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🎟️ Tom Kosnik is speaking at the Firm Leaders Summit presented by Crelate, November 16 to 18. Every live session is free: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ 🚀 This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the CRMx that captures every conversation and tells you the next action to take: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ We recorded this conversation with Tom Kosnik in 2024, during one of the longest down stretches the recruiting and staffing industry has seen. We're bringing it back because Tom is joining us at the Firm Leaders Summit, and the questions he raised then are the same ones firm owners are working through right now. Tom is the founder and president of the Visus Group, a growth strategy and organizational development firm that works only with staffing and recruiting companies. As he tells it, close to 100 C-suite executives sit in his peer roundtables, which means he hears every few months what's working and what isn't inside firms from startup size to billions in revenue. He also got into the industry by an unusual route. He was studying for the Catholic priesthood, realized it wasn't his calling, and ended up building roundtables for staffing executives because it was the only industry left on the table. The heart of this episode is Tom's stage-by-stage breakdown of what it takes to grow a firm, and how the owner's job changes at every step. From $1M to $5M, the stakes are your next few hires and running out of cash. From $5M to $10M, you need a real sales plan, a recruiting manager who frees you to work on the business, and an owner who keeps selling. From $10M to $25M, it's an operating system, quarterly initiatives, weekly business KPIs, and getting off factoring. Past $25M, your job becomes building and running a management team. He also makes the case that hiring more salespeople and making more dials no longer grows a firm. Recruiting in places a client can't reach is now table stakes. The firms that are winning bring their clients market data and talk with them about human capital strategy, and that conversation positions them as advisors instead of a source of bodies. He explains why offshore sourcing is about to be automated away, why technology spend that doesn't raise gross profit per person is wasted, and why marketing and personal brands now carry most of the sales load. Tom also covers the personality traits that predict great recruiters, how to keep A-players from leaving to start their own firms, and the story of an operator with no staffing background who took a firm from $1M to $3.5M in EBITDA in three years, as Tom tells it. What You'll Learn What changes at $1M, $5M, $10M, and $25MWhy your sales plan matters more than your business plan below $10MWhy "more dials" is the wrong answer to a slow marketThe traits that separate top billers from friendly extrovertsHow to keep your best producers from going out on their ownWhy every firm owner needs a peer group that tells them what they don't want to hear Books mentioned: First, Break All the Rules and The Power to See Ourselves. 🔗 Connect with Tom Kosnik: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tkosnik/ 🌐 Visus Group: https://www.visusgroup.com/ 💬 Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 📩 Get the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Registration is open for the Firm Leaders Summit, three days built for recruiting firm owners and leaders, November 16 to 18. Hiring and training recruiters, growth, BD, and becoming the rainmaker for your firm: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.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: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ Most agency owners chase clients every single month. Matthieu "Matt" Beaurain built a $50M a year search group by doing the opposite. Matt has led Lincoln for 26 years, taking over the firm when it was four people and growing it to roughly 230 people across more than 10 countries and four brands, with about €50M in annual revenue, as he tells it. His model is simple and radical: every consultant is a talent agent. Lincoln follows people, not companies, and the business follows the talent. In this conversation, Matt breaks news he held back from our pregame. In 2020, Lincoln sold 55% of the firm to join a larger European talent representation project. At the end of July, they bought it all back. Lincoln is 100% independently owned again, and Matt explains what that means for the next chapter. He also introduces a metric most firm owners have never heard of: Talent Lifetime Value. Lincoln measures each consultant's portfolio of talent over five years, the way a SaaS company measures customer lifetime value. Build it well and you stop starting every month from zero. Matt shares how he started in recruiting part-time at Robert Half while running a bar with his wife, why he moved his family to Shanghai after visiting a struggling office, and how he built trust in China for six years without speaking Mandarin. He walks through Lincoln's international expansion, from a small acquisition in Belgium right before the 2008 crash to Cooper Fitch in the Middle East, and why one rebrand after an acquisition probably destroyed value. He also explains why he brought in an outside CEO so he could keep doing the