The Elite Recruiter Podcast

Епизоди

• 
  How To Build A $1.9M Firm With Just 2 People 30.09.2026 1ч 14мин

  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
• 
  How To Take A $300K Recruiter Past $500K. 24.09.2026 40мин

  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/
• 
  $1M At 25. What's Possible In Your First Two Years 21.09.2026 1ч 15мин

  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
• 
  The $5.3 Million Tax You're Paying Without Knowing It. 19.09.2026 58мин

  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/
• 
  How To Beat Korn Ferry With 4 People And AI. 17.09.2026 1ч 19мин

  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
• 
  The Hidden Truths of High-Performing Recruiters 14.09.2026 1ч 8мин

  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
• 
  How To Become The Recruiter Everyone Refers 10.09.2026 1ч 9мин

  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/
• 
  How To Stop Losing $100K Fees At The Finish Line 07.09.2026 1ч 4мин

  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
• 
  20 Principles To Become The Recruiter AI Can't Replace 31.08.2026 1ч 18мин

  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
• 
  8X Million-Dollar Biller. Zero Business Development 27.08.2026 1ч 9мин

  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
• 
  Laid Off At 5 Weeks Postpartum. $1.3 Million In 2.5 Years 24.08.2026 45мин

  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
• 
  $500 In The Bank. $870,000 Billed One Year Later 20.08.2026 51мин

  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/
• 
  How To Become A Talent Engineer (Recruiting's New AI Role) 17.08.2026 1ч 23мин

  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
• 
  $1.5M To $6M While Everyone Watched Their Inbox Die 13.08.2026 1ч 3мин

  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
• 
  How To Build A $1.5 Million Desk With No College Degree 10.08.2026 1ч 10мин

  Before we get into it: The Recruiting Agents Workshop with Seb Sharp is happening August 25th and 26th. Two live build-along sessions where you will build an autonomous lead agent, a placement agent, and wire your entire tech stack together, with recordings, templates, and a full week of Slack access to Seb included. Sign up here: https://the-recruiting-agents-workshop.heysummit.com/ This episode is sponsored by Atlas, the CRM that actually understands context. Atlas captures every interview, client call, email, and LinkedIn message automatically, then tells you the next action to take. Atlas customers are reporting 50% higher candidate response rates, 15 hours saved every week, and monthly billings jumping 85%. Learn more at https://recruitwithatlas.com/ What happens when the only way forward is outworking every degree in the room? David Fishman spent eight years in the Coast Guard, started on a temp desk, and launched Sparrow Company in 2009 when the alternative was going broke. Thirty years into the business, his desk regularly produces $1.5 million a year, his longest client relationship has lasted three decades, and he recently ran a streak where ten straight presentations turned into ten placements. First candidate presented, first candidate hired, ten times in a row. In this conversation, David breaks down how he built all of it without a college degree and why the chip on his shoulder became his biggest advantage. He shares the intake questions that shape every search, explains why he reads a resume like a photograph, and reveals how patience let him win back clients he lost three or four times by simply outliving the tenure of the HR leaders who cut him. He also unpacks why he stopped tracking dollars and started tracking deals, how the wave cycles of recruiting punish anyone who gets comfortable, and why the first three days of your week decide whether you have any momentum left by the next Monday. You will also hear how David expanded into the temp business by recruiting his own business partner, what it means to have his son and daughter working inside the company, and why at 58 he still wakes up feeling like something is chasing him. What You'll Learn: The resume-reading method behind a 10-for-10 presentation-to-placement streakThe intake questions that tell you if the wind is at your back or you are digging through mudHow to win back a lost client by outliving the tenure of the person who cut youWhy tracking deals instead of dollars protects you from the summer complacency trapThe Monday-through-Wednesday work rhythm that keeps your momentum aliveHow to turn a no-degree chip on your shoulder into a 30-year career Sign up for The Recruiting Agents Workshop (Aug 25-26): 🤖 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
• 
  The Inner Work That Made Her A Million Dollar Biller 03.08.2026 1ч 17мин

  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/
• 
  How To Become The Recruiter AI Recommends 27.07.2026 1ч 2мин

  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]
• 
  How To Find Your Real Driver. It Was Never Money 24.07.2026 58мин

  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/
• 
  20 Placements a Month Put Her in the Hospital 23.07.2026 46мин

  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/
• 
  He's Seen Billions Of Recruiting Messages: What's Dead And What Wins In 2026 20.07.2026 1ч 6мин

  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