom's place: no KPIs, no fixed working hours, no fixed location, brand-first, give back to STEM. Eight years and over $40 million in fees later, they've stuck to every line of it.   Their first placement was a chef in a Bristol restaurant for £2,000. Hire number two was a head of marketing — a decision every advisor said was crazy. By Tom's read, recruitment and marketing are the same thing. Brand pull beats spam. That bet became the operating philosophy of the entire company.   Then COVID hit and the space industry — recession-proof, Tom argues, because satellites don't get sick — tripled their revenue and headcount. They paid LinkedIn a fortune ahead of a planned scale to three hundred people. They flew the whole company and their partners to Monaco after a million-dollar month. Tom calls that trip the moment the wheels were about to come off.   By 2021 the cracks were showing. Five account managers, thirty fillers, two RPO teams, a full operations and finance bench. Tom describes the peak as a hot mess. So the four founders sat down and made the hardest call of their careers. Contract team first — running $20K a week with no real strategy. Then perm cuts. Then operations. Then the advisors. Tom and the other three didn't pay themselves for six months. He moved his family to the US in the middle of it.   The episode ends on the moment the four founders agreed one of them had to lead, and that person would be Tom. Without ego. The single reason, Tom says, the business is still standing.   Part 2 drops Wednesday — the 25-interview rule that defines elite recruiters at EVONA, and the segmentation that explains why most agency owners are quietly losing 60% of their team.   What You'll Learn:   - Why scaling to 80 recruiters nearly broke the business, and the moment the four founders knew they had to cut to 30 - The pre-COVID hire every advisor told Tom was crazy, and why it became the engine of the company - How EVONA tripled in COVID while most agencies were frozen - The £300,000 company trip Tom now calls a warning sign - What it actually costs to let 50 people go — emotionally, financially, culturally - Why the four founders agreed one person had to take the wheel, and how they made the call without breaking the partnership   Connect with Tom Kelly:   LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/evonatom/ EVONA — https://evona.com  

Most recruiters think AI is coming for someone else's desk. Riece Keck isn't so sure. Two years ago he said AI wouldn't replace great recruiters, but it would replace the mediocre ones sooner than anyone wanted to admit. He still stands by it, and he thinks we're a lot closer now than we were then. He's also taking the stage at the AI Recruiting Summit 2026 to go even deeper on this, so if today's episode lands, that's where you see it built live: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ This conversation is the proof. Riece built a tech recruiting agency to a $1.2M year, then watched it nearly die twice before it folded into a merger for a token amount. He stepped away during a brutal personal stretch, then cold-started the whole thing again in early 2025, and billed roughly $800K in his first year back without leaning on his old client list. The difference the second time wasn't more hustle. It was systems. Riece walks Benjamin through the no-code BD engine he built end to end: scraping job boards on a daily auto-run, identifying the right hiring managers, enriching the contacts, drafting the outreach, and dripping it out, all while he sleeps. He breaks down how he uses funding signals, new-hire signals, and backfill signals to reach companies at the exact moment they're hurting, and how he's now rebuilding the entire stack inside Claude Code with MCP connections so an agent runs his ATS and his sourcing for him. But this isn't a go-all-in-on-tech sermon. Riece is just as direct about the other lane: if your zone of genius is relationships, build the offline communities that pull you out of the LinkedIn noise everyone else is drowning in. The one move he says gets you crushed in 2026 is staying in the middle, the undifferentiated recruiter who takes a job order, fires off templated outreach, and hopes. You'll also hear how he turned strategic referral partnerships into a steady deal source, why persona-based messaging quietly outperforms everything else in the inbox, and what he'd tell a recruiter trying to go from average to elite right now. If you've ever watched your desk go to zero and wondered if there's another side to it, this one is for you. There is. The recruiters who reinvent now are the ones crushing it in 2028. This episode is powered by Atlas, the AI-first recruitment platform built to eliminate the admin that eats your day. Atlas captures every candidate conversation automatically and turns it into something you can actually use. Ask it who mentioned wanting a four-day week or who's open to relocating next year, and Magic Search pulls the answer from your entire database instantly. No keyword guessing, no digging through old notes. Atlas customers have reported over 40% EBITDA growth and over 80% more monthly billings after switching. Unlock your exclusive listener offer at recruitwithatlas.com. Also brought to you by Millee, the AI deal strategist that turns the gut feel of big billers into real-time guidance on every live process. Millee preps you before every call and drafts your high-caliber follow-ups so you lead from the first minute. Try it free at millee.ai.