work he loves, how Lincoln holds fees at 25 to 28% on a fully retained model, and why the US may finally be on the map. What You'll Learn: How the talent agent model replaces traditional BDWhat Talent Lifetime Value is and how to measure itWhy Lincoln keeps acquired brands instead of rebrandingHow to defend retained fees when clients push for contingencyWhat it takes to hand your firm to an outside CEOWhy Matt believes AI won't replace the trust you build with talent Connect with Matthieu Beaurain: 🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthieu-beaurain-743609/ 🌐 Lincoln: https://lincoln-group.com 🚀 Firm Leaders Summit: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com ⚙️ Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ 🎯 Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 📬 Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

David Dickey was a consistent $500K biller for years. This year he is on pace to break $1 million. When asked what changed, his answer was not a new sales script or a bigger client list. It was one hire. The Firm Leaders Summit is November 16, 17, and 18. Three days built for recruiting firm owners and leaders: hiring and training recruiters, growth, BD, and becoming the rainmaker for your firm. Register here: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the CRMx that captures every call, email, and LinkedIn message automatically and tells you the next action to take. Learn more at https://recruitwithatlas.com/ David is the founder of The Patriot Group, an executive and technical search firm focused on aerospace and defense, with deep work in the unmanned and drone space. Before recruiting, he was a Marine officer who went on to build government contracting companies. When the VP offers started coming in, it was his then girlfriend, now wife, who asked why he did not just go out on his own again. That question started The Patriot Group, which turns 15 this January. In this conversation, David walks through every pivot. From government consulting to running veteran career fairs, 25 events in four years, to going all in on recruiting. He explains why contract-funded GovCon roles are a race to the bottom on margins, and why he only works headquarters roles that are not tied to a single contract. Then the big one. David recruited for about 12 years before making his first CEO placement. The fear that held him back is the same one most recruiters carry: if I call myself an executive recruiter, I lose everything else. He shares the referral that opened the door, what he would tell himself five years ago, and why owning your positioning on LinkedIn matters more than waiting for credibility to catch up. We also get into the hire that changed the year. In the summer of 2024, David brought his youngest stepson into the business from a sales background. He took over the processes, the forms, and training the firm's AI on Claude, which freed David to focus on better clients and sharpen the firm's message. David also breaks down why he moved away from contingency to an engagement fee model, why the first move for a recruiter stuck at a low average fee is to raise it, and how years of building his LinkedIn network turned simple connection messages into searches. What You'll Learn: Why David only works headquarters roles in GovCon, not contract-funded seatsThe fear that kept him from executive search for 12 years, and what finally tipped itHow one hire freed up his time and put him on pace for $1MHow his stepson uses Claude and Loxo to automate submissions and curated resumesWhy he dropped contingency for an engagement fee modelHow his LinkedIn DM game turns connections into executive searchesThe Marine Corps principle he still applies when a placement does not work out 🔗 Links: 🎖️ Connect with David Dickey: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dickeydavid/ 🏢 The Patriot Group: https://thepatriotsgrp.com/ 🚀 Firm Leaders Summit: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com ⚡ Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ 🤝 Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 📬 Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Your desk goes quiet. The calls slow down, the interviews dry up, and you start wondering what changed. John Ruffini has an answer, and it usually starts with what is sitting in your pipeline. The Firm Leaders Summit runs November 16 to 18, three days built for recruiting firm owners and leaders on hiring, training, BD, and growth: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com Money Makers 2.0 is on Amazon in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover: https://amzn.to/4AYuOqu This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the CRMx that captures every interview, call, and message automatically, then tells you the next action to take, now with a contract suite and live margin visibility on every placement: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ John has spent 30 years in recruiting, starting on a direct hire desk and spending the last 10 to 15 years training, mentoring, and developing recruiters across accounting, IT, and healthcare. Ten years after his first book, he sat down with Benjamin Mena for the release of Money Makers 2.0, a full rewrite of the original for the way recruiters work today. He opens with the question he uses when a passive candidate tries