The Elite Recruiter Podcast

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• How To Build A Million Dollar Biller. Danny Cahill. 01.07.2026 51min

  In this second part of a two part conversation, Danny Cahill takes Benjamin Mena behind the scenes of how he builds million dollar billers, why AI is quietly turning recruiters into commodities, and the one skill he says you cannot teach. This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the AI first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin and turn every candidate conversation into something you can use. Atlas customers have reported over 40 percent EBITDA growth and over 80 percent increase in monthly billings after adopting the platform. Get started and unlock your exclusive listener offer at recruitwithatlas.com Danny is not anti AI, and he opens by drawing a sharp line between where it helps and where it hurts. AI is a gift for market research and mapping, but the moment recruiters hand it their messaging, they start to sound exactly like everyone else. Clients are already telling his office that you all sound the same, and Danny argues the real threat was never AI replacing recruiters. It is recruiters using AI so lazily that they make themselves replaceable. That leads into the idea he most wanted to talk about. As everyone races to become a player on social media by outsourcing their voice to a bot, the ability to write and think originally becomes the last real advantage. Referencing Pree Sarkar, who framed it as capture, not create, Danny explains why your narrative and reputation are the one thing generative AI can flatten, and why that makes original language more valuable, not less. Then Danny takes on a myth this audience needs to hear. You do not have to have no life to be great at this. The million dollar billers he mentors are not obsessive versions of him. Many stop at four in the afternoon to be a parent, run nonprofits, and pour into their families. As he puts it, they do not die sad and lonely, they die happy and rich and having helped a lot of people. The heart of part two is mentorship. Danny explains why he still does it when he does not need to, why top billers become a protected class that no one will push, and why there is almost always a wound behind a high achiever. He tells the story of a twenty two year veteran who slumped and confessed she thought she had just gotten lucky, and how he answered her. You do not luck into twenty two years. He also walks through what mentoring actually looks like, from taping calls to weekly accountability. He closes with a challenge. Everyone talks about how technology changed recruiting, but almost no one questions the infrastructure, the pricing, or the sales DNA underneath it. And in one of the most honest moments of the conversation, Danny answers a question no one has ever asked him. What You'll Learn: Where AI helps a recruiter and where leaning on it makes you sound like everyone else Why writing and original thinking are becoming the last real advantage in recruiting The truth about work and life balance among actual million dollar billers Why your best biller becomes a protected class, and the hidden wound behind high achievers How Danny structures mentorship, from the first intake to weekly accountability The infrastructure and pricing questions almost no recruiter is asking If you missed Part 1, go back for how Danny survived four recessions and a pandemic and built a firm of recruiters who last. Connect with Danny Cahill on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danny-cahill-a6797a/ Listen to Part 1: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7AaKC3JrP3Y0eeu9SESsHp?si=5xQfHvygTFimUKEhCU5LOg Listen on Apple Podcasts: Listen on Spotify: Watch on YouTube: Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community Register for the AI Recruiting Summit 2026: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe Sponsored by Atlas: recruitwithatlas.com
• Danny Cahill On Building A 40 Year Career. (Pt 1) 29.06.2026 56min

  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/
• How To Become A Million Dollar Biller 25.06.2026 33min

  Half the year is gone. That single fact is why Benjamin Mena pulled this talk out of the Elite Recruiter Community and put it in the feed. It is a reset, a line in the sand, and a challenge to decide right now what the rest of the year is going to look like. Brent Orsuga has spent 23 years in recruiting, the last 16 in logistics and supply chain, and 11 of those years running his own firm, Pinnacle Growth Advisors. He says it took him four years to hit a million dollar desk, and that he has now done it seven years running, to the point where it has become his floor rather than his ceiling. He is candid that there is no secret sauce and no magic pill, only a set of behaviors that the biggest billers share. This conversation lays out ten of them. This episode is brought to you by Atlas. The resume never tells the full story. Candidates share what really matters in conversations, on calls, in interviews, and over email, their motivations, salary expectations, and plans to relocate, and most of that detail ends up buried in notes and forgotten. Atlas changes that. It is the AI first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin, capturing every conversation automatically and turning it into something you can use. With MagicSearch you can ask who mentioned wanting a four day week or who is open to relocating next year, and it pulls answers from across your entire database instantly. Atlas customers have reported over 40 percent EBITDA growth and over 80 percent increase in monthly billings after adopting the platform. Get started and unlock your exclusive listener offer at recruitwithatlas.com. He starts with belief, because nothing else matters if you are quietly convinced a million is out of reach. From there he moves into identity, arguing that every serious biller has claimed a niche and built a brand around it, and that there is a real difference between a recruiter who sends fifteen resumes and a headhunter who sends three. Money follows attention, and the recruiters who get known for one thing become a magnet for the companies and candidates who want the best. The rest of the talk is the engine room. Brent covers doing business development on the right clients and becoming a partner rather than a vendor, chasing the big at bats that produce forty and fifty thousand dollar fees, and obsessing over your average fee until the math of a million stops feeling impossible. He explains why he works in quarters rather than months, why he counts the Mondays he has left, and why a referral system beats cold starting every search from zero. He is blunt about removing negativity, increasing outbound when most people let it slide, and holding firm on fees instead of lowering the bar for everyone. He closes on what he calls the real talk, the lifestyle behind the number. The people he knows who do this consistently are not sloppy, are not sleeping in, and are not built on social media. He frames the journey through three phases, the underdog with a chip on the shoulder, the villain who mutes the noise and works with dark focus, and the favorite, which he says is the hardest place of all to keep winning. If you have looked up and wondered where the time went, this is the wake up call. Draw the line and run for it. A note on the figures in this episode. Brent's billing numbers are his own account of his track record and are shared as he told them. Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community Register for the AI Recruiting Summit 2026: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe Get started with Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com
• Retained Masterclass Pt 2: The Dollars Are In Delivery 23.06.2026 45min

