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The Elite Recruiter Podcast

Benjamin Mena

The Elite Recruiter Podcast is where top recruiters go to get better.

Hosted by executive recruiter Benjamin Mena, this show dives deep into the stories, strategies, and mindsets of the most successful people in the industry — from $1M solo producers to 8+-figure agency founders.

Each episode delivers real, tactical insights for high-performance recruiting:

How elite recruiters build and scale
Tools, tech stacks, and sourcing strategies
Daily habits and workflows that drive million-dollar desks
Lessons from failure, breakthrough wins, and mindset shifts
What the best are doing next — and how they’re changing the game

If you’re in agency recruiting, staffing, or executive search — this is your new secret weapon.

No fluff. No recycled advice. Just the unfiltered playbook of the top 1%.

🎧 Subscribe now and start leveling up like an elite.

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S1 · E356
Monday · 1 hr 8 min
The Hidden Truths of High-Performing Recruiters
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 room Why entrepreneurs and recruiters carry so much alone, and why naming it is the catalyst The three rules for deciding who deserves to hear what you are carrying The four buckets of life and what happens when work is the only thing in yours Why work-life balance is baloney, and the tension model that replaces it The difference between success and significance, and why one is steps and the other is hard How to handle imposter syndrome without destroying the drive that got you here Why 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
S1 · E355
Thursday · 1 hr 9 min
How To Become The Recruiter Everyone Refers
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 nobody Why April never sells at networking events and how referrals arrive months later anyway The follow-up message that actually gets remembered, and the one that gets ignored How to host your own networking event that people beg to return to How she built an AI sourcing agent on Claude Code that searches her ATS and beyond The 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/
S1 · E354
September 7 · 1 hr 4 min
How To Stop Losing $100K Fees At The Finish Line
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
S1 · E353
August 31 · 1 hr 18 min
20 Principles To Become The Recruiter AI Can't Replace
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
S1 · E352
August 27 · 1 hr 9 min
8X Million-Dollar Biller. Zero Business Development
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
S1 · E351
August 24 · 45 min
Laid Off At 5 Weeks Postpartum. $1.3 Million In 2.5 Years
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: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ 🤖 The Recruiting Agents Workshop: https://the-recruiting-agents-workshop.heysummit.com/ ⚡ Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ 🔗 Julia Arpag LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julia-arpag/ 👥 Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 📩 Newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscrib
S1 · E350
August 20 · 51 min
$500 In The Bank. $870,000 Billed One Year Later
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/ 🚀 Finish The Year Strong 2026: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ ⚡ The Recruiting Agents Workshop with Seb Sharp: https://the-recruiting-agents-workshop.heysummit.com/ 🤖 Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ 🎧 Randee's original episode: on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6NxWrsc6WHEzBoZhjzXcUh?si=O5GoC4s9Tw29Oysg_UGyyg Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/%24500-left-in-the-bank-and-how-he-turned-it-into/id1547241660?i=1000699791975 👥 Want the summit replays plus a community of recruiters pushing for more? Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 📩 Free newsletter with the best of every episode: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe Connect with Randee Staats: https://www.linkedin.com/in/randee-staats-jr/
S1 · E349
August 17 · 1 hr 23 min
How To Become A Talent Engineer (Recruiting's New AI Role)
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/ 🚀 Finish The Year Strong 2026 (Sept 28-Oct 5): https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ 🤖 Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ 🔗 Connect with Dan McCarthy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamdanmccarthy/ 🎙 Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 📩 Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe
S1 · E348
August 13 · 1 hr 3 min
$1.5M To $6M While Everyone Watched Their Inbox Die
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/ 🎧 Listen to the full episode: 🤝 Connect with Brian Abrams: https://www.linkedin.com/in/babramspmo/ 💼 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
S1 · E347
August 10 · 1 hr 10 min
How To Build A $1.5 Million Desk With No College Degree
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 streak The intake questions that tell you if the wind is at your back or you are digging through mud How to win back a lost client by outliving the tenure of the person who cut you Why tracking deals instead of dollars protects you from the summer complacency trap The Monday-through-Wednesday work rhythm that keeps your momentum alive How to turn a no-degree chip on your shoulder into a 30-year career Sign up for The Recruiting Agents Workshop (Aug 25-26): 🤖 https://the-recruiting-agents-workshop.heysummit.com/ Finish The Year Strong 2026 Summit (Sept 28 - Oct 5): 🚀 https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ Atlas: 🔗 https://recruitwithatlas.com/ Connect with David Fishman on LinkedIn: 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-fishman-b468112/ Join the Elite Recruiter Community: 🚀 https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community Subscribe to the Elite Recruiter Newsletter: 📩 https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe
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August 3 · 1 hr 17 min
The Inner Work That Made Her A Million Dollar Biller
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: 🚀 Finish The Year Strong 2026 Summit: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.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 🔗 Connect with Kimberly Laipple: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimberlylaipple/ Connect with Benjamin Mena: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminmena/
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July 27 · 1 hr 2 min
How To Become The Recruiter AI Recommends
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]
S1 · E344
July 24 · 58 min
How To Find Your Real Driver. It Was Never Money