to shut the call down, and its twin for the hiring manager who says they just posted the job. Then he walks through his forecasting rule. By his math, only about 30% of an active pipeline closes, and a resume submission does not count until the client agrees to interview. A recruiter who wants to bill $30K a month, as he tells it, needs roughly $100K of interview-stage deals in motion. He is clear that seasoned billers who know their clients can close far more, but for a quiet or growing desk, the math is the wake-up call. From there it gets practical. Why he calls active candidates every week even when he cannot place them, what one active and one passive interview a day does for a desk, how he tracks the companies where competitors are placing and he is not, and why he never blocks more than 45 minutes of calls at a time. He shares the story of a recruiter who trusted the plan through six slow months and went on to have 80 nurses working for her, and a friend who left voicemails for a niche clinician for six months until she called back because he was the only one who kept calling. What You'll Learn: The Million-Dollar Recruiting Question for passive candidatesThe marketing version that gets hiring managers talkingHow to ask for referrals that produce real namesThe pipeline math behind a consistent monthHow to find your own send-out to placement ratioThe call block plan that separates busy from productiveWhy most deals fall apart, and the steps recruiters skip Money Makers 2.0 is on Amazon in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover: https://amzn.to/4AYuOqu 🎙️ Connect with John Ruffini on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnruffini/ 📱 John on Instagram and TikTok: @beabetterrecruiter 🏢 Firm Leaders Summit: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-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 ⚡ Try Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ 🔗 Connect with Benjamin Mena: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminmena/

Firm owners, the Firm Leaders Summit runs November 16 to 18. Save your seat: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the CRMx that actually understands context. It captures every interview, client call, LinkedIn message, email, and WhatsApp automatically, then tells you the next action to take. Learn more at https://recruitwithatlas.com/ Brooke Weinert and her husband Tommy had a plan: one of them would keep the paycheck while the other built a recruiting firm. Then their entire team at a 2,000-person government contractor was let go, and both of them were out at once. Within 48 hours they were at the dining room table with a spiral notebook, writing the business plan for what became Mount Indie, a cleared recruiting firm built for government contracting. Eight years later, Brooke is founder and CEO, and the firm runs a second line of business most owners would be afraid to touch. Shadow Labs, their cleared recruiter training platform, trains in-house recruiting teams, often at the same companies Mount Indie recruits for. A mentor warned them it would cannibalize the firm. As Brooke tells it, the opposite happened: training clients keep coming back for surge support and their hardest-to-fill roles. Brooke and Benjamin get into how a discounted favor for people they knew turned into a product, why she built a Client Readiness Framework after reading The Pumpkin Plan, and how a dashboard tracking every step from first submittal to offer tells her team which clients deserve their time. She breaks down Evergreen, the retainer model they built by listening to GovCon clients, including the client who went in-house, came back, and grew from 50 to 150 employees with Mount Indie embedded in their hiring. They also cover why Mount Indie has never hired an in-house salesperson, how a quarterly newsletter and LinkedIn content turn into clients over years, what EOS forced them to start doing, and why they earned a facility clearance but have no interest in becoming a prime. If you have ever wondered what else your firm could sell without putting your recruiting business at risk, this one is for you. What You'll Learn Why training your clients' recruiters can bring in more recruiting work, not lessHow a Client Readiness Framework shows which clients are worth your team's timeHow to structure a retainer for clients whose hiring swings with contract awardsWhy protecting your brand and your recruiters' bandwidth can be worth slower growthWhat EOS changes for recruiters who never planned on running a businessHow to test a new revenue line by talking to your clients first Links 🔗 Connect with Brooke on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brooke-weinert-6632752b/ 🏔️ Mount Indie: https://mountindie.com/ 🧪 Shadow Labs: https://shadow-labs.io/ 🚀 Firm Leaders Summit: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com ⚙️ Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ 🤝 Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 📬 Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