  Most recruiters think AI is coming for their job. Allie Milbrath thinks it's coming for one kind of recruiter — the one whose value was sending LinkedIn messages faster than the person next to them. If that was ever the whole game, she says you should be worried. If it wasn't, this episode is the way out. This is Part 1 of a two-part retained search masterclass. Allie Milbrath of the Quinn Roberts Company returns to The Elite Recruiter Podcast to walk through the shift she believes our industry needs most: moving from contingent to retained, and from transactional order-taker to trusted advisor. She has built her career entirely in retained search, and not by being the most aggressive salesperson in the room. She won it by delivering so well that clients simply stopped shopping. That distinction is the spine of this conversation. The part that will stay with you is what Allie calls "emotional exits." Contingent recruiting, she argues, quietly trains you to bail. When a search gets hard, you have fifteen others on your desk to retreat to. When a client is difficult, you move on. When the market turns, you move on again. Over time it compounds, and you lose the ability to operate from any real depth. Retained takes the exit away. It forces you to stay in the discomfort long enough to actually solve the problem — and that, more than any script or pricing model, is the real mindset shift she thinks recruiters are afraid of. They are not afraid of the work. They are afraid of commitment. Benjamin and Allie also get honest about who retained is not for, why "the fear holding you back" and "a market that genuinely can't bear retained" are two different things, and how AI is quietly closing the escape hatch on transactional recruiting. Then they move into the mechanics — fee structures, guarantees, fall-off and cancellation terms, off-limits clauses, and the protective language Allie now writes into every agreement after learning the hard way. Part 1 ends mid-mechanics. Part 2 drops tomorrow and finishes the masterclass: pipelining projects, the real math on how many searches one recruiter can carry, and why she believes great delivery is your best business development. If you take one thing from this episode, let it be the question Benjamin opens with. As AI gets better, you have to figure out why clients will still pay you. What part of your process actually adds value? You don't have to go fully retained to answer that. But you do have to answer it. What You'll Learn: Why panicking about AI is the wrong response, and the harder question to ask yourself instead What "emotional exits" are, and how contingent work quietly trains you to bail Why clients return again and again to an advisor, not an attack dog How to tell the difference between fear that's holding you back and a market that can't support retained Who retained search is genuinely not the right fit for The contract terms that actually protect you: guarantees, fall-off, cancellation, and off-limits language This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the AI-first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin. Atlas captures every candidate conversation automatically and turns it into something you can use, so the details that usually get buried in notes are searchable in seconds. Atlas customers have reported over 40% EBITDA growth and over 80% increase in monthly billings after adopting the platform. Get started and unlock your exclusive listener offer at recruitwithatlas.com. Connect with Allie Milbrath on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alliemilbrath/ Part 2 drops tomorrow — make sure you're following so you don't miss it. Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community Register free for the AI Recruiting Summit 2026: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ Get the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe
• Going Retained Masterclass Part 1 with Allie Milbrath 22.06.2026 45min

  Most recruiters think AI is coming for their job. Allie Milbrath thinks it's coming for one kind of recruiter — the one whose value was sending LinkedIn messages faster than the person next to them. If that was ever the whole game, she says you should be worried. If it wasn't, this episode is the way out. This is Part 1 of a two-part retained search masterclass. Allie Milbrath of the Quinn Roberts Company returns to The Elite Recruiter Podcast to walk through the shift she believes our industry needs most: moving from contingent to retained, and from transactional order-taker to trusted advisor. She has built her career entirely in retained search, and not by being the most aggressive salesperson in the room. She won it by delivering so well that clients simply stopped shopping. That distinction is the spine of this conversation. The part that will stay with you is what Allie calls "emotional exits." Contingent recruiting, she argues, quietly trains you to bail. When a search gets hard, you have fifteen others on your desk to retreat to. When a client is difficult, you move on. When the market turns, you move on again. Over time it compounds, and you lose the ability to operate from any real depth. Retained takes the exit away. It forces you to stay in the discomfort long enough to actually solve the problem — and that, more than any script or pricing model, is the real mindset shift she thinks recruiters are afraid of. They are not afraid of the work. They are afraid of commitment. Benjamin and Allie also get honest about who retained is not for, why "the fear holding you back" and "a market that genuinely can't bear retained" are two different things, and how AI is quietly closing the escape hatch on transactional recruiting. Then they move into the mechanics — fee structures, guarantees, fall-off and cancellation terms, off-limits clauses, and the protective language Allie now writes into every agreement after learning the hard way. Part 1 ends mid-mechanics. Part 2 drops tomorrow and finishes the masterclass: pipelining projects, the real math on how many searches one recruiter can carry, and why she believes great delivery is your best business development. If you take one thing from this episode, let it be the question Benjamin opens with. As AI gets better, you have to figure out why clients will still pay you. What part of your process actually adds value? You don't have to go fully retained to answer that. But you do have to answer it. What You'll Learn: Why panicking about AI is the wrong response, and the harder question to ask yourself instead What "emotional exits" are, and how contingent work quietly trains you to bail Why clients return again and again to an advisor, not an attack dog How to tell the difference between fear that's holding you back and a market that can't support retained Who retained search is genuinely not the right fit for The contract terms that actually protect you: guarantees, fall-off, cancellation, and off-limits language This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the AI-first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin. Atlas captures every candidate conversation automatically and turns it into something you can use, so the details that usually get buried in notes are searchable in seconds. Atlas customers have reported over 40% EBITDA growth and over 80% increase in monthly billings after adopting the platform. Get started and unlock your exclusive listener offer at recruitwithatlas.com. Connect with Allie Milbrath on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alliemilbrath/ Part 2 drops tomorrow — make sure you're following so you don't miss it. Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community Register free for the AI Recruiting Summit 2026: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ Get the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe
• Your Best Biller Costs You $5 Million. 18.06.2026 1godz 3min

  Your best biller is the person bringing in the most money. So how could promoting them be the most expensive mistake your firm ever makes? That is where Benjamin Mena starts with Duncan Taylor, a healthcare staffing veteran who has spent more than 30 years on the executive side of recruiting and built his career around one unusual specialty: recruiting for recruiting companies. Duncan lays out the producer-manager trap in brutal math. Take your million-dollar biller, move them into leadership, and you do not just risk the million they were producing. You risk the top billers who walk rather than report to them. By his estimate, five million in gross profit can leave through a single promotion that everyone mistook for a reward. The AI Recruiting Summit 2026 runs July 13 through 20, free for all live sessions: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the AI-first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin. Atlas captures every candidate conversation automatically and turns it into something you can use. With MagicSearch you can ask questions like who mentioned they are open to relocating next year and pull the answer from your entire database in seconds, with no keyword guessing and no digging through old notes. Atlas customers report over 40% EBITDA growth and over 80% increase in monthly billings after adopting the platform. Unlock your exclusive listener offer at recruitwithatlas.com From there the conversation becomes a map of where recruiting leadership is heading. Duncan argues that dialing for dollars is fading, not because the phone stops working, but because buyers research before they ever pick up, and the firms that win will be the ones whose leaders are known as the authority in their space. He describes the future leader as tech-fluent, consultative, and an architect of growth rather than a manager of activity, then names the uncomfortable problem underneath it. If AI absorbs the entry-level grind where recruiters used to earn their instincts, the industry faces a junior talent cliff with no obvious place for the next generation of leaders to come from. He also walks through a business-model shift already underway in IT and government contracting that staffing is only starting to feel: the move away from arbitrage and billing by the hour toward selling outcomes, guaranteeing fill rates, and pricing reliability instead of headcount. He gets candid about the risk that worries him most, the absence of AI governance in healthcare staffing, where an unsupervised agent can invent a credential and clear a clinician for a shift they are not qualified to take. He explains the data behind his gut, the Hogan-based assessments he uses to surface the derailers a strong interview hides, and the one habit he credits for turning candidates he never placed into his biggest clients: the Friday follow-up. What You'll Learn: The real math behind promoting your best biller, and what it actually costsWhy dialing for dollars is fading, and what replaces itThe profile of the recruiting leader who wins over the next five yearsHow AI is creating a junior talent cliff, and how to bridge itThe shift from billing hours to guaranteeing outcomesThe Friday follow-up that turns lost candidates into clients The AI Recruiting Summit 2026 runs July 13 through 20, free for all live sessions: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ 🎙️ Connect with Duncan Taylor on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/duncantaylor/ 🚀 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 ⚡ Try Atlas: recruitwithatlas.com Apple / Spotify / YouTube episode links: 
• The NFL & Forbes 400 Hire Her. Here's Why 15.06.2026 1godz 14min