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? 🎯 Free registration is open for Finish The Year Strong 2026, the virtual summit for recruiters running September 28 to October 5: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ 🤖 Atlas is the AI first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin. Atlas customers have reported over 40 percent EBITDA growth and over 80 percent increase in monthly billings. Unlock your exclusive listener offer: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ Part 2 of this conversation starts tactical and goes somewhere most recruiting podcasts never touch. Michelle, the coach one client dubbed the Wendy Rhoades of recruiting, opens with the top biller's morning and what elite performers actually do before 9am. She breaks down the pre call ritual for dialing a Fortune 500 C suite, what flow state really looks like on a recruiting desk, and how many genuine flow cycles a day is humanly possible. Then she runs a live breathwork session right on the episode, the same nervous system reset she teaches at the biggest recruitment conferences, and you can follow along at your desk. From there the conversation flips to the question the whole series has been building toward: how to find your real driver. Michelle walks through the exercise she has used with over 5,000 recruiters and explains why money never survives to the final list of core values, what actually shows up instead, and what that means for how you build your desk or your firm. She takes Benjamin through pieces of the Life Audit live, shares the most dramatic transformations she has watched, including a client whose sleep score went from the 40s to 98 and another who lost 6 stone, and gets honest about the two fears that quietly trap founders, the fear of failing and the fear of succeeding. She also speaks to the loneliness of leaving the big office to go solo, the one thing she would fix about the recruitment industry, whether AI is actually costing recruiters money right now, and the question she wishes recruiters would ask her but never do. If Part 1 was about the collapse and the foundations, this is the payoff: what all the placements are actually for, and how to build a career that your body and your life can afford. Client stories and figures in this episode, including the 5,000 recruiter count and transformation results, are Michelle's own account of her coaching work as shared on the show. Missed Part 1? The 20 placements a month desk and the collapse that came with it: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3IRlRouHl8t0ogOU5SbH1r?si=fC3_i1LlTAucQkCcEGr1qw or on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/20-placements-a-month-put-her-in-the-hospital/id1547241660?i=1000778005710 Connect with Michelle Flynn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelleflynn/ 🚀 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 📩 Get recruiting insights every week from the Elite Recruiter newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe Benjamin Mena LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminmena/
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July 23 · 46 min
20 Placements a Month Put Her in the Hospital
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. 🎯 Free registration is open for Finish The Year Strong 2026, the virtual summit for recruiters running September 28 to October 5: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ 🤖 Atlas is the AI first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin. Atlas customers have reported over 40 percent EBITDA growth and over 80 percent increase in monthly billings. Unlock your exclusive listener offer: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ In part one of this two part conversation, Michelle takes us inside the business that every recruiter dreams of building and the collapse that came with it. She walks through what a Tuesday actually looked like at the peak, working embedded on client sites with her own desk and a client email address, booking interviews by tapping hiring managers on the shoulder, and running up to 50 or 60 interviews in a single week. She also shares the part nobody saw. The suspected heart attack at 39. Asking for her phone in the hospital because an interview was in progress. A client knowing she was hospitalized before her own parents did. The second collapse at 42 that left her with black eyes and finally forced the wake up call, and the two weeks in Thailand that changed how she understood stress, burnout, and the nervous system forever. From there, Michelle gets practical about the foundations that keep high performers from falling apart. Why you cannot outwork burnout, and the difference between stress and dropping off the side of the performance curve. The gap between a fact and an excuse, and how recruiters convince themselves that easy work is hard work. The four factors of sleep quality and why four and a half hours of deep restorative sleep beats nine hours of broken sleep, plus her honest take on the Elon Musk and Tim Cook hustle mythology. Why stress management through breathwork is the single fastest lever for billings, the same nervous system reset elite athletes use before a penalty kick. And the time audit that finds hidden hours in your week, including the client who discovered he was spending 36 hours a week on Instagram, and why wasting just 30 minutes a day adds up to roughly three working weeks a year. Whether you are a solo recruiter, an agency owner watching a top biller quietly slip, or someone who has been ignoring the little signs your body keeps sending, this episode is the reminder that the foundations are not soft. They are what the whole desk is built on. Figures like the placement numbers and client stories in this episode are Michelle's own account of her business and coaching work as shared on the show. This is part one of two. Part two covers business development without cold calls, flow state, a live breathwork session, and how to find your real driver. Listen to Part 2: Connect with Michelle Flynn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelleflynn/ 🚀 Join the Elite Recruiter Community for unlimited access to replays from past summits and events: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 📩 Get recruiting insights every week from the Elite Recruiter newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe Benjamin Mena LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminmena/
S1 · E342
July 20 · 1 hr 6 min
He's Seen Billions Of Recruiting Messages: What's Dead And What Wins In 2026
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. 🔗 Connect with Dougie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dougieloan/ 🎧 Listen to this episode: 🚀 See what SourceWhale is building: https://sourcewhale.com/ YouTube: 🏆 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
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July 16 · 1 hr 9 min
How To Build A Multi-Million-Dollar Recruiting Firm From Zero
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: 🎯 Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 📩 Get the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe
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July 9 · 1 hr 21 min
How To Get 3 Hours Of Real Work Done Before Lunch
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/
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July 6 · 1 hr 19 min
How To Build A $1.3 Million AI Recruiting Desk
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/
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July 1 · 51 min
How To Build A Million Dollar Biller. Danny Cahill.
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
S1 · E337
June 29 · 56 min
Danny Cahill On Building A 40 Year Career. (Pt 1)
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/

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