Most recruiters treat their client list like a closed account. You made the perm placement, the fee hit, and now you wait six months until they need you again. Dawson Henis looked at that same client list and saw six figures of recurring revenue nobody was collecting, so he picked up the phone.  In this episode, Dawson, the founder of the Atlanta-based Henis Group, walks Benjamin Mena through what happened in the four weeks after he bolted a staffing division onto the perm search firm he started at 24. Seven contractors. Two existing clients. Roughly ten thousand dollars a month in gross profit, built entirely off relationships he already had. His first two orders filled in 48 hours, a pace he would never touch on the perm side.   But the contractors are only half the story. Dawson hasn't made a cold call in two years. He breaks down the lead-gen system that replaced it, the ICP work, the messaging that doesn't sound like creepy automation, and the exact stack he runs, and why he fired three lead-gen agencies charging him thousands a month before building the whole thing himself. If you have ever paid an outside firm to book your meetings and gotten nothing back, this part will sting in a useful way.   This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the AI-first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin. Atlas captures every candidate conversation automatically and turns it into something you can actually use. With MagicSearch you can ask things like "who mentioned they're open to relocating next year?" and get answers instantly across your whole database, with no keyword guessing and no digging through old notes. Atlas customers have reported over 40% EBITDA growth and over 80% more monthly billings after adopting the platform. Get started and unlock your exclusive listener offer at https://recruitwithatlas.com   He is also honest about what it cost him along the way: the hires that didn't fit, what recruiters get wrong when they hire for their own shop, and the four-question screen from coach Diane Prince that finally fixed it. And he goes deep on the why, how he lost it chasing other people's playbooks and how he got it back.   Whether you are a perm firm owner sitting on contract revenue you haven't tapped, a newer recruiter wondering if you can really do this on your own, or someone who just needs the reminder that the opportunity is already in your book, this one delivers.   Connect with Dawson Henis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dawson-henis/   Resources and links:

Steve Anderson was a milkman in South Carolina before he picked up a phone in healthcare recruiting. Twenty-five years later, he got laid off at 48 — part of a 1,500-person RIF — with five daughters, a mortgage, and no plan B.   Three months in, they pitched their first investor. He told them they were idiots and hung up. That call is the reason Optigy exists in its current form   This episode is brought to you by Atlas — the AI-first recruitment platform that captures every candidate conversation and turns it into searchable intelligence. Atlas customers report over 40% EBITDA growth and 80%+ increases in monthly billings. Get started at recruitwithatlas.com.   Also brought to you by Millee — AI deal strategy built from the encoded intuition of elite recruiters. Sharper call prep, high-caliber emails drafted for you, real-time guidance on every live process. Users save an hour a day on email alone. Try it free at millee.ai.   Steve Anderson was a milkman in South Carolina before he picked up a phone in healthcare recruiting. Twenty-five years later, he got laid off at 48 — part of a 1,500-person RIF — with five daughters, a mortgage, and no plan B. Three months in, they pitched their first investor. He told them they were idiots and hung up. That call is the reason Optigy exists in its current form.   Steve and his co-founders rebuilt the company in 48 hours. No clients, only partners. No vendor relationships, no race to the bottom, no "send us reqs and we'll send you names." It cost them roughly $3.5M in walked-away deals in year one. It also got them in a room with one of the largest healthcare organizations in the country, where they built the first physician healthcare recruitment team in the ACO space — on a $400 website, an ATS they didn't own, and a phone they hadn't bought yet.   Year one: $1.1M off six months of real building. Year two: $3.7M. Year three, closing January 2027, on track for $19.4M. 53 partners, 84% close rate, only two partners lost in two years. A private equity deal closed December 2025 that changed what's possible from here. This episode is the operator's playbook behind that arc. Why "partners, not clients" isn't marketing — it's a P&L decision. What broke in Q1 of year two when the credit card bills came due. What Steve learned in-house at a company that saved his life five months after a heart attack he didn't see coming. And the line his older brother gave him that reshaped how he thinks about time: "I have lived longer than I have left to live."  If you've been waiting for the right moment to bet on yourself, this is the one to listen to twice.  What You'll Learn: Why "partners, not clients" is the model that scaled Optigy from zero to a $19.4M run-rateThe exact moment Year 1 broke — and the leadership shift that fixed itHow to walk into a 2,200-location healthcare org with no website and no ATSWhat in-house recruiting teaches you that no agency seat ever canThe five-part call structure and where 90% of recruiters fall apart on the transitionWhy "work works" is the only input that matters early — and what replaces it as you scaleThe diligence questions that protect founders from the wrong PE partner  

She launched her firm on January 12th. Six weeks later she'd billed $120,000 — working off an Excel spreadsheet, a phone, and zero AI. While most of the industry is convinced the next placement is one shiny tool away, Lauren Lehman quietly proved the opposite, and this conversation breaks down exactly how she did it. Before we get into it — this episode is brought to you by Atlas, the AI-first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin. The resume never tells the full story, and Atlas captures every candidate conversation automatically so nothing gets buried in your notes. With MagicSearch you can ask things like "who mentioned they're open to relocating next year?" and pull the answer from your entire database instantly. Atlas customers have reported over 40% EBITDA growth and over 80% increase in monthly billings after adopting the platform. Get started and unlock your exclusive listener offer at recruitwithatlas.com. Lauren spent nearly a decade recruiting in healthcare and then accounting and finance before walking away from a comfortable, high-billing seat to start Manta Search. In this episode she's honest about the part nobody posts about: the fear of failing, the costs people underestimate, and the reality that you become marketing, payroll, admin, and AR the day you go out on your own. Her advice is to have the lawyer and accountant in place before you jump — then jump anyway. As she puts it, you build the parachute on the way down. The engine behind the $120K is less glamorous than the number suggests, and that's the point. Lauren treats business development as the circle of life for a desk — two to three hours every single day, calendar blocked, phone off, hitting 50 companies a block through calls, texts, voice notes, and LinkedIn. She walks Benjamin through her actual MPC scripts, why she leads with a candidate instead of begging for a job order, and why texting CFOs outperforms email every time. Spoiler: they text back, because they're people on their phones just like the rest of us. Then there's mushrooming — Lauren's term for turning one filled role into an entire account. She breaks down precisely how she asks a hiring manager for the introduction into legal, engineering, or IT without sounding opportunistic, when to make the ask, and how she follows up on open roles without ever becoming a resume pusher. This is the relationship game that replaced the transactional, burnout-driven headhunter mentality she ran during the pandemic gold rush, and the shift to a white-glove approach — including learning to say no to the wrong searches — is what made the model durable. And on the question every recruiter is wrestling with: Lauren thinks AI isn't good enough to replace the human part yet, and that leaning on it too early is quietly making recruiters lazy. She uses it where it helps on the back end, but the relationships, the follow-up, and the discipline are still hers. If you've been waiting for the perfect moment to go all in, this is the episode. Draw the line in the sand and start your six weeks now — because 2026 is your year. Connect with Lauren Lehman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurentaylorlehman/