  She runs a three-person team. She places 7 to 12 people a month. She charges 18% of annual salary — right in line with the market. And somehow she's the preferred childcare provider for the LA Rams, the LA Chargers, and a meaningful slice of the Forbes 400. There's no SDR. There are no paid ads. She's not on LinkedIn. Every deal is referred or inbound. After 20 years. Rebecca Stewart is the founder of VIP Nannies. What she's built in high-end household staffing is the relationship-driven, niche-locked business most agency owners say they want and almost none actually build. This episode is how she got there — and what she'd tell a recruiter sitting in the wrong niche, or no niche at all. This episode is brought to you by Atlas — the AI-first recruitment platform that captures every candidate conversation and makes it searchable. Atlas customers report 40%+ EBITDA growth and 80%+ billings increase. Unlock your listener offer at recruitwithatlas.com The AI Recruiting Summit 2026 is back July 13-20. Free live sessions with recruiting engineers, operators, and tool-builders showing what's actually working. Register at https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ Rebecca didn't plan this. Small California town, college basketball, Cal State Fullerton, then three months in the Peace Corps in Paraguay because her friends were getting master's degrees. She came home needing a job. A friend told her about a Bel Air nanny role. She interviewed. She was hired before she got home. She worked Friday through Monday for a year, then walked away because she wanted her weekends back. Inside a few weeks she'd researched every LA nanny agency, called her hometown bank for a loan, and started VIP Nannies at 23. The first family she met tried to hire her as their nanny. She declined and never sat down with a family again. Early on she chased anyone who could afford a nanny. Then she pulled up to a Beverly Hills Hotel event in her Honda Accord and realized she was at the wrong altitude. She read a marketing book, rewrote her pitch, raised her fees, and rebuilt the website. It took seven years for the pivot to fully show up. Today the business runs on relationships that compound for decades. The LA Rams reached out about childcare ten years ago after she sent a single congratulations message on LinkedIn — the only time she's used the platform. The Chargers came later. Most placements come from nannies calling her when a job ends. The episode pulls apart how — the fee structure that filters wrong clients, the $450 registration fee LA agencies wouldn't charge until she did, the six-month replacement guarantee, the nanny socials she runs to fight isolation. And the deeper thesis: there's a niche for everything. Find the one you'd run toward if nobody paid you, then learn to charge for it. If you're a recruiter stuck in a niche you fell into, this is the conversation that argues you can change that. What you'll learn: How a three-person team places 7 to 12 people a month with zero outboundThe Honda Accord moment that triggered Rebecca's seven-year pivot upmarketWhy a $450 registration fee filters better than any qualifying callThe single LinkedIn message that won the LA Rams account ten years agoHow to turn "do what you love" into a real business model in a recruiting nicheThe 12-minutes-for-12-days exercise Rebecca uses to find clarity on direction 🎯 Connect with Rebecca Stewart Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vipnanniesla/ Website: https://www.vipnannyagency.com/ 📣 The AI Recruiting Summit 2026 — July 13-20, free 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 💼 This episode is brought to you by Atlas https://recruitwithatlas.com
• The 60% of Recruiters Who'll Quietly Sink Your Agency. Part 2 10.06.2026 46min

  In Part 1, Tom Kelly walked us through how EVONA scaled from four founders to 80 recruiters in three years, then deliberately cut back to 30 — and per-head revenue doubled. In Part 2, he hands over the framework that explains how he manages the leaner team. And it starts with a number most agency owners have never been forced to confront. If you haven't heard Part 1 yet, listen to that one first — it sets up everything Tom unpacks here. Brought to you by Atlas. The AI-first recruitment platform that captures every candidate conversation automatically. Atlas customers report 40%+ EBITDA growth and 80%+ increase in monthly billings. Get your exclusive listener offer at recruitwithatlas.com. Tom segments every sales team into four brackets. The top 10% who don't care about anyone else — they just want to bill. The next 20% who aspire to be that top performer. The bottom 10% who were never going to make it. And then the middle 60%. The bracket nobody manages correctly. Because the middle 60% don't measure themselves against the top performers. They measure themselves against the bottom 10%. As long as they're doing enough not to be the worst person on the team, they think they're fine. That's the bracket quietly sinking most agencies, and most owners can't see it because they manage everyone on the team the same way. The second framework Tom hands over is the activity benchmark EVONA uses to define elite. 25 interviews on a rolling four-week period. Reverse engineered from a 12-to-1 interview-to-placement ratio, the number means a recruiter hitting it consistently is doing two placements a month at minimum. Drop below 25 and Tom is direct — you are not fit to play at the top level. Tom also unpacks why he would hate to be running a big recruitment company right now. AI governance is about to break the firms that can't police what their recruiters are doing with dashboards, prompts, and outreach automation. LinkedIn is heading into a tidal wave of AI-driven spam. Vertical platforms are about to replace the way candidates look for jobs. And recruitment is now an IQ-over-EQ game — the people leveraging the tools and staying sharp are pulling away from everyone else. He opens the conversation with the moment that built all of this. Tom had a stutter so bad as a kid he was afraid to pay a phone bill. He chose recruitment specifically because it would force him onto the phone every day. That fear is the engine behind eight years of building EVONA — and the reason "evolving" is the company's core value. Tom closes with the books that shaped him (the Rockefeller Habits, Ronnie Wood, Alex Ferguson on man management), why Claude is the tool changing how he thinks, why he's not crazy about Bullhorn, and the one piece of advice he'd give every recruiter facing the next 18 months. Don't be a lone wolf. What You'll Learn: - The four-bracket framework Tom uses to manage every sales team, and why the middle 60% is the bracket quietly sinking most agencies - The 25-interview rolling 4-week benchmark that defines elite at EVONA, and the ratio behind it - Why Tom says recruitment is now IQ over EQ, and what that shift means for average recruiters - The vertical-platform shift coming for LinkedIn, and how candidates will find jobs in the next two years - Why a stutter became the engine of Tom's career, and what that says about the recruiters who succeed - The tools, books, and habits that shape Tom's leadership at EVONA Connect with Tom Kelly: LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/evonatom/ Email — tom@evona.com EVONA — https://evona.com 🎙️ Resources: Atlas — recruitwithatlas.com Elite Recruiter Community — https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community AI Recruiting Summit 2026 — https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ Newsletter — https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe
• $40M in Fees. Then Cut 50 Recruiters to Save It. Part 1 09.06.2026 45min