How To Build An AI-Native Firm That Beats Firms 4x Its Size. Firm Leaders Summit, Nov 16 to 18, free live sessions: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ Atlas, the CRMx built for recruiters: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ Alex Papageorge is back. Since his last appearance the idea he was duct-taping together with n8n, Clay, and OpenAI has become a fully built recruiting firm running on Azure, with three AI agents named Donna, Sunny, and Mina sitting on Mac Minis on his desk. The argument Alex makes is simple and uncomfortable. If you think you're using AI because you pay for a sourcing tool with AI in it, you're not. You're renting tools. The firms that pull ahead over the next two years won't be the ones with the best tool, they'll be the ones whose tools talk to each other through a real data layer. Ask your firm what its data architecture strategy is. If the answer is "our ATS," that's the pause for concern. He walks through what that actually looks like for a recruiter. When a candidate replies at 1 AM asking about salary, an agent answers inside a minute, because the information lives in one central source of truth instead of six systems an agent has to go hunting through. Recruiters stay on the calls that need a human. Mina sources, reaches out, qualifies, and books the calendar. Sunny takes candidates who didn't land and finds the companies hiring for exactly that role. Donna runs operations. None of them replace the recruiter, and Alex says on tape that staying human in the process is a principle, not a 2026 answer. The number that stops you is the cost. Alex says the infrastructure runs about $150 to $160 a month, maybe $1,000 if he added 25 more recruiters. That figure is infrastructure only, excluding sourcing and interview tools. He also explains why most recruiters are burning tokens: they ask AI to figure out what a plain automation should just move from A to B. Then the conversation turns to clients. Every hiring manager now has the same tools recruiters do, and Alex is hearing it in meetings: the 20% fee is being called a commodity. His answer is not to get cheaper but to be the trusted partner who can explain why a search isn't working and what changing A, B, and C would do, backed by a weekly report. He also shares the email result Benjamin saw on screen in the pregame, 157 candidates with a 62% open rate and a 58% positive reply rate as Alex tells it, and why deliverability, mailbox rotation, and A/B testing are the unglamorous reason behind it. What You'll Learn Why "our ATS" is the wrong answer to the infrastructure question, and what the right one sounds likeHow a central source of truth cuts token costs instead of adding to themWhat Donna, Sunny, and Mina each do, and where the human stays in the loopWhy clients are calling the 20% fee a commodity and what to sell insteadThe first thing to do Monday morning if you just realized your tool stack isn't a strategyThe two questions Alex wishes recruiters would ask him Connect with Alex Papageorge LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-papageorge/ Email: [email protected] Website: https://superrecruiter.io/ Ask him on LinkedIn for his free infrastructure pack. Super Recruiter is hiring and is starting to partner with solo recruiters who want to run on their infrastructure. 🚀 Firm Leaders Summit, Nov 16 to 18: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ 🤖 Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ 🎙️ Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 📬 Newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Finish The Year Strong is live this week, September 28 through October 5. It is the final free virtual summit of 2026 and every session is built to help you close Q4 hard. Big billers, AI, automation, mindset, all week. Register here: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ If you are hearing this after October 5, the Firm Leaders Summit runs November 16 through 18, presented by Crelate. Three days for owners and firm leaders. Register here: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com This episode is presented by Atlas. Atlas is the CRMx that captures every call, meeting, message, and email you touch, ranks your candidates, builds your BD shortlist, and plugs into your Claude and ChatGPT stack. Customers report 50 percent higher response rates, 35 percent more clients won, 15 hours back a week, and billings up 85 percent. See it at https://recruitwithatlas.com/ Bodie Nowak has been in recruiting for 18 years. He and his partner Daniel run Blackwood Partners, a construction and AEC search firm out of Dallas. Just the two of them and Bodie's niece Zoe. In their best year they billed just under $2 million together. Not a 20-person firm. Not a scaled team. Two people and an admin. But the story that got them there is the one nobody talks about. In 2009, less than 18 months into his career, Bodie billed $11,250 for the entire year. Wife at home, kid in kindergarten, on a draw. He interviewed for a Coca-Cola route job at $50,000. He turned it down because the cap would lock his upside forever. Then he spent the rest of the year in a dark makeshift office wondering if he had made the worst decision of his life. He hadn't. In 2010 he pivoted to upstream oil and gas and built the practice from scratch. By 2014 he was billing $800,000 a year. Then OPEC crashed the oil market the day before Thanksgiving and he had to walk away from everything he had built. In 2016 he restarted in construction, in Dallas, from zero. In 2023 he and Daniel bought the business and launched Blackwood Partners. In this conversation Bodie tells Benjamin what does not make it into a Pinnacle