What separates the recruiters billing seven figures from the ones who plateau year after year? According to Scott Love, only one out of a hundred recruiters will ever reach their full potential. The other ninety-nine are stuck in the same loop — relying on the most placeable candidate call, avoiding real business development, and confusing activity with progress. In this episode, Scott breaks down exactly why 99% of recruiters fail at BD and what the 1% are doing differently going into 2026. Scott Love is one of the most recognized names in the recruiting industry. He runs partner-level legal recruiting for global law firms, hosts The Rainmaking Podcast (a top 2% show globally with 300+ episodes), serves as editor-in-chief of The Rainmaking Magazine, and has coached 4,500 recruiting firms across 36 countries. He's a Naval Academy graduate, a former card-counting blackjack player mentored by alumni of the MIT blackjack team, and one of the sharpest strategic minds in the search business. In this conversation, Scott shares why most recruiters never escape transactional BD, the three traits that define the top 1%, why niching down is non-negotiable, and how to build thought leadership that pulls clients toward you instead of chasing them. He explains why "they need you more than you need them" is the posture shift behind every seven-figure desk, when to stop thanking your clients, how game theory applies to deal management and emotional recovery, and what every recruiter should do in the first hour of the day. This episode is brought to you by Atlas. Atlas is the AI-first recruitment platform built for agency recruiters and search firms who want to source faster, manage pipeline smarter, and bill more without adding headcount. If you're stitching together five tools to run your desk, Atlas was built for you. Try it free at https://recruitwithatlas.com This episode is also brought to you by Millee. Millee analyzes every detail of your live deals and builds the exact strategy you need — powered by a curated knowledge base from elite recruiters. It's encoded intuition, the judgment and gut feel of big billers translated into real-time guidance for every single process. Users save an hour a day on email alone. Try Millee free for 30 days at https://millee.ai Scott also gets into the trends he's tracking for 2026, including his prediction that LinkedIn will lose its grip as the dominant sourcing channel within two years, the dirty-secret play that built his thought leadership in legal, and the journaling discipline he's used since 2017 to track his greatest achievements, his mistakes, and the patterns underneath both. If you want to bill more in 2026, this is the conversation.

Tony O'Neill surfs 200 days a year, runs an executive search firm from the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, and lives a life most agency owners assume they have to retire before earning. Here's the part no one talks about: it didn't come from selling the business or stepping back from the desk. He's still billing, still in Pinnacle Society conversations, and still committed to another fifteen years in the seat. The life came from a decision he made fifteen years ago to reverse-engineer everything and to build a brand, not a search firm.  This conversation is the playbook. Tony walks through the brick wall he hit in year one, the consultants who saved his business, and why he chose an outdoor sporting goods niche his mentors told him was too small. He explains why he switched from contingent to retained in year three, why he refuses contingent work today even with the perfect candidate already in his inbox, and why owning the client relationship is the non-negotiable that separates high-performance firms from everyone else. Then he breaks down the 2024 pivot that added over six figures to his revenue. When his niche got hit, he called every past client to ask how he could improve, and got certified in DISC and Predictive Index. He built behavioral assessments into his proposals with an extended warranty, priced them higher than felt comfortable, and turned them into a recurring revenue line. His framing for clients: two-thirds of hires industry-wide are bad hires, and the assessment moves the customer from a .333 batting average to .500. MILLEE — The judgment that separates big billers the reframe that regains control of a stalling process, the move when a candidate goes quiet — usually takes years on the desk. Millee analyzes every live deal and builds the exact strategy you need, powered by a curated knowledge base from elite recruiters. It's encoded intuition. Before every call you get sharp contextual preparation. In your inbox, high-caliber emails are already drafted. Users save an hour a day on email alone. Try Millee free for 30 days: https://www.millee.ai/ ATLAS — The resume never tells the full story. Candidates share what really matters in conversations: motivations, salary expectations, plans to relocate. Most of that ends up buried in notes. Atlas captures every conversation automatically and turns it into something you can use. With MagicSearch, you can ask "who talked about wanting a four-day week" or "who's open to relocating next year" and pull answers from your entire database instantly. Atlas customers report over 40% EBITDA growth and over 80% increase in monthly billings after adopting the platform. Unlock your exclusive listener offer: https://recruitwithatlas.com  What You'll Learn: Why Tony refuses contingent work, even when the perfect candidate is already in his inboxThe brick wall every new search firm owner hits in year one and the consultants who break itHow he chose a "too small" niche and built a brand recruiters confuse for a sporting goods companyThe 2024 pivot that added six figures: DISC, Predictive Index, and extended warranties built into the proposalWhy two-thirds of hires industry-wide are bad and how to get your client to bat .500Tony's daily operating system: 10am-3:30pm prime selling time, sauna, cold plunge, algorithm starvationThe two books behind the business: Million Dollar Consulting and The Four AgreementsWhy "freedom requires discipline" is the principle every search firm owner has to internalize first   Connect with Tony O'Neill on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/outdoorindustryrecruiter/

Resumes never tell the full story. The candidate who casually mentioned she's open to relocating, the manager who said he wants a four-day week, the senior dev who's quietly looking — that detail gets buried in notes and forgotten. Atlas changes that. It's the AI-first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin, capturing every conversation automatically and turning it into something you can actually search. With MagicSearch you can ask Atlas "who talked about relocating?" or "who mentioned a four-day week?" and it pulls the answers instantly across your entire database. Atlas also makes BD easier with opportunity tracking and client relationship tools powered by generative AI, plus smart dashboards that give you full pipeline visibility across the business. Atlas customers report 40%+ EBITDA growth and 80%+ increases in monthly billings after adoption. It's built for agencies that want to grow without adding more manual work. https://recruitwithatlas.com April 24, 2020. Catiana Ibarra Aponte was handing layoff letters to her own team when her own letter came. Her director's parting line: "If we had more recruiting, you'd still be here." She heard what she'd been hearing her whole life. Not good enough. This wasn't her first no. Her father, a second-generation pharmacy owner, told her she couldn't take over the family business — she was a girl, she'd have other roles. Her master's professor told the class on day one they weren't degree material. Now her employer was saying the same thing during a global pandemic. She cried for four hours. Then she built a plan. In this episode of The Elite Recruiter Podcast, Catiana — now CEO and Brand Manager of PeopleLift, an HR staffing and AI consulting firm serving clients across Puerto Rico, Latin America, and the United States — walks Benjamin Mena through one of the most resilient career arcs in recruiting. Surviving Hurricane Maria with six months of no electricity while still trying to fill jobs. Bouncing through four contract roles in two years. Driving alone to a hotel during COVID lockdown for a first interview she suspected might be a kidnapping. Getting publicly attacked in a company-wide Slack channel by a teammate who compared her to a dog chasing a bone. Building the trust with clients that eventually moved her from talent acquisition manager to CEO. This is an episode for any agency recruiter, executive search professional, or staffing firm owner who's ever wondered whether they have what it takes to become an operator, a partner, or a CEO. It's also for any recruiter who's been told no — by a client, a candidate, a boss, a family member — and needs to hear from someone who turned every one of those nos into the next chapter. What you'll learn: Why being told "no" is the single most useful career fuel for an agency recruiterHow Catiana rebuilt her career across four contract roles before landing the CEO seatThe after-5pm work that took her from TA manager to operator to CEOHow to spot top billers who can become leaders — and which top billers should stay individual contributorsThe change-management playbook she used to push new processes through resistant teamsWhy one-service staffing firms are at risk and how PeopleLift expanded into fractional HR and AI consultingThe mindset shift that transformed her client retention and BD resultsWhat recruiters who dream of becoming operators or partners need to start doing tomorrow  

$720,000 in one quarter. Zero cold calls. Three tools. He's running 29 active job orders in pharma and biotech recruiting, his business development is 100% inbound from LinkedIn, and he just took over the family agency on January 1st. This is what an AI-powered recruiting desk actually looks like when someone executes it correctly. This episode is sponsored by Atlas — the AI-first recruitment platform built for agencies that want to scale without adding manual work. Atlas captures every candidate conversation automatically across calls, emails, and interviews, then turns it into searchable intelligence. With MagicSearch you can ask Atlas in plain English — "Who mentioned they're open to relocating?" or "Who wants a four-day week?" — and pull answers across your entire database instantly. Atlas customers report 40% EBITDA growth and 80% increases in monthly billings. Unlock your exclusive listener offer at https://recruitwithatlas.com This episode is also sponsored by Millee — try Millee free for 30 days. Millee analyzes every detail of your live deals and builds the exact strategy you need in real time, powered by a curated knowledge base from elite recruiters. It's encoded intuition — the judgment and gut feel of big billers translated into real-time guidance for every process. Sharp prep before every call. High-caliber emails already drafted in your inbox. Users save an hour a day on email alone. Start your 30-day free trial at https://www.millee.ai/ Pin Discount Code and Link: https://www.pin.com/book-a-demo?via=recruiter  Code: JRS02DRI Now back to Nick. He grew up inside the business. His mom Jennifer was a Pinnacle Society member for years, one of the most respected pharma recruiters in the country. She drilled the old-school fundamentals into him: phone above everything, persistence past the point most quit, availability that never sleeps. When Nick took over this January, he didn't throw any of it out. He fused it to AI and rebuilt the desk from the ground up. Nick walks through every layer of the build. The Claude agent that drafts client-ready job descriptions in twenty minutes. The virtual assistant on Slack handling every interview thread so nothing slips. The network scoring system rating every relationship one to ten — highest score gets the call. The pricing move that landed him a no-end-date $20,000-a-month retainer. The text message detail that lifted response rates by 40% — switching from a green RingCentral bubble to a blue iMessage bubble, same exact message. Benjamin pushes him on the controversial calls every recruiter is wrestling with. Why cold calling is finished. Why pure sourcers are about to disappear. Why the gap between recruiters who adopt AI and those who don't will widen so violently that ten-person agencies will hit ten million in revenue. The three traits that project a new recruiter ahead of everyone else. And the one business development principle Nick's mom drilled into him that most modern recruiters skip to their own detriment. If you're an agency recruiter, executive search consultant, staffing firm owner, or solo recruiter trying to figure out what an AI-powered recruiting desk needs to look like in 2026, this is the episode to study.

Two million-dollar billers. A $4 million book. They walked away from all of it — at the peak of their performance — because they believed most recruiters were about to learn the hard way that AI doesn't save careers. It exposes the ones built on shaky ground.

Amanda Hendrix helped scale a healthcare staffing firm from $2.2M to $11M in a single year during the COVID boom. Then the market normalized. Bill rates dropped from $145 to $110 in thirty days. Vendors got cut. Recruiter morale cracked. Agencies that hired aggressively into the surge got squeezed out one by one. This episode is the post-mortem you don't usually get from someone who lived both sides of it. Now Head of Growth at Ember Hiring, an AI SaaS platform built for healthcare staffing, Amanda works with nearly 20 agencies across the industry. What she's seeing inside those firms is the most direct AI warning Benjamin has put on the show. A year ago, the line in AI engineering circles was that staffing agencies who didn't adopt AI would be out of business in five years. The current timeline she's hearing? Eighteen months. That's the operational reality being traded between agency operators while consolidation accelerates underneath them. One of her clients merged five agencies into one then acquired four more. She predicts the 400 to 500 active travel nursing agencies operating today will collapse to roughly fifty within ten years. The conversation moves through what actually scaled the firm in year three, what habits from hyper-growth quietly became liabilities once the market tightened, and the leadership decisions that kept the company alive when bill rates collapsed. Amanda is candid about cutting salaries, choosing not to over-hire during the boom, and the moment she realized her former mentor's "don't throw people at the problem" advice had saved the company. She also walks through what the recruiter desk needs to look like over the next eighteen months: AI-funneled pre-qualified leads in one bucket, an active book of business in another, submitted candidates in the third — with the recruiter's job becoming pure relationship work and oversight of AI agents handling the rest. She explains why managing 40 to 50 candidates is no longer enough, and why 100-plus is the new floor. Amanda drops a stat that should change how every healthcare recruiter thinks about flow: less than ten percent of candidates who apply actually get the role they applied for, because the job is filled before the submission packet reaches the client. Speed is preparation. Consistency beats charisma. The recruiters who treat themselves like entrepreneurs are the ones who'll still be standing in five years. If you run an agency, lead a team, or bill a desk in any vertical of recruiting, this is the episode to forward to anyone on your team who still thinks AI is optional. This episode of The Elite Recruiter Podcast is brought to you by Atlas, the AI-first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin and turn every candidate conversation into pipeline. Atlas captures every conversation automatically, then lets you query your entire database with MagicSearch — ask "who mentioned wanting a four-day week" or "who's open to relocating next year" and get answers instantly. No keyword guessing. No digging through old notes. Atlas customers report over 40% EBITDA growth and over 80% increase in monthly billings after rollout. Unlock your exclusive listener offer at https://recruitwithatlas.com

Diane Prince walked into staffing with zero recruiting experience and one specific intention: build a business she could scale and sell. Six years later, she sold her staffing agency for $28 million.

Norm Volsky doesn't just place people at companies. He invests in them. After 14 years in digital health and employee benefits recruiting, Norm has built something almost nobody else in this industry has pulled off: a $6M recruiting practice and a fully operational venture capital firm — running side by side, feeding each other, in the same niche. His first client, Livongo, sold to Teladoc for $18.5 billion. His second, Hinge Health, just IPO'd for $3 billion. He placed three dozen people at Hinge alone. And somewhere along the way, he realized the smartest investors in the room already trusted him more than any VC — because he knew every founder, every pricing model, every hiring trend before they did. So he stopped just taking fees. He started taking equity.

The This Is Your Year Recruiter Summit kicks off April 27th — less than 2 weeks away. Free live sessions with the industry's best, including Mike Williams, Brianna Rooney, and Mark Whitby. Register now: https://this-is-your-year-recruiter-summit.heysummit.com/ Most contingent recruiters think the hardest part of going retained is convincing their clients to pay upfront. Andrea Colabella thought the same thing — until she actually did it, and discovered the anticipation was far worse than the conversation. Andrea is the founder of Cardea Group, a fully retained executive search firm based in New York City specializing in legal and compliance professionals within investment management. She started cold-calling recruiting agencies in 2005 asking to be hired as a recruiter, found her first mentor, and spent the next 18 years niching further and further — from admin and HR, to software sales, to investment management broadly, to a single laser-focused vertical: legal and compliance at hedge funds, private equity firms, and family offices. She built Cardea Group in 2009 during one of the worst markets in modern financial history. She's a Pinnacle Society member, has placed over 500 professionals, and in 2023 made the full pivot to a 100% retained model. You'll also hear how she uses recorded video first-round interviews through Hinterview to cut five to eight hours of client interviewing time per search, how she runs weekly steering meetings with retained clients to manage expectations and protect the search process, and why building a reputation as the expert in the room — not just the recruiter who fills the job — has become her most powerful business development tool.  Timestamps 00:00 — Cold-calling her way into recruiting in 2005 Boston 10:42 — Leaving the broad market to go deep in investment management 12:37 — What bad firm culture taught her about running her own shop 23:00 — Recyclability: why candidates in multiple processes all move at once 26:02 — The contingent to engaged to retained journey 30:05 — How retained pricing works: 40/40/20 on total comp 31:43 — Why billing on total compensation changes everything 33:22 — What white glove service actually means operationally 37:26 — Converting existing clients: anticipation is worse than the conversation 39:33 — Hosting in-person industry events as a BD strategy 44:14 — Weekly steering meetings and defensive calendar blocking 53:16 — The retained pitch and 52-day average time to close 54:36 — Using recorded video interviews to cut client interviewing time Connect with Andrea Colabella

Dave Veres started at Aerotech in September 1994. He was 22, fresh off four years as an all-conference shortstop at Michigan State, and he didn't know how to spell the company name. He got on a plane to Baltimore for training and called his parents after three days. They asked what the job was. He told them he didn't know — but it was the coolest thing he'd ever seen. What followed was 27 and a half years at one company. From entry-level recruiter to running national sales and enterprise accounts across automotive, defense, and government — while that company scaled into the largest privately held staffing firm in the country. This episode is the blueprint for how he did it. The through-line is what Dave calls diagnosis-based selling. Not transactional. Not even question-based. Diagnosis. The difference: question-based selling asks what a client needs today. Diagnosis-based selling understands where a client sits in their product life cycle, predicts what they'll need three months from now, and positions talent before the req ever exists. That shift — from reactive to predictive — is what made Dave the call people made when the stakes were too high. He breaks down how he cracked Toyota, Honda, and Hyundai when Aerotech already owned GM, Ford, and Chrysler — by becoming the expert in markets his own company didn't yet understand. He talks about stumbling into defense staffing almost by accident: a colleague drives past a shipyard, asks one right question, and six months later they're running $500,000 a week in spread with 1,800 contractors in Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He was grumbling about 4am traffic until he started seeing soldiers at the airport. That moment rewired something. After that, it wasn't headhunting anymore. He talks about the long game on relationships — the HR generalist you place today is the VP of People who calls you in seven years, and most recruiters blow that window without realizing it. He talks about navigating enterprise accounts where no single person signs the deal. And he talks about what it actually takes to build a culture where people stay and grow. Thirty years in. Still loves it. This is why. What you'll learn: The difference between question-based and diagnosis-based selling — and how to shiftHow to use product life cycle mapping to break into new industriesWhy candidates you place today are your best future clientsHow to find the real decision maker in an enterprise accountThe first three moves to make to change your sales approach in 30 daysHow AI should be used to keep recruiting human — not replace it Sponsor:

Most recruiting firms measure success by offers accepted. Jake Frazer watched that metric send unqualified people into a war zone. That was the moment he decided the industry was broken — and spent the next decade building something different.  Frazer is not a recruiter. He is a government contracting operator who watched from the inside as one of the largest defense contractors in the world staffed programs the wrong way and paid for it in the field. He served in the Army, ran logistics at KBR pumping 2,000 people a month into theater, then built and sold a $200 million prime contractor. When he launched Precision Talent Solutions ten years ago, he made one decision that changed everything: he refused to run it like a recruiting firm.  PTS does not hire traditional recruiters. Seventy percent of his 25-person team came out of govcon operations — people who have been on programs, who know what the mission costs, who have been ghosted by a bad recruiter and remember how it felt. They use a full assessment platform — personality profiling, cognitive scoring, custom video interviews — because Jake believes the resume, especially now, reveals almost nothing. He made hiring a P&L responsibility inside the firm because he learned at KBR that whoever owns the gate owns the outcome.  In this episode Jake shares the framework that took him from a failed SaaS startup to one of the most respected executive search firms in the govcon space — including how he has placed over 50 transitioning generals, how he is positioning PTS for the European defense surge, and why he believes the recruiters who survive the AI wave will be the ones with the deepest industry expertise and the most genuine empathy. The ones who treat candidates and clients with the same level of care. The ones who understand what is actually at stake.  In government contracting, Jake says, a bad hire does not just cost you a fee. Sometimes it costs something else entirely.  

Most recruiting firms aren't losing their best women because of the market. They're losing them because of how they're built. Augusta Mirchandani has watched it happen her entire career — high-performing women who outbill their peers, build the best client relationships, and then quietly disappear after a maternity leave, a life change, or one too many passive-aggressive performance conversations. She refused to accept that as inevitable. So she built something different. Augusta is the founder and CEO of AAA Global, a specialist recruiting firm across five countries — London, Amsterdam, Mumbai, Shenzhen, and Dubai — focused on the quant and discretionary finance space. She started the business at 26 after nearly getting PIP'd in her first seven months. She went on to become top junior biller that same year. After her first daughter was born, she opened four new countries in twelve months. In this conversation, Augusta makes the case that women don't leave recruiting because it's too hard. They leave because most firms are structurally designed for a workforce that no longer exists — rewarding office hours over performance, stripping books during maternity leave, and managing top female billers with indirect communication that is, in her words, insulting. She walks through exactly what needs to change and breaks down the billing methodology that made her a top producer: process-led, information-first, built on relationships rather than hard closing. If you run a firm, this is a direct challenge to how you operate. If you're a recruiter, it's a masterclass in what top performance looks like built over a decade. What you'll learn: The three structural changes male firm owners need to make right nowWhy indirect management of high-performing women is costing your firm placementsHow Augusta went from nearly PIP'd at month seven to top biller that same yearThe information-led method that closes candidates who aren't even looking to moveWhy having a child increased her output — and why most firms have it backwardsWhat to do with a biller's book during maternity leave so they return ready to performThe one question Augusta wishes every recruiter would ask about their own process Timestamps: 00:04 — Why women have a natural edge in relationship-driven recruiting00:07 — Three things male firm owners need to fix right now00:09 — What really happens to a woman's desk during maternity leave00:12 — How having a daughter made Augusta open four countries in one year00:18 — Seven months, 100 calls a day, no placement, nearly PIP'd00:21 — The process-led billing methodology that made her a top producer00:22 — Information-led selling: how to close candidates who aren't looking00:29 — What the first year of running your own firm actually feels like01:04 — The nudge Augusta would give every woman afraid to make the leap

He spent years managing luxury restaurants in Los Angeles and London. Then he walked into a recruiting office with zero industry knowledge — and became one of Europe's top billing recruiters. Jean-Louis-Philippe Girardet (JLP) didn't just cross industries. He rewired how recruiting gets done.

Stephanie Lowenstern's LinkedIn looks like the highlight reel. South Florida recruiter. Founder. Boy mom. Building a go-to-market search firm for the best tech startups in the country. The kind of story that gets you double-tapped and scrolled past in two seconds. What the highlight reel doesn't show: her partner left when their son was five days old. She took a candidate call while she was in labor. She spent over $100,000 — on therapy, legal fees, moving costs, and healing work — funded entirely by her recruiting business. She celebrated 10 years sober in the middle of all of it. And she kept billing through every single day of it. This episode is the real story. Stephanie built her firm from scratch at 29 — no backing, no playbook, just a Squarespace website and blind faith — and hit $170K in year one without knowing what a Series B funding round was. When her personal life collapsed around a newborn, she didn't shut it down. She went on morning walks, listened to Joe Dispenza, cried at strangers in her neighborhood, and sourced candidates like a zombie who refused to stop moving. Because stopping wasn't an option. The business was the lifeline. What makes this conversation rare isn't the resilience story — it's what Stephanie learned on the other side. About rates she should have never cut. About the clients she should have walked away from sooner. About how showing up powerfully for candidates and clients starts with how you show up for yourself. And about why your peace is never going to come from the number. If you're going through something right now and still trying to run your desk — this one's for you. What You'll Learn: How Stephanie built a $170K first year with no recruiting firm experience and no external fundingWhy she kept billing through one of the most traumatic personal seasons of her life — and what three habits kept her business aliveThe $100K+ mistake she made cutting her rates to win business, and what she'd do differentlyHow to convert genuine relationships into clients without sounding like you're sellingWhy your internal state is the single biggest lever on your revenue — and how she rebuilt hersWhat she wishes more recruiters would actually ask her (and the answer she never gets to give) Atlas — The AI-first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin. It captures every conversation automatically and turns it into something you can use. With Magic Search, ask your entire database questions like "Who mentioned they're open to relocating next year?" and get instant answers — no keyword guessing, no digging through old notes. Atlas customers have reported 40%+ EBITDA growth and 80%+ increase in monthly billings. Try it free → https://recruitwithatlas.com

What if the best investment you could make in your recruiting firm had nothing to do with hiring another recruiter? Reyhan Khan has seen inside hundreds of agencies — and the ones scaling fastest all made the same unexpected move first. If you want to check out Clay: https://clay.com/?via=411229 Why This Episode Matters The recruiting industry is still early on the GTM adoption curve. The firms that figure this out now will have an unfair advantage over every competitor still running manual processes. This episode gives you the exact framework to stop trading time for revenue and start building a business that scales without you doing everything yourself. What You'll Learn The exact 5 things a GTM engineer should do in their first 90 days at your firmWhy intent-based outreach crushes cold volume — and the signal-stacking system that makes it workThe HR ratio playbook: how to identify companies actively hiring with zero internal TAHow to build a total addressable market table that shows you exactly how big your niche really isThe honest truth about where AI replaces recruiting work within a year — and where it never willWhy fewer than 5% of recruiters are building personal brands and what that gap is costing themHow to vet GTM vendors so you don't hand $10K to someone who just took a Clay course About the Guest Reyhan Khan is a systems and operations expert and founder of RecruiterGTM. Over the last four years he has built GTM systems for recruiting firms, placed offshore talent to run those systems, and coached hundreds of recruiters on scaling lean without adding headcount. The Transformation Imagine starting 2027 with a pipeline that runs without you, a market map that tells you exactly where your next client is coming from, and a personal brand that generates inbound while you sleep. That's what the recruiters applying these systems are building right now. This episode is the starting point. Listen Now If you're ready to stop being the bottleneck in your own business, this is the episode you've been waiting for. Hit play. Timestamp Highlights 03:06 – Reyhan's origin story: electrical engineer to GTM expert for recruiters07:18 – Why a GTM engineer may be more valuable than your next recruiter hire13:07 – Intent-based outreach: how to fish in a smaller, higher-converting pond15:27 – How to vet GTM vendors before you waste $10K–$15K23:50 – The 5 priorities for a GTM engineer's first 90 days28:15 – Market mapping and building your total addressable market table36:38 – AI's real impact on recruiting over the next 3–5 years42:13 – Can a 5-person firm double revenue with the right GTM hire?47:07 – What it actually takes to go from good to elite55:41 – The question recruiters never ask but should

