The Elite Recruiter Podcast

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Jul 2026

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The Elite Recruiter Podcast is where top recruiters go to get better. Hosted by executive recruiter Benjamin Mena , this show dives deep into the stories, strategies, and mindsets of the most successful people in the industry — from $1M solo producers to 8+-figure agency founders. Each episode delivers real, tactical insights for high-performance recruiting: How elite recruiters build and scale Tools, tech stacks, and sourcing strategies Daily habits and workflows that drive million-dollar desks Lessons from failure, breakthrough wins, and mindset shifts What the best are doing next — and how they’re changing the game If you’re in agency recruiting, staffing, or executive search — this is your new secret weapon. No fluff. No recycled advice. Just the unfiltered playbook of the top 1%. 🎧 Subscribe now and start leveling up like an elite.

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July 9, 2026Episode 3401 hr 21 min

How To Get 3 Hours Of Real Work Done Before Lunch

Gary Stauble started his firm in 1998 and almost immediately lost control of his mornings. Circumstances at home meant he could not rely on being at his desk on any given day. He had less time than his competition, and he was not hitting his goals. So he stopped measuring hours and started measuring what the hours produced. He compressed his workday, front-loaded everything that mattered into the morning, and produced more, not less. This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the AI-first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin. Atlas captures every conversation automatically and turns it into something you can use, so the detail that never fits in a resume field does not get buried in your notes. Ask MagicSearch who mentioned relocating next year and it searches your entire database instantly. https://recruitwithatlas.com/ This lands right before the AI Recruiting Summit 2026, and that is deliberate. Next week will throw more tools and change at you than anyone can absorb in a sitting. None of it matters if you cannot hold a morning together. Register: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ Gary was last on the show in Episode 178, on performance systems and where his career started. This session is where he explains what forced him to build them: https://www.eliterecruiterpodcast.com/peak-performance-of-7-figure-billers-with-gary-stauble/ He opens with the problem, and the numbers are uncomfortable. The average knowledge worker is productive for 2.3 hours a day, interrupted fifty-six times, once every eleven minutes, taking up to twenty-three minutes to recover focus each time. Gary's view is that recruiters score worse than average, not better, because the business is chaotic by nature. He calls it constant partial attention. You are never fully present, so you end the day exhausted and unsure what you moved. Then he builds the answer. The morning gets a boot-up sequence you execute without thinking, because there is no time for thinking at five in the morning, only time for running a script you wrote the night before. Clothes laid out. Coffee preset. A fixed appointment early enough that you cannot negotiate with it. Gary's own block runs six to eight forty-five, nearly three hours of work before most desks open. The middle of the day gets a boundary. Gary separates exploration from execution and gives you somewhere to put every shiny tool and half-formed idea so it stops eating your morning. He covers accurate project selection, why scheduling interviews is the first, second and third most important thing you do, and what ten marketing actions by ten does to a pipeline. The end of the day gets thirty minutes. Most recruiters skip it, and it is the part that makes everything else work. Gary calls it engineering an epic tomorrow. Plan Monday on Friday afternoon and you get a weekend. Skip it and you carry low-grade static through every hour you are supposed to be off. You still have to win the morning to win the desk. Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe Connect with Gary Stauble: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garystauble/

July 6, 2026Episode 3391 hr 19 min

How To Build A $1.3 Million AI Recruiting Desk

The AI Recruiting Summit 2026 kicks off July 13th and runs through July 20th, and this episode is your preview of exactly what you will see there. Live sessions are free, so you can pop in and out around your desk. If you want the replays, grab the VIP option or join the Elite Recruiter Community, where every summit replay lives permanently. Register now at https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ because 2026 is the year you draw your line in the sand. This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the AI first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin. Atlas captures every candidate conversation automatically and turns it into something you can use. With MagicSearch you can ask questions like who mentioned they are open to relocating next year, and it pulls answers instantly from real conversations across your entire database. Atlas customers have reported over 40 percent EBITDA growth and over 80 percent increase in monthly billings. Unlock your exclusive listener offer at https://recruitwithatlas.com/ Pulled straight from the Elite Recruiter Community library, this session is a taste of the summit format: a real recruiter walking through a real AI powered desk, screen level detail and all. Nick Poloni of Cascadia Search Group billed 1.3 million dollars last year, his first time crossing the million mark, with only about half a year on his current AI stack. This year he is already around 700K and climbing. And here is the part that should stop you mid scroll: he rates his own coding ability a one out of ten. He cannot write a line of code, and he still built his own recruiting bots, rebuilt his firm's entire website from scratch in Claude, and wired his ATS into Slack so a pipeline bot flags every stalled candidate before breakfast. Alongside Jake Price of PIN, Nick breaks down the full system. He records hiring manager intake calls, feeds the notes into Claude, and has AI write his AI sourcing prompts. His outreach is short, specific, and so personalized that candidates reply just to ask if he is real, at one point pulling around a 70 percent response rate across email and LinkedIn on over a thousand candidates. He has done zero traditional business development, no cold calls to HR, ever. Instead he gives away candidates, floats resumes for free, and lets value do the selling, a philosophy that landed him a 20K a month retainer and a 100 rep sales build. You will also hear how he sourced an entire salesforce in two and a half weeks, ran 500 to 800 interviews over three months without a single no show, and turned a Philippines based assistant into the chief of getting stuff done. If any of this feels out of reach, that is exactly why the summit exists. From July 13 through July 20 you will get walkthroughs, tools, and tech you can steal for your own desk. Nick's billing figures are his own account of his results, shared as he told them. Register for the AI Recruiting Summit 2026: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe Connect with Nick Poloni: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickpoloni/ Connect with Jake Price: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacob-price-05a6562b/ Listen on Apple Podcasts: Listen on Spotify: Watch on YouTube: This episode is sponsored by Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/