  Tom Kelly scaled EVONA from four bootstrapped founders in a tiny Bristol office to eighty recruiters in three years. Then he made the call most agency owners never make. He cut the team back to thirty. And in doing it, per-head revenue doubled.   This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation that pulls apart exactly how that happened.   Brought to you by Atlas. The AI-first recruitment platform that captures every candidate conversation automatically. Atlas customers report 40%+ EBITDA growth and 80%+ increase in monthly billings. Get your exclusive listener offer at recruitwithatlas.com.     Tom came up on the inside track at one of the biggest STEM recruiters on the FTSE. He spotted space as a high-growth vertical before almost anyone, pitched it internally, got shut down, and walked. He linked up with three other recruiters in the same office — Jack, Rich, and Ryan. They sketched the company out on a whiteboard at Tom's place: no KPIs, no fixed working hours, no fixed location, brand-first, give back to STEM. Eight years and over $40 million in fees later, they've stuck to every line of it.   Their first placement was a chef in a Bristol restaurant for £2,000. Hire number two was a head of marketing — a decision every advisor said was crazy. By Tom's read, recruitment and marketing are the same thing. Brand pull beats spam. That bet became the operating philosophy of the entire company.   Then COVID hit and the space industry — recession-proof, Tom argues, because satellites don't get sick — tripled their revenue and headcount. They paid LinkedIn a fortune ahead of a planned scale to three hundred people. They flew the whole company and their partners to Monaco after a million-dollar month. Tom calls that trip the moment the wheels were about to come off.   By 2021 the cracks were showing. Five account managers, thirty fillers, two RPO teams, a full operations and finance bench. Tom describes the peak as a hot mess. So the four founders sat down and made the hardest call of their careers. Contract team first — running $20K a week with no real strategy. Then perm cuts. Then operations. Then the advisors. Tom and the other three didn't pay themselves for six months. He moved his family to the US in the middle of it.   The episode ends on the moment the four founders agreed one of them had to lead, and that person would be Tom. Without ego. The single reason, Tom says, the business is still standing.   Part 2 drops Wednesday — the 25-interview rule that defines elite recruiters at EVONA, and the segmentation that explains why most agency owners are quietly losing 60% of their team.   What You'll Learn:   - Why scaling to 80 recruiters nearly broke the business, and the moment the four founders knew they had to cut to 30 - The pre-COVID hire every advisor told Tom was crazy, and why it became the engine of the company - How EVONA tripled in COVID while most agencies were frozen - The £300,000 company trip Tom now calls a warning sign - What it actually costs to let 50 people go — emotionally, financially, culturally - Why the four founders agreed one person had to take the wheel, and how they made the call without breaking the partnership   Connect with Tom Kelly:   LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/evonatom/ EVONA — https://evona.com   🎙️ Resources:   Atlas — recruitwithatlas.com Elite Recruiter Community — https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community AI Recruiting Summit 2026 — https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ Newsletter — https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe
• $800K From Zero in 1 Year. AI Ran the BD 05.06.2026 1godz 8min

  Most recruiters think AI is coming for someone else's desk. Riece Keck isn't so sure. Two years ago he said AI wouldn't replace great recruiters, but it would replace the mediocre ones sooner than anyone wanted to admit. He still stands by it, and he thinks we're a lot closer now than we were then. He's also taking the stage at the AI Recruiting Summit 2026 to go even deeper on this, so if today's episode lands, that's where you see it built live: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ This conversation is the proof. Riece built a tech recruiting agency to a $1.2M year, then watched it nearly die twice before it folded into a merger for a token amount. He stepped away during a brutal personal stretch, then cold-started the whole thing again in early 2025, and billed roughly $800K in his first year back without leaning on his old client list. The difference the second time wasn't more hustle. It was systems. Riece walks Benjamin through the no-code BD engine he built end to end: scraping job boards on a daily auto-run, identifying the right hiring managers, enriching the contacts, drafting the outreach, and dripping it out, all while he sleeps. He breaks down how he uses funding signals, new-hire signals, and backfill signals to reach companies at the exact moment they're hurting, and how he's now rebuilding the entire stack inside Claude Code with MCP connections so an agent runs his ATS and his sourcing for him. But this isn't a go-all-in-on-tech sermon. Riece is just as direct about the other lane: if your zone of genius is relationships, build the offline communities that pull you out of the LinkedIn noise everyone else is drowning in. The one move he says gets you crushed in 2026 is staying in the middle, the undifferentiated recruiter who takes a job order, fires off templated outreach, and hopes. You'll also hear how he turned strategic referral partnerships into a steady deal source, why persona-based messaging quietly outperforms everything else in the inbox, and what he'd tell a recruiter trying to go from average to elite right now. If you've ever watched your desk go to zero and wondered if there's another side to it, this one is for you. There is. The recruiters who reinvent now are the ones crushing it in 2028. This episode is powered by Atlas, the AI-first recruitment platform built to eliminate the admin that eats your day. Atlas captures every candidate conversation automatically and turns it into something you can actually use. Ask it who mentioned wanting a four-day week or who's open to relocating next year, and Magic Search pulls the answer from your entire database instantly. No keyword guessing, no digging through old notes. Atlas customers have reported over 40% EBITDA growth and over 80% more monthly billings after switching. Unlock your exclusive listener offer at recruitwithatlas.com. Also brought to you by Millee, the AI deal strategist that turns the gut feel of big billers into real-time guidance on every live process. Millee preps you before every call and drafts your high-caliber follow-ups so you lead from the first minute. Try it free at millee.ai. 🎤 See Riece speak at 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 📬 Get the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe 👤 Connect with Riece Keck: https://www.linkedin.com/in/riecekeck/
• 7 Contractors in 4 Weeks From Clients You Already Have 01.06.2026 1godz 4min

