The RAG Podcast - Recruitment Agency Growth Podcast

Hosted by Sean Anderson

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Nov 2026

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About the show

We’re having real and raw conversations with successful recruitment entrepreneurs about what is happening in their businesses right now and their plans to navigate market changes.

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60 recent

November 11, 20261 hr 3 min

Season 10 | Ep6 Tom Hunter: One Recruiter. Never Hiring Onshore. On Track for A$600K in Year 1

Tom Hunter runs Story Recruitment from Sydney, placing the first CFO and the first finance hire in tech, fintech and deep tech startups. It's him, 1 full-time marketer in South Africa and a lot of AI. He only works retained, his average fee is 50-60K, and he's on track for around 600K in his first 12 months. Every search starts with a story post, a press release for the role. Candidates have messaged him from other cities, and he says 50-60% of his roles are now referred. Tom says there's no one in Australia in accounting and finance with this level of reach, and no one else in Australia who can do what he does. And he has no plans to ever hire onshore. On this episode of The RAG Podcast, Tom breaks down how he built a lean, retained-only business around his own reputation. Like most founders, Tom once pictured a bigger team. He built the Australian office up to 6-7 people, then took it back to 2-3, and now he runs Story as 1 recruiter and an offshore marketer. He says 2-3 jobs a month is a 1.5M business for him, and he never wants to be high volume. His idea for the profit is angel investing in the early stage startups he meets. If you've ever wondered whether you can build a lean, retained-only recruitment business around your own reputation, with AI doing the heavy lifting, this episode is for you. ---------- Episode Sponsor: Atlas Admin is a massive waste of time. That's why there's Atlas, the AI-first recruitment platform built for modern agencies. It doesn't only track CVs and calls. It remembers everything. Every email, every interview, every conversation. Instantly searchable, always available. And now, it's entering a whole new era. With Atlas 2.0, you can ask anything and it delivers. With Magic Search, you speak and it listens. It finds the right candidates using real conversations, not simply look for keywords. Atlas 2.0 also makes business development easier than ever. With Opportunities, you can track, manage and grow client relationships, powered by generative AI and built right into your workflow. Need insights? Custom dashboards give you total visibility over your pipeline. And that's not theory. Atlas customers have reported up to 41% EBITDA growth and an 85% increase in billings after adopting the platform. No admin. No silos. No lost info. Nothing but faster shortlists, better hires and more time to focus on what actually drives revenue. Atlas is your personal AI partner for modern recruiting. Don't miss the future of recruitment. Get started with Atlas today and unlock your exclusive RAG listener offer at https://recruitwithatlas.com/therag/ ---------- Episode Sponsor: Hoxo Every recruitment founder is investing in LinkedIn, but AI has turned templated posts and outreach into a commodity. When everyone sounds the same, the market stops listening. The recruiters winning now are the ones the market trusts. At Hoxo we help recruitment founders become the most influential name in their niche, using AI to multiply output while trust stays the product. Our clients turn their existing networks into £100K to £300K in new billings within months. Watch the free RAG listener training to see how: https://hubs.ly/Q03lBpYC0 ---------- Tom Hunter is the founder of Story Recruitment, a specialist recruitment business hiring the first finance hire and first CFO for Australian tech, fintech and deep tech startups. Tom is also host of the CFO Track Podcast and can be found at https://storyrecruitment.com.au

November 4, 20261 hr 4 min

Season 10 | Ep5 Julia Arpag: $650K in Year One. Then She Chose Enough.

Julia Arpag is the founder of Aligned Recruitment, a retained search business working with US tech startups. She has built a LinkedIn following of over 91,000, and she has never made a single cold call. It started in the hardest possible way. Julia was five weeks postpartum, with a two-year-old and two teenage foster sons at home, when the startup she worked for ran out of money and let her go. She had six job offers within two weeks, and accepted one. Then a friend asked her to help spin up a recruitment company, "like five hours a week". They closed three retainer clients in their first six weeks. Julia went all in. She had only ever worked retained and RPO, and in its first year Aligned billed $650,000. The obvious next move was to scale and sell. Diane Prince, who coached her one to one and taught her how to sell, had scaled and sold her own business for 28 million. Julia started down that path, and the stress, anxiety and sleepless nights told her something was wrong. "I'm killing myself for something that I don't actually need to do right now or want to do right now." So she made a decision most founders never make. She let enough be enough. On this episode of The RAG Podcast, Julia breaks down how she built a business around her life instead of the other way round. Julia isn't ruling out selling one day. But she is clear that she won't lose these early years with her family to get there. If you've ever wondered whether you are allowed to stop climbing, decide that what you have built is already enough, and still win, this episode is for you. ---------- Episode Sponsor: Atlas Admin is a massive waste of time. That's why there's Atlas, the AI-first recruitment platform built for modern agencies. It doesn't only track CVs and calls. It remembers everything. Every email, every interview, every conversation. Instantly searchable, always available. And now, it's entering a whole new era. With Atlas 2.0, you can ask anything and it delivers. With Magic Search, you speak and it listens. It finds the right candidates using real conversations, not simply look for keywords. Atlas 2.0 also makes business development easier than ever. With Opportunities, you can track, manage and grow client relationships, powered by generative AI and built right into your workflow. Need insights? Custom dashboards give you total visibility over your pipeline. And that's not theory. Atlas customers have reported up to 41% EBITDA growth and an 85% increase in billings after adopting the platform. No admin. No silos. No lost info. Nothing but faster shortlists, better hires and more time to focus on what actually drives revenue. Atlas is your personal AI partner for modern recruiting. Don't miss the future of recruitment. Get started with Atlas today and unlock your exclusive RAG listener offer at https://recruitwithatlas.com/therag/ ---------- Episode Sponsor: Hoxo Every recruitment founder is investing in LinkedIn, but AI has turned templated posts and outreach into a commodity. When everyone sounds the same, the market stops listening. The recruiters winning now are the ones the market trusts. At Hoxo we help recruitment founders become the most influential name in their niche, using AI to multiply output while trust stays the product. Our clients turn their existing networks into £100K to £300K in new billings within months. Watch the free RAG listener training to see how: https://hubs.ly/Q03lBpYC0