Society speech. The 8 months in jail he chose over 2 years of probation because control mattered more than comfort. The letter he wrote to the warden every day for a month. The wife who trusted him when he could not trust himself. And the reason he refuses to scale even though a 15-person firm would love to hit the numbers his 2-person shop hits. He also gets tactical. Bodie walks through his contingency BD system, how he lays contracts across an entire market, why he calls the hiring manager the same hour he learns they interviewed a candidate, and the one trait he hires for above everything else. If you are in your own $11,000 year right now, this episode is for you. If you are grinding yourself trying to scale to 20 people, this episode is for you. And if you have ever wondered whether motivation is a lie, Bodie has your answer. What You'll Learn: Why the long way is actually the shortcutHow to build $1.9 million a year with a 2-person teamThe contingency BD system Bodie calls "lay paper all over the town"How Bodie and Daniel built a 50/50 partnership that survived a market crash and an acquisitionWhy control over comfort is the operating principle behind every hard decision Bodie has madeThe one trait Bodie hires for over every other Connect with Bodie Nowak on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bodienowak/ 🎙️ Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 📬 Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Finish the Year Strong 2026 kicks off Monday, September 28. It is free, it is virtual, and it runs through October 5. Register here: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ This episode is brought to you by Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ To give you a taste of what is coming, we pulled one of the most rewatched sessions from last year's Finish the Year Strong out of the Elite Recruiter Community Library. Dante Nino, co-founder and Managing Partner of Tiello, built his talk around one question: how do you take a recruiter who is stuck at $300K and get them past $500K? Dante co-founded Tiello in 2019 with his college soccer teammate and roommate. At the time of this talk, Tiello was a fully remote, 25 person recruiting firm focused on architecture, engineering, and construction, with over 400 clients signed and more than 750 placements across 31 states, as Dante tells it. His focus is the recruiter who works hard, does everything right, and still plateaus. His answer is not "make more calls." Before any system goes in, Tiello diagnoses the problem, and it is usually one of four: too generalist, too transactional, no ideal client profile, or failing to grow wallet share inside the accounts that already pay you. From there he walks through how Tiello fixes it: industry pods, a recruiter deal box every new hire fills out to define their ideal client, a simple weekly scoreboard of 10 discovery calls a day, 5 submissions, 3 interviews, and 1 offer, and quarterly billing tiers running from a $75K minimum to a $250K million dollar pace. The client strategy section is where it gets sharp. Dante explains why a couple thousand dollars and two days on a client site can turn into a six figure year with that client, why you do not need 100 clients when 3 to 5 six figure accounts can carry a desk, and why Tiello starts at 30% of base plus guaranteed compensation. He shares the VP of Sales placement where $100K in guaranteed first year bonus was billed alongside a $170K base, and how a single job posting turned into a multi six figure client. He closes with the million dollar mindset: return on effort over busywork, depth over breadth, skill stacking, running your desk like a business, and protecting your energy by saying no to clients who will not pay your fee. Recorded October 2025, so "this year" on tape means 2025. What You'll Learn The four reasons hard working recruiters stall at $300KHow Tiello's recruiter deal box defines an ideal client profileThe weekly activity benchmarks behind every Tiello deskHow 3 to 5 six figure clients can carry a $500K deskWhy Dante starts fees at 30% and bills on guaranteed compensationHow to compare two $100K clients on return on effort, not revenue If this is the kind of session you want more of, join us for Finish the Year Strong 2026, September 28 to October 5. Take one or two ideas from every talk, implement them, and finish the year strong. 🎟️ Finish the Year Strong 2026: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ ⚡ Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ 🏛️ Firm Leaders Summit (Nov 16 to 18): https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com 🤝 Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 📬 Newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe 🔗 Dante Nino on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dante-nino/