  Most recruiters treat their client list like a closed account. You made the perm placement, the fee hit, and now you wait six months until they need you again. Dawson Henis looked at that same client list and saw six figures of recurring revenue nobody was collecting, so he picked up the phone.  In this episode, Dawson, the founder of the Atlanta-based Henis Group, walks Benjamin Mena through what happened in the four weeks after he bolted a staffing division onto the perm search firm he started at 24. Seven contractors. Two existing clients. Roughly ten thousand dollars a month in gross profit, built entirely off relationships he already had. His first two orders filled in 48 hours, a pace he would never touch on the perm side.   But the contractors are only half the story. Dawson hasn't made a cold call in two years. He breaks down the lead-gen system that replaced it, the ICP work, the messaging that doesn't sound like creepy automation, and the exact stack he runs, and why he fired three lead-gen agencies charging him thousands a month before building the whole thing himself. If you have ever paid an outside firm to book your meetings and gotten nothing back, this part will sting in a useful way.   This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the AI-first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin. Atlas captures every candidate conversation automatically and turns it into something you can actually use. With MagicSearch you can ask things like "who mentioned they're open to relocating next year?" and get answers instantly across your whole database, with no keyword guessing and no digging through old notes. Atlas customers have reported over 40% EBITDA growth and over 80% more monthly billings after adopting the platform. Get started and unlock your exclusive listener offer at https://recruitwithatlas.com   He is also honest about what it cost him along the way: the hires that didn't fit, what recruiters get wrong when they hire for their own shop, and the four-question screen from coach Diane Prince that finally fixed it. And he goes deep on the why, how he lost it chasing other people's playbooks and how he got it back.   Whether you are a perm firm owner sitting on contract revenue you haven't tapped, a newer recruiter wondering if you can really do this on your own, or someone who just needs the reminder that the opportunity is already in your book, this one delivers.   Connect with Dawson Henis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dawson-henis/   Resources and links: 🎟️ 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 ⚡ Try Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com 🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/7-contractors-in-4-weeks-from-clients-you-already-have/id1547241660?i=1000770612272 🎧 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6NyWT1BHcrylFY5889lqoj?si=zsIPR4CWSemHivwpuTMP-Q ▶️ Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/oxmW2Epm1ok
• Laid Off at 48. Zero Clients. On Track for $19.4M in 3 Years 28.05.2026 1godz 11min

  Steve Anderson was a milkman in South Carolina before he picked up a phone in healthcare recruiting. Twenty-five years later, he got laid off at 48 — part of a 1,500-person RIF — with five daughters, a mortgage, and no plan B.   Three months in, they pitched their first investor. He told them they were idiots and hung up. That call is the reason Optigy exists in its current form   This episode is brought to you by Atlas — the AI-first recruitment platform that captures every candidate conversation and turns it into searchable intelligence. Atlas customers report over 40% EBITDA growth and 80%+ increases in monthly billings. Get started at recruitwithatlas.com.   Also brought to you by Millee — AI deal strategy built from the encoded intuition of elite recruiters. Sharper call prep, high-caliber emails drafted for you, real-time guidance on every live process. Users save an hour a day on email alone. Try it free at millee.ai.   Steve Anderson was a milkman in South Carolina before he picked up a phone in healthcare recruiting. Twenty-five years later, he got laid off at 48 — part of a 1,500-person RIF — with five daughters, a mortgage, and no plan B. Three months in, they pitched their first investor. He told them they were idiots and hung up. That call is the reason Optigy exists in its current form.   Steve and his co-founders rebuilt the company in 48 hours. No clients, only partners. No vendor relationships, no race to the bottom, no "send us reqs and we'll send you names." It cost them roughly $3.5M in walked-away deals in year one. It also got them in a room with one of the largest healthcare organizations in the country, where they built the first physician healthcare recruitment team in the ACO space — on a $400 website, an ATS they didn't own, and a phone they hadn't bought yet.   Year one: $1.1M off six months of real building. Year two: $3.7M. Year three, closing January 2027, on track for $19.4M. 53 partners, 84% close rate, only two partners lost in two years. A private equity deal closed December 2025 that changed what's possible from here. This episode is the operator's playbook behind that arc. Why "partners, not clients" isn't marketing — it's a P&L decision. What broke in Q1 of year two when the credit card bills came due. What Steve learned in-house at a company that saved his life five months after a heart attack he didn't see coming. And the line his older brother gave him that reshaped how he thinks about time: "I have lived longer than I have left to live."  If you've been waiting for the right moment to bet on yourself, this is the one to listen to twice.  What You'll Learn: Why "partners, not clients" is the model that scaled Optigy from zero to a $19.4M run-rateThe exact moment Year 1 broke — and the leadership shift that fixed itHow to walk into a 2,200-location healthcare org with no website and no ATSWhat in-house recruiting teaches you that no agency seat ever canThe five-part call structure and where 90% of recruiters fall apart on the transitionWhy "work works" is the only input that matters early — and what replaces it as you scaleThe diligence questions that protect founders from the wrong PE partner   📌 Connect with Steve Anderson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sgandersonlmg/ Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Fo9ioNrWsM0 🎤 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 🤝 Sponsors: Atlas — recruitwithatlas.com Millee — millee.ai
• No AI, No CRM — $120K in 6 Weeks on a Spreadsheet 25.05.2026 1godz 2min

  She launched her firm on January 12th. Six weeks later she'd billed $120,000 — working off an Excel spreadsheet, a phone, and zero AI. While most of the industry is convinced the next placement is one shiny tool away, Lauren Lehman quietly proved the opposite, and this conversation breaks down exactly how she did it. Before we get into it — this episode is brought to you by Atlas, the AI-first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin. The resume never tells the full story, and Atlas captures every candidate conversation automatically so nothing gets buried in your notes. With MagicSearch you can ask things like "who mentioned they're open to relocating next year?" and pull the answer from your entire database instantly. Atlas customers have reported over 40% EBITDA growth and over 80% increase in monthly billings after adopting the platform. Get started and unlock your exclusive listener offer at recruitwithatlas.com. Lauren spent nearly a decade recruiting in healthcare and then accounting and finance before walking away from a comfortable, high-billing seat to start Manta Search. In this episode she's honest about the part nobody posts about: the fear of failing, the costs people underestimate, and the reality that you become marketing, payroll, admin, and AR the day you go out on your own. Her advice is to have the lawyer and accountant in place before you jump — then jump anyway. As she puts it, you build the parachute on the way down. The engine behind the $120K is less glamorous than the number suggests, and that's the point. Lauren treats business development as the circle of life for a desk — two to three hours every single day, calendar blocked, phone off, hitting 50 companies a block through calls, texts, voice notes, and LinkedIn. She walks Benjamin through her actual MPC scripts, why she leads with a candidate instead of begging for a job order, and why texting CFOs outperforms email every time. Spoiler: they text back, because they're people on their phones just like the rest of us. Then there's mushrooming — Lauren's term for turning one filled role into an entire account. She breaks down precisely how she asks a hiring manager for the introduction into legal, engineering, or IT without sounding opportunistic, when to make the ask, and how she follows up on open roles without ever becoming a resume pusher. This is the relationship game that replaced the transactional, burnout-driven headhunter mentality she ran during the pandemic gold rush, and the shift to a white-glove approach — including learning to say no to the wrong searches — is what made the model durable. And on the question every recruiter is wrestling with: Lauren thinks AI isn't good enough to replace the human part yet, and that leaning on it too early is quietly making recruiters lazy. She uses it where it helps on the back end, but the relationships, the follow-up, and the discipline are still hers. If you've been waiting for the perfect moment to go all in, this is the episode. Draw the line in the sand and start your six weeks now — because 2026 is your year. Connect with Lauren Lehman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurentaylorlehman/ 🎓 Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 🤖 AI Recruiting Summit 2026: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ 📬 Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe 🚀 Powered by Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com
• Scott Love: Why 99% of Recruiters Fail at Business Development 18.05.2026 1godz 15min