The AI race in recruiting has already started — and most recruiters don't even know they're losing. Jordan Shlosberg isn't a recruiter. He's the founder building the technology that's about to separate the top 1% of agency recruiters from everyone else. And in this episode, he pulls back the curtain on exactly what's coming, what it means for your desk, and why the window to get ahead is closing fast. Why This Episode Matters The recruiting industry is on the edge of a fundamental power shift. Internal TA teams are shrinking. Agency market share is growing. And the recruiters who move now — building their memory, sharpening their BD, and leveraging AI as an unfair advantage — are going to capture most of that upside. This episode gives you the strategic roadmap straight from the person whose technology is driving that change. What You'll Learn Why recruiters don't have a data problem — they have a memory problem, and how solving it creates a 100x service advantage over internal TAThe exact reason Jordan believes agency recruiters will steal market share from in-house talent teams over the next 3–5 yearsThe three skills every recruiter must double down on right now to win in an AI-driven market (hint: one of them is vibe coding)Why a 1–2 person agency team will soon be able to outbill a 20-person firm — and what that means for how you structure your deskThe "speccing autopilot" coming to Atlas this summer that could generate placements from candidates you've already forgotten you have About Jordan Shlosberg Jordan Shlosberg is the founder of Atlas, the AI-first recruitment platform that's become the most talked-about CRM in the agency recruiting world. Before Atlas, he built ProSapient — an expert network — to $30M in revenue in five years. He brings a rare combination of deep technical expertise, founder-level product obsession, and an outsider's clarity on what's actually broken in recruiting. Extended Value Tease Imagine opening your laptop every morning to a system that's already ranked your best BD prospects, drafted your outreach, searched your entire candidate database without a single filter, and flagged the candidates most worth speccing today. That's not a fantasy — that's where the top agency recruiters are heading right now. This episode gives you the mental model and the tactical roadmap to be one of them. The recruiters who listen to this and act will look back on 2026 as the year everything changed. The ones who don't will feel it in their billings. Timestamp 00:06:23 — "Recruiters don't have a data problem, they have a memory problem" — the insight that reframes your entire database00:08:11 — Two agencies, same size: what the divergence looks like at 1 year, 3 years, and 5 years out00:10:35 — Is a recruiting income gap coming? Jordan's bold prediction on where agency market share is heading00:36:09 — Can a 2-person team outbill a 20-person agency? Jordan's answer and where the real bottleneck will be00:38:37 — The 3 skills every recruiter must build now: sales, relationships, and vibe coding00:48:35 — What the Atlas Top 100 recruiter rankings actually reveal about how elite billers are winning inbound business

Josh Volinsky never hired a single recruiter. No experience, no desk history, no cold call background — just accountants. And somehow he built a $5M firm where 7+ people billed over $400K in their first year.  That's not a fluke. That's a system.  Josh is the co-founder of Synergy Search and the former all-time single-month billing record holder at Robert Half — $259K in one month. He walked away from one of the cushiest books of business in the industry, started a firm above a liquor store and a Dunkin' Donuts, hit $2.7M in year one, and $5M in year two. Then the market shifted, their best performer passed away suddenly, and everything they'd built got stress-tested in the worst possible way.  This episode is the full story. The rocket ship. The crash. The rebuild. And the exact decisions — on hiring, culture, KPIs, and partnership structure — that separated Synergy Search from every other firm that tried the same thing and failed.  **What You'll Learn** - Why hiring experienced recruiters actually slows your growth (and what to hire instead) - The "day in the life" interview method that predicts top billers before they start - How implementing KPI tracking turned a $700K quarter into a single $700K month - The exact culture reset that took them from their worst quarter ever to their best Q4 in firm history - Why splitting everything equally with partners — even when others called it crazy — was the secret to scaling fast - The relationship-building system that took one recruiter from $400K to $850K per year - What separates $500K+ billers from everyone else in today's market (it's one thing)   If you run a desk, lead a firm, or are thinking about going out on your own — this one's going to hit different.  **Timestamp Highlights** 00:40 – The moment Josh told his wife he was leaving Robert Half 05:19 – The $259K month that broke the all-time firm record 08:00 – Why they spent $25K before making a single call 16:21 – How following the non-compete forced their best BD strategy 18:49 – Doubling lifetime billings in one month after their first hires 22:13 – Full desk vs. split: putting people in positions to thrive 31:45 – The worst quarter in firm history and the breakfast that changed everything 36:57 – The 3 levers they pulled to reboot the culture 39:31 – How KPI scorecards produced three $100K billers in a single month 43:06 – The hiring blueprint: A-players only, and how to spot them 53:30 – What $700K+ billers do differently than everyone else   ---