July 1, 2026Episode 33851 min

How To Build A Million Dollar Biller. Danny Cahill.

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

June 29, 2026Episode 33756 min

Danny Cahill On Building A 40 Year Career. (Pt 1)

Danny Cahill is one of the biggest names in the history of the recruiting industry, and in this first part of a two part conversation he sits down with Benjamin Mena to unpack forty years of building a firm, surviving every disruption thrown at him, and developing recruiters who last entire careers. This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the AI first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin and turn every candidate conversation into something you can use. Atlas customers have reported over 40 percent EBITDA growth and over 80 percent increase in monthly billings after adopting the platform. Get started and unlock your exclusive listener offer at recruitwithatlas.com Danny owns Hobson Associates, the firm where he started six days out of college, became rookie of the year, billed as top producer for four straight years, and then bought the company at twenty seven. He has never had a resume and never been out of a job, which he calls the great hypocrisy of a man who got wealthy helping other people change theirs. The conversation opens on something Danny believes most recruiters are getting wrong in 2026. Leaning on AI to handle your messaging, your outreach, and your tough sales conversations is quietly making you passive and worse at the actual work of selling. As Danny puts it, all we have really done is find a way to make more noise faster. From there he and Benjamin walk through how he has navigated four recessions and a pandemic. During the Great Recession he watched his fintech heavy niche collapse, raised his fees while everyone else cut theirs, and moved his firm into biotech. When Covid shut Connecticut down in a single afternoon, he bought thirty laptops, called in two million dollars of receivables, and had his team working remotely by the end of the day. But the heart of this episode is people. Danny explains why he believes the best recruiters are frustrated social workers, why money is a great early motivator that never sustains anyone, and why his people want his approval more than they want to buy a house. He breaks down how he manages a recruiter differently across their career, and why he spends more time with his veterans than his rookies, because senior people need recognition their entire lives. He closes part one with the fundamentals even twenty year veterans still butcher, the sales approaches working right now, and a hard truth about your pipeline. When you think you have four job orders, you really have one. What You'll Learn: Why leaning on AI for your outreach and sales conversations is making recruiters passive and worse at selling How Danny survived four recessions and a pandemic, and the counterintuitive move he made during the Great Recession What he did in a single afternoon when Covid shut everything down Why the best recruiters are frustrated social workers, and what actually motivates top performers over the long term How to manage rookies and veterans differently, and why your senior people need more of your time The sales fundamentals even twenty year veterans still get wrong Why you probably have far fewer real job orders than you think Make sure to listen to Part 2, where Danny goes deep on AI, the writing skills that set elite recruiters apart, and how he builds million dollar billers behind the scenes. Connect with Danny Cahill on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danny-cahill-a6797a/ Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/danny-cahill-on-building-a-40-year-career-pt-1/id1547241660?i=1000774681186 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7AaKC3JrP3Y0eeu9SESsHp?si=5xQfHvygTFimUKEhCU5LOg Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community Register for the AI Recruiting Summit 2026: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe Sponsored by Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/

June 25, 2026Episode 33633 min

How To Become A Million Dollar Biller

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

June 23, 2026Episode 33545 min

Retained Masterclass Pt 2: The Dollars Are In Delivery

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

June 22, 2026Episode 33445 min

Going Retained Masterclass Part 1 with Allie Milbrath

June 18, 2026Episode 3331 hr 3 min

Your Best Biller Costs You $5 Million.

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:

June 15, 2026Episode 3321 hr 14 min

The NFL & Forbes 400 Hire Her. Here's Why

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

June 10, 2026Episode 33146 min

The 60% of Recruiters Who'll Quietly Sink Your Agency. Part 2

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