  What separates the recruiters billing seven figures from the ones who plateau year after year? According to Scott Love, only one out of a hundred recruiters will ever reach their full potential. The other ninety-nine are stuck in the same loop — relying on the most placeable candidate call, avoiding real business development, and confusing activity with progress. In this episode, Scott breaks down exactly why 99% of recruiters fail at BD and what the 1% are doing differently going into 2026. Scott Love is one of the most recognized names in the recruiting industry. He runs partner-level legal recruiting for global law firms, hosts The Rainmaking Podcast (a top 2% show globally with 300+ episodes), serves as editor-in-chief of The Rainmaking Magazine, and has coached 4,500 recruiting firms across 36 countries. He's a Naval Academy graduate, a former card-counting blackjack player mentored by alumni of the MIT blackjack team, and one of the sharpest strategic minds in the search business. In this conversation, Scott shares why most recruiters never escape transactional BD, the three traits that define the top 1%, why niching down is non-negotiable, and how to build thought leadership that pulls clients toward you instead of chasing them. He explains why "they need you more than you need them" is the posture shift behind every seven-figure desk, when to stop thanking your clients, how game theory applies to deal management and emotional recovery, and what every recruiter should do in the first hour of the day. This episode is brought to you by Atlas. Atlas is the AI-first recruitment platform built for agency recruiters and search firms who want to source faster, manage pipeline smarter, and bill more without adding headcount. If you're stitching together five tools to run your desk, Atlas was built for you. Try it free at https://recruitwithatlas.com This episode is also brought to you by Millee. Millee analyzes every detail of your live deals and builds the exact strategy you need — powered by a curated knowledge base from elite recruiters. It's encoded intuition, the judgment and gut feel of big billers translated into real-time guidance for every single process. Users save an hour a day on email alone. Try Millee free for 30 days at https://millee.ai Scott also gets into the trends he's tracking for 2026, including his prediction that LinkedIn will lose its grip as the dominant sourcing channel within two years, the dirty-secret play that built his thought leadership in legal, and the journaling discipline he's used since 2017 to track his greatest achievements, his mistakes, and the patterns underneath both. If you want to bill more in 2026, this is the conversation. 🔗 Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 🎟️ AI Recruiting Summit 2026: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ 📬 Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe ⚡ Sponsor — Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com 🎯 Sponsor — Millee (30-day free trial): https://millee.ai 🎙️ The Rainmaking Podcast: https://therainmakingpodcast.com 🔗 Connect with Scott on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scotttlove/ YouTube: https://youtu.be/GyrM_muEqPM
• The Top Biller Who Surfs 200 Days a Year 14.05.2026 1godz 6min

  Tony O'Neill surfs 200 days a year, runs an executive search firm from the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, and lives a life most agency owners assume they have to retire before earning. Here's the part no one talks about: it didn't come from selling the business or stepping back from the desk. He's still billing, still in Pinnacle Society conversations, and still committed to another fifteen years in the seat. The life came from a decision he made fifteen years ago to reverse-engineer everything and to build a brand, not a search firm.  This conversation is the playbook. Tony walks through the brick wall he hit in year one, the consultants who saved his business, and why he chose an outdoor sporting goods niche his mentors told him was too small. He explains why he switched from contingent to retained in year three, why he refuses contingent work today even with the perfect candidate already in his inbox, and why owning the client relationship is the non-negotiable that separates high-performance firms from everyone else. Then he breaks down the 2024 pivot that added over six figures to his revenue. When his niche got hit, he called every past client to ask how he could improve, and got certified in DISC and Predictive Index. He built behavioral assessments into his proposals with an extended warranty, priced them higher than felt comfortable, and turned them into a recurring revenue line. His framing for clients: two-thirds of hires industry-wide are bad hires, and the assessment moves the customer from a .333 batting average to .500. MILLEE — The judgment that separates big billers the reframe that regains control of a stalling process, the move when a candidate goes quiet — usually takes years on the desk. Millee analyzes every live deal and builds the exact strategy you need, powered by a curated knowledge base from elite recruiters. It's encoded intuition. Before every call you get sharp contextual preparation. In your inbox, high-caliber emails are already drafted. Users save an hour a day on email alone. Try Millee free for 30 days: https://www.millee.ai/ ATLAS — The resume never tells the full story. Candidates share what really matters in conversations: motivations, salary expectations, plans to relocate. Most of that ends up buried in notes. Atlas captures every conversation automatically and turns it into something you can use. With MagicSearch, you can ask "who talked about wanting a four-day week" or "who's open to relocating next year" and pull answers from your entire database instantly. Atlas customers report over 40% EBITDA growth and over 80% increase in monthly billings after adopting the platform. Unlock your exclusive listener offer: https://recruitwithatlas.com  What You'll Learn: Why Tony refuses contingent work, even when the perfect candidate is already in his inboxThe brick wall every new search firm owner hits in year one and the consultants who break itHow he chose a "too small" niche and built a brand recruiters confuse for a sporting goods companyThe 2024 pivot that added six figures: DISC, Predictive Index, and extended warranties built into the proposalWhy two-thirds of hires industry-wide are bad and how to get your client to bat .500Tony's daily operating system: 10am-3:30pm prime selling time, sauna, cold plunge, algorithm starvationThe two books behind the business: Million Dollar Consulting and The Four AgreementsWhy "freedom requires discipline" is the principle every search firm owner has to internalize first   Connect with Tony O'Neill on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/outdoorindustryrecruiter/ 🎯 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 ▶️ Watch the full episode on YouTube:
• From Laid-Off Recruiter to Staffing Firm CEO | Catiana Ibarra 11.05.2026 1godz 2min