Before the episode, two dates. Finish the Year Strong runs September 28 through October 5, and the brand new Firm Leaders Summit runs November 16 through 18. Live sessions for both are free. Register at https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ and https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/. Replays, VIP access, and the Elite Recruiter Community are there if you want to go all in on the rest of 2026. 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: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ Mary Huminski was 22, fresh out of Bentley, and everyone told her the same thing: go to a big firm first, learn the trade, then think about boutique. Her uncle, a career headhunter, said it. Her future boss said it. She had a Michael Page offer in hand. Twenty minutes after congratulating her on that offer, Annie Colabella called back with a better one, and Mary took the boutique path everyone warned her against. Year one, as Mary tells it, she billed $713K. Year two she crossed $1 million. She's 25. This episode deconstructs how. Not the highlight reel, the operating system. Mary walks through inheriting two desks from recruiters with 10 and 20 years on her within months of starting, and the mindset shift that turned a terrifying phone list into a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. She breaks down the training method she and Annie built around her learning style: a Zoom window open all day for months, mute and unmute, Annie typing the next question in the chat while Mary drove the call. She explains 9 Before 9, the rule that no coffee happens until nine business development calls are made, and why she plans every single call the night before. The numbers get honest treatment. Mary breaks down where the million-dollar year actually came from: roughly 70 percent referrals and inherited relationships, about 20 percent cold reactivation of dormant clients, and one client from an MPC. She shares her original MPC voicemail script word for word, then the evolved version that leads with market intel instead of the candidate. She walks through a counteroffer she saw coming from the first call, and the client who lit her up for 15 minutes over a follow-up email, the calendar reminder Annie made her set, and what happened when she called back three months later. There's a Gen Z conversation in here that goes somewhere unexpected. Mary doesn't think she's an exception. She thinks there are a lot of Marys out there who never had someone say I'm invested in you. What You'll Learn: The 9 Before 9 rule and the night-before prep that makes it fitHow to build a rookie's training plan around how they actually learnMary's original MPC voicemail script and the advisor version it becameWhere a million-dollar year actually comes from, by percentageThe difference between busy and productive on a full deskWhy the client who yelled at you won't remember it in three months 🔗 Connect with Mary: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mary-huminski-b030901a2/ 📅 Finish the Year Strong Summit, Sept 28 to Oct 5: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ 🏢 Firm Leaders Summit, Nov 16 to 18: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ ⚡ Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ 🤝 Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 📬 Newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

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/ 🎯 Finish the Year Strong 2026, free, September 28 to October 5: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com 🏢 Firm Leaders Summit presented by Crelate, November 16 to 18, live sessions free: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ 🚀 Want the replays? Elite Recruiter Community members get every Finish the Year Strong session on demand, plus replays from all past summits: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 📩 Weekly recruiting insights from the Elite Recruiter newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe Benjamin Mena LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminmena/

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: 🚀 Finish The Year Strong 2026 Summit (Sept 28 to Oct 5): https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ 🤖 Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ 🏆 Firm Leaders Summit (Nov 16 to 18): https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com 💬 Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 📧 Newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

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 🚀 Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 📩 Newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe 🔗 Connect with April: https://www.linkedin.com/in/april-ben-sabat/

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. 🎯 Finish The Year Strong, September 28 to October 5: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ 🚀 Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ 📘 Sell Yourself Like a CEO by Ryan Sheppard, available on Amazon 🔗 https://amzn.to/4gS3lxo Connect with Ryan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-sheppard-search-advisory/ 🏛️ Firm Leaders Summit, November 16 to 18: Details Soon 🤝 Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 📬 Newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

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 📘 Recruitment Principles: Timeless Truths in the Age of AI: https://amzn.to/4gGUdf4 🤖 Free Recruitment Principles GPT: https://gregbenadiba.com/gpt 🔗 Greg Benadiba on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gbenadiba/ 🌐 Greg's website: https://gregbenadiba.com/  🎯 Finish The Year Strong 2026: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ 🚀 Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ 👥 Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 📬 Newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe