Episodes

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-recru...

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...

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 tha...

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 biller...

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...

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....

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...

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 wa...

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 Octo...

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 perman...

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-w...

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 sp...

Two years ago, the role of talent engineer didn't exist. Today a16z is funding a fellowship for it, and Benjamin Mena sits down with one of its founding members to find out what it means for every recruiting team, agency and in-house alike. Dan McCarthy took the least likely path into this seat: jazz musician, New York bartender, wine educator, and Brooklyn CrossFit gym owner before Shopify hired him into tech recruiting at 40 years old. Two layoffs later, he's a Senior Talent Engineer at Zapier, where he built a talent intelligence MCP in about a month using completely free APIs including the Department of Labor, WARN Act data, and Indeed Hiring Lab, so recruiters walk into every intake call armed with real market data. Benjamin and Dan get into the ego build problem on LinkedIn, the difference between building to learn and building to ship, what a solo recruiter could stand up in a weekend to change their next client pitch, whether a three person agency could really bill five …

Cold email is dying, so Brian Abrams went old school. His boutique IT project management staffing firm grew from $1.5M to $6M while the staffing industry contracted three years straight, and 30 to 40 percent of his gross profit now comes from one channel: industry conferences. In this episode, the founder of PMO Partners lays out his entire four part playbook. How he picks his conference slate a year out, the pre-work almost nobody does including the exact no-pressure LinkedIn message he sends 30 days before every event, how his team works the floor, the follow up system that turned a 10 second booth conversation into his biggest client ever, and the story behind the legendary Run PMO shirts.

David Fishman built a $1.5 million recruiting desk with no college degree, an eight-year Coast Guard stint, and a chip on his shoulder that never went away. Thirty years in, his longest client has been with him for three decades, and he just ran a streak of ten placements from ten straight presentations, first candidate presented, first candidate hired. He breaks down the intake questions that shape every search, why he reads resumes like photographs, how he wins back lost clients by outliving the HR leaders who cut him, why he tracks deals instead of dollars, and the Monday-through-Wednesday rhythm that protects his momentum. At 58, something is still chasing him.

Kimberly Laipple was a single mom at 18 who was told she would never get a degree. She survived foreclosure, fed her kids through food banks, and poured herself into a recruiting desk at Scientific Search. Eighteen years later she is president of that same firm, a $1.4 million personal biller, and one of only 80 recruiters admitted to the Pinnacle Society, where she serves as vice president of the board. In this episode she breaks down the inner work that took her from years stuck at $550K to her first million dollar year, the Mr. Miyagi deal she makes with every new recruiter, the repeatable process behind back to back $100K months, and the path she used to climb from recruiter to president: prove yourself, then ask for it. If you are sitting at a plateau and blaming the market, this one will challenge you in the best way.

A hiring manager types "accounting recruiter near me" into ChatGPT. Somebody comes up. Steve Gipson's argument is that it is almost never the best recruiter. It is the most visible one. Steve is Director of Sales and Operations at Recruiters Websites, now in its fourteenth year and used by over a thousand recruiting firms. One of those clients is a two person firm that had closed $404,000 of inbound business as of the day this was recorded, pulling twenty to thirty leads a month from people who had never heard of them. Steve is direct about the caveat. They started this work seven or eight years ago. Inside the episode: what Google actually changed and why SEO did not die, how topical authority works on a recruiting site, whether Wix and Squarespace can rank, the listicle and directory play for getting cited by AI, and the one on page fix to make this week. Figures are self reported and not independently verified. Recruiters Websites: https://recruiterswebsites.com/ Finis…

Across more than 5,000 recruiters, Michelle Flynn has run the same values exercise, and money has never once come up as a core value. Part 2 starts tactical and goes somewhere most recruiting podcasts never touch. The top biller's morning. The pre call ritual before dialing a Fortune 500 C suite. What flow state actually looks like on a recruiting desk, and a live breathwork session you can follow along with in real time. Then the payoff: how to find your real driver, why money never survives to the final list, what shows up instead, and what that means for how you build your desk or your firm. Michelle walks through pieces of the Life Audit live, shares the most dramatic client transformations she has watched, and gets honest about the two fears that quietly trap founders, the loneliness of going solo, whether AI is actually costing recruiters money, and the question she wishes recruiters would ask her but never do. If Part 1 was the collapse and the foundations, this is what all the…

Michelle Flynn was living the recruitment dream: 20 placements a month as a solo recruiter, working 9:30 to 4:30, every client on exclusive, no cold calls. Then, three months after her wedding, a suspected heart attack at 39 put her on the hospital floor. From her hospital bed, she asked for her phone because an interview was still running. In Part 1 of this two part conversation, the health and performance coach recruiters call the Wendy Rhoades of the industry takes us inside the dream desk, the collapse, the second warning at 42 that finally forced the wake up call, and the foundations she now coaches into top billers and staffing firm owners. Why you cannot outwork burnout. The fact versus excuse test. The four factors of sleep quality. The breathwork reset elite athletes use before a penalty kick. And the time audit that found one recruiter 36 hours a week hiding on Instagram. Essential listening for agency recruiters, executive search professionals, and recruitment founders runn…

Welcome to another episode of The Elite Recruiter Podcast! Today, host Benjamin Mena sits down with Dougie Loan, a recruitment tech leader who has analyzed billions of recruiting messages and has his finger on the pulse of what’s truly effective — and what’s no longer working — in modern recruiting. In this data-driven conversation, Dougie Loan shares candid insights from behind the scenes, busts outdated outreach myths, and reveals strategies that are winning business in 2026. Tune in as we talk AI's impact, wasted workdays, assembling high-growth playbooks, and actionable advice for recruiters who want to move from average to elite. Whether you’re struggling with low reply rates or searching for a competitive edge, this episode is packed with practical tips and forward-looking strategies to help you thrive in the rapidly evolving world of recruitment.

The AI Recruiting Summit 2026 is happening now through July 20th, and registration is free for every live session. Recruiting engineers, operators, and recruiters actually running AI on their desks are showing what is working behind the scenes. Do not miss it. Register here: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ This episode is brought to you by Atlas. The resume never tells the full story, and most of what candidates share ends up buried in notes and forgotten. Atlas is the AI first ...

Gary Stauble started his firm in 1998 and almost immediately lost control of his mornings. Circumstances at home meant he could not rely on being at his desk on any given day. He had less time than his competition, and he was not hitting his goals. So he stopped measuring hours and started measuring what the hours produced. He compressed his workday, front-loaded everything that mattered into the morning, and produced more, not less. This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the AI-first recrui...

Welcome to The Elite Recruiter Podcast! In this episode, "How To Build A $1.3 Million AI Recruiting Desk," we dive deep into the strategies that are revolutionizing the recruiting industry. This episode serves as a preview for the upcoming AI Recruiting Summit 2026, running from July 13th to July 20th. Join us for free live sessions to gain actionable insights or opt for the VIP package or Elite Recruiter Community membership for permanent access to replays. This episode is proudly sponsored ...

In part two, Danny Cahill takes Benjamin Mena behind the scenes of how he actually builds million dollar billers. He draws a sharp line between where AI genuinely helps and where it makes every recruiter sound the same, and argues that as everyone outsources their voice to a bot, the ability to write and think originally becomes the last real competitive advantage. He dismantles the myth that you need no life to be great at this, then opens up on mentorship. Why top billers become a protected class no one will push, the hidden wound behind most high achievers, and why you do not luck into a 22 year career. He closes with a challenge to rethink the pricing and sales DNA of the entire industry