  Resumes never tell the full story. The candidate who casually mentioned she's open to relocating, the manager who said he wants a four-day week, the senior dev who's quietly looking — that detail gets buried in notes and forgotten. Atlas changes that. It's the AI-first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin, capturing every conversation automatically and turning it into something you can actually search. With MagicSearch you can ask Atlas "who talked about relocating?" or "who mentioned a four-day week?" and it pulls the answers instantly across your entire database. Atlas also makes BD easier with opportunity tracking and client relationship tools powered by generative AI, plus smart dashboards that give you full pipeline visibility across the business. Atlas customers report 40%+ EBITDA growth and 80%+ increases in monthly billings after adoption. It's built for agencies that want to grow without adding more manual work. https://recruitwithatlas.com April 24, 2020. Catiana Ibarra Aponte was handing layoff letters to her own team when her own letter came. Her director's parting line: "If we had more recruiting, you'd still be here." She heard what she'd been hearing her whole life. Not good enough. This wasn't her first no. Her father, a second-generation pharmacy owner, told her she couldn't take over the family business — she was a girl, she'd have other roles. Her master's professor told the class on day one they weren't degree material. Now her employer was saying the same thing during a global pandemic. She cried for four hours. Then she built a plan. In this episode of The Elite Recruiter Podcast, Catiana — now CEO and Brand Manager of PeopleLift, an HR staffing and AI consulting firm serving clients across Puerto Rico, Latin America, and the United States — walks Benjamin Mena through one of the most resilient career arcs in recruiting. Surviving Hurricane Maria with six months of no electricity while still trying to fill jobs. Bouncing through four contract roles in two years. Driving alone to a hotel during COVID lockdown for a first interview she suspected might be a kidnapping. Getting publicly attacked in a company-wide Slack channel by a teammate who compared her to a dog chasing a bone. Building the trust with clients that eventually moved her from talent acquisition manager to CEO. This is an episode for any agency recruiter, executive search professional, or staffing firm owner who's ever wondered whether they have what it takes to become an operator, a partner, or a CEO. It's also for any recruiter who's been told no — by a client, a candidate, a boss, a family member — and needs to hear from someone who turned every one of those nos into the next chapter. What you'll learn: Why being told "no" is the single most useful career fuel for an agency recruiterHow Catiana rebuilt her career across four contract roles before landing the CEO seatThe after-5pm work that took her from TA manager to operator to CEOHow to spot top billers who can become leaders — and which top billers should stay individual contributorsThe change-management playbook she used to push new processes through resistant teamsWhy one-service staffing firms are at risk and how PeopleLift expanded into fractional HR and AI consultingThe mindset shift that transformed her client retention and BD resultsWhat recruiters who dream of becoming operators or partners need to start doing tomorrow   🎯 Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 🚀 AI Recruiting Summit 2026: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ 📩 Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe 🤝 Connect with Catiana on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/catiana-i-ibarra-aponte-91656642/ ▶️ Watch on YouTube: 
• $720K in Q1, Zero Cold Calls — Nick Poloni's AI-Powered Recruiting Desk 07.05.2026 1godz 24min

  $720,000 in one quarter. Zero cold calls. Three tools. He's running 29 active job orders in pharma and biotech recruiting, his business development is 100% inbound from LinkedIn, and he just took over the family agency on January 1st. This is what an AI-powered recruiting desk actually looks like when someone executes it correctly. This episode is sponsored by Atlas — the AI-first recruitment platform built for agencies that want to scale without adding manual work. Atlas captures every candidate conversation automatically across calls, emails, and interviews, then turns it into searchable intelligence. With MagicSearch you can ask Atlas in plain English — "Who mentioned they're open to relocating?" or "Who wants a four-day week?" — and pull answers across your entire database instantly. Atlas customers report 40% EBITDA growth and 80% increases in monthly billings. Unlock your exclusive listener offer at https://recruitwithatlas.com This episode is also sponsored by Millee — try Millee free for 30 days. Millee analyzes every detail of your live deals and builds the exact strategy you need in real time, powered by a curated knowledge base from elite recruiters. It's encoded intuition — the judgment and gut feel of big billers translated into real-time guidance for every process. Sharp prep before every call. High-caliber emails already drafted in your inbox. Users save an hour a day on email alone. Start your 30-day free trial at https://www.millee.ai/ Pin Discount Code and Link: https://www.pin.com/book-a-demo?via=recruiter  Code: JRS02DRI Now back to Nick. He grew up inside the business. His mom Jennifer was a Pinnacle Society member for years, one of the most respected pharma recruiters in the country. She drilled the old-school fundamentals into him: phone above everything, persistence past the point most quit, availability that never sleeps. When Nick took over this January, he didn't throw any of it out. He fused it to AI and rebuilt the desk from the ground up. Nick walks through every layer of the build. The Claude agent that drafts client-ready job descriptions in twenty minutes. The virtual assistant on Slack handling every interview thread so nothing slips. The network scoring system rating every relationship one to ten — highest score gets the call. The pricing move that landed him a no-end-date $20,000-a-month retainer. The text message detail that lifted response rates by 40% — switching from a green RingCentral bubble to a blue iMessage bubble, same exact message. Benjamin pushes him on the controversial calls every recruiter is wrestling with. Why cold calling is finished. Why pure sourcers are about to disappear. Why the gap between recruiters who adopt AI and those who don't will widen so violently that ten-person agencies will hit ten million in revenue. The three traits that project a new recruiter ahead of everyone else. And the one business development principle Nick's mom drilled into him that most modern recruiters skip to their own detriment. If you're an agency recruiter, executive search consultant, staffing firm owner, or solo recruiter trying to figure out what an AI-powered recruiting desk needs to look like in 2026, this is the episode to study. 🎯 Connect with Nick Poloni on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickpoloni/ 🎬 Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/XAS4vpTON_E 🤖 Atlas — AI-first recruitment platform: https://recruitwithatlas.com ⚡ Millee — free 30-day trial: https://www.millee.ai/  Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 🎤 AI Recruiting Summit 2026: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ 📩 Newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe
• Million-Dollar Biller: The AI That Builds Elite Recruiters 04.05.2026 1godz 2min

  Two million-dollar billers. A $4 million book. They walked away from all of it — at the peak of their performance — because they believed most recruiters were about to learn the hard way that AI doesn't save careers. It exposes the ones built on shaky ground. 🎁 Try Millee free for 30 days: https://www.millee.ai/ Seb Sharpe is the co-founder of Millee, an AI recruitment intelligence platform powered by 15 million tokens of what he believes to be the highest-quality data in recruiting. He's also co-founder of Generate, the "business in a box" infrastructure play built for the next generation of agency recruiters. Before any of that, he and his business partner Charlie Rawlings — friends since age 12 — built Inventure into a $4M renewable energy search firm out of Los Angeles. Then they walked away from the desk to build the thing they thought the industry was missing. In this conversation, Seb makes the case most recruiters don't want to hear: the ones betting on AI to save their careers are actually accelerating their own irrelevance. He explains why the contingency hit ratio sits stubbornly at 25%, why "more emails faster" is the wrong problem to solve, and why reputations across the industry are about to be won and lost at speeds nobody's prepared for. He breaks down the math behind a million-dollar desk that almost nobody talks about — the first $400K happens between 8:30 and 5:30, and the remaining $600K happens between 5:30 and 10pm, for months on end. He shares why "only the paranoid survive" is the operating principle of every elite biller he knows, even in their best quarters. And he reveals the mentor advice from Joel Slanning that took Inventure from $1M to $4M with healthy margins. You'll also get an inside look at Millee itself — how it sits inside your inbox like a $3M biller looking over your shoulder, how its health-score dashboard exposes the deals you think are alive but aren't, and why it's just as powerful for entry-level recruiters as it is for top performers. Plus Seb's read on the bifurcation coming for the industry: the recruiters who'll use AI to triple their output, and the ones who'll quietly fall behind. The AI Recruiting Summit returns in July, and Seb is one of the featured speakers. If 2026 is going to be your year, this is the room. Details and registration: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ 🎁 Try Millee free for 30 days: https://www.millee.ai/ 🔗 Connect with Seb on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seb-sharpe-01b89840/ 🚀 Learn about Generate: https://wearegenerate.com/🎯 🎤 AI Recruiting Summit, July 2026: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ 📺 Watch on YouTube: 👥 Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community
• From $2.2M to $11M: The 18-Month AI Deadline Hitting Every Agency 01.05.2026 56min

  Amanda Hendrix helped scale a healthcare staffing firm from $2.2M to $11M in a single year during the COVID boom. Then the market normalized. Bill rates dropped from $145 to $110 in thirty days. Vendors got cut. Recruiter morale cracked. Agencies that hired aggressively into the surge got squeezed out one by one. This episode is the post-mortem you don't usually get from someone who lived both sides of it. Now Head of Growth at Ember Hiring, an AI SaaS platform built for healthcare staffing, Amanda works with nearly 20 agencies across the industry. What she's seeing inside those firms is the most direct AI warning Benjamin has put on the show. A year ago, the line in AI engineering circles was that staffing agencies who didn't adopt AI would be out of business in five years. The current timeline she's hearing? Eighteen months. That's the operational reality being traded between agency operators while consolidation accelerates underneath them. One of her clients merged five agencies into one then acquired four more. She predicts the 400 to 500 active travel nursing agencies operating today will collapse to roughly fifty within ten years. The conversation moves through what actually scaled the firm in year three, what habits from hyper-growth quietly became liabilities once the market tightened, and the leadership decisions that kept the company alive when bill rates collapsed. Amanda is candid about cutting salaries, choosing not to over-hire during the boom, and the moment she realized her former mentor's "don't throw people at the problem" advice had saved the company. She also walks through what the recruiter desk needs to look like over the next eighteen months: AI-funneled pre-qualified leads in one bucket, an active book of business in another, submitted candidates in the third — with the recruiter's job becoming pure relationship work and oversight of AI agents handling the rest. She explains why managing 40 to 50 candidates is no longer enough, and why 100-plus is the new floor. Amanda drops a stat that should change how every healthcare recruiter thinks about flow: less than ten percent of candidates who apply actually get the role they applied for, because the job is filled before the submission packet reaches the client. Speed is preparation. Consistency beats charisma. The recruiters who treat themselves like entrepreneurs are the ones who'll still be standing in five years. If you run an agency, lead a team, or bill a desk in any vertical of recruiting, this is the episode to forward to anyone on your team who still thinks AI is optional. This episode of The Elite Recruiter Podcast is brought to you by Atlas, the AI-first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin and turn every candidate conversation into pipeline. Atlas captures every conversation automatically, then lets you query your entire database with MagicSearch — ask "who mentioned wanting a four-day week" or "who's open to relocating next year" and get answers instantly. No keyword guessing. No digging through old notes. Atlas customers report over 40% EBITDA growth and over 80% increase in monthly billings after rollout. Unlock your exclusive listener offer at https://recruitwithatlas.com 🎧 Connect with Amanda Hendrix on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amandahendrix/ 🎟️ The AI Recruiting Summit 2026 is now open — the event built for recruiters operating at the front edge of where this industry is heading. Register here: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ 🚀 Join the Elite Recruiter Community for $49/month — biweekly roundtables, the Billers Club, full replays from every past summit, and a tight crew of recruiters serious about growth. Cancel anytime: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community
• How a Former NFL Player Built a $700K Recruiting Desk 27.04.2026 1godz 10min

  🚀 THIS IS YOUR YEAR — Recruiter Gworth Summit kicks off TODAY 2026 is your year. The year you stop watching other recruiters hit the numbers you've been chasing and become the one hitting them. We're pulling together the industry's best — Mike Williams, Brianna Rooney, Mark Whitby, and a stacked lineup across the full week — to give you the playbook, the mindset, and the strategies to go elite this year. Every live session is free. This is the recruiter event of the year and it starts today, April 27. Register here: https://this-is-your-year-recruiter-summit.heysummit.com/  Most recruiters never see the full collapse of someone's first dream before they get to their second. Luke Marquardt did. He was 6'9", 320 pounds, a Hall of Fame offensive line coach pouring into him, NFL scouts walking his college sideline, his name on the Senior Bowl list before his senior year — and then he broke his foot. Missed the entire season. Got invited to the NFL Combine anyway. Signed undrafted with the 49ers. Broke his foot again at minicamp. Got released. Two years of surgeries, a fused foot, four-month stints with the Jets and Lions, four preseason games played in shooting pain, and a final-round cut. Then a brutal Seahawks workout sent him to the ER flying home from Seattle. Type 1 diabetes diagnosis. Insulin pump for life. Final nail in the coffin.  What happens after the dream you've poured a decade into ends in a hospital bed? For Luke, it was an offer to start hourly at a small recruiting firm in commercial construction. Around 40 grand his first year. Then he kept going. Two-hundred-something in year two. Three to four hundred in years four and five. A six-hundred-thousand dollar year during COVID off the back of one hydrogen fueling startup client. And last year, after making the jump to a new firm with no clients carried over, he billed over $700K on a fully self-built desk and changed 22 people's lives doing it. This conversation walks the full arc — the broken feet, the ego death after being released, the identity rebuild, and the specific recruiting habits that took him from a $300K biller to a $700K biller. Benjamin pushes Luke on what actually separates the desks at that level: the volume of conversations, the militant focus on revenue-producing activities, the front-end vetting that saves you from wasting weeks on the wrong searches, and the willingness to flip a candidate call into a client by asking the one right question. Luke breaks down how a single ask on a project executive call turned into a $300M general contractor relationship that's now one of his biggest accounts. This episode is brought to you by Atlas — the AI-first recruitment platform rebuilding how agencies operate. Atlas captures every candidate conversation automatically, the motivations and comp expectations and relocation plans that normally die in scattered notes, and turns it into a searchable database you can actually use. With MagicSearch, you ask questions in plain English — who talked about wanting a four-day week, who's open to relocating next year, who mentioned hating their boss — and Atlas pulls answers across your entire database in seconds. No keyword guessing. No digging. Claim your exclusive Elite Recruiter listener offer at https://recruitwithatlas.com 🔗 Connect with Luke Marquardt LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukemarquardt/ 🤝 Join The Elite Recruiter Community The number one growth environment for agency recruiters. Unlimited access to AI Recruiting Summit replays, Finish The Year Strong replays, biweekly roundtables on sourcing, BD, and mindset, plus the Billers Club for accountability and splits. $49/month, cancel anytime. Join here: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community YouTube: https://youtu.be/i3FywSiAh1g