October 28, 20261 hr 4 min

Season 10 | Ep4 Rich Rosen: 30 Years, 1,300 Placements, and Still a Team of One

Rich Rosen has been recruiting software sales talent from his home outside Boston since 1996. Thirty years, almost 1,300 placements, and he's done it pretty much solo. He lasted six months at Management Recruiters in New England. He closed two deals in his first ten days, was the top recruiter out of about 77, and then left over how commission was being handled to start Cornerstone Search from home. He's publicly said he bills around a million dollars a year, and has done for 30 years. Forbes ranked Cornerstone #14 on its list of America's Best Executive Recruiting Firms. In the last seven weeks alone he's billed over $400,000. On this episode of The RAG Podcast, Rich tells the full story. Rich isn't here to argue against building a bigger agency. But he's proof that the life most recruitment founders are chasing may already be available to them, if they shift their focus. If you'd like to know why one of America's top-ranked recruiters still works alone after 30 years, this episode is for you. ---------- Episode Sponsor: Atlas Admin is a massive waste of time. That's why there's Atlas, the AI-first recruitment platform built for modern agencies. It doesn't only track CVs and calls. It remembers everything. Every email, every interview, every conversation. Instantly searchable, always available. And now, it's entering a whole new era. With Atlas 2.0, you can ask anything and it delivers. With Magic Search, you speak and it listens. It finds the right candidates using real conversations, not simply look for keywords. Atlas 2.0 also makes business development easier than ever. With Opportunities, you can track, manage and grow client relationships, powered by generative AI and built right into your workflow. Need insights? Custom dashboards give you total visibility over your pipeline. And that's not theory. Atlas customers have reported up to 41% EBITDA growth and an 85% increase in billings after adopting the platform. No admin. No silos. No lost info. Nothing but faster shortlists, better hires and more time to focus on what actually drives revenue. Atlas is your personal AI partner for modern recruiting. Don't miss the future of recruitment. Get started with Atlas today and unlock your exclusive RAG listener offer at https://recruitwithatlas.com/therag/ ---------- Episode Sponsor: Hoxo Every recruitment founder is investing in LinkedIn, but AI has turned templated posts and outreach into a commodity. When everyone sounds the same, the market stops listening. The recruiters winning now are the ones the market trusts. At Hoxo we help recruitment founders become the most influential name in their niche, using AI to multiply output while trust stays the product. Our clients turn their existing networks into £100K to £300K in new billings within months. Watch the free RAG listener training to see how: https://hubs.ly/Q03lBpYC0

October 20, 20261 hr 5 min

Season 10 | Ep3 Dom Khedun: Two Billers. Just Under A$1M. No Plans to Hire Again.

Dom Khedun landed in Sydney in 2007 on a sponsored visa with Michael Page. Ten months later he moved companies, and then the financial crisis arrived. He was made redundant and worried he'd have to go back home. Years later he was building a legal team inside another agency when the MD called him out at a breakfast meeting in front of the whole business, 35 to 40 people. After that day, Dom went to the bank and applied to remortgage his apartment. When the money came through, he resigned and started Mizzen Search. Mizzen started as a 50-50 partnership. Working largely on his own, Dom billed between A$300,000 and A$400,000 a year off 10 to 12 deals. Last financial year, with one other recruiter in the business, Mizzen did just under a million Australian dollars, double its previous best. He has no intention of hiring again. On this episode of The RAG Podcast, Dom breaks down how a two-biller business doubled its billings without becoming an agency. Like most founders, Dom has thought about growing heads and turning Mizzen into a bigger agency. But the first thing he pictures is the price: a proper office, 5 days a week, listening to other people's problems. Even if you offered him double the profit for working that hard, he's out. He'd rather keep the Tuesday golf, the month back home, and a business he can run at this pace into his fifties. If you've ever wondered whether you can build serious money out of a two-biller business without ever building a team, this episode is for you. ---------- Episode Sponsor: Atlas Admin is a massive waste of time. That's why there's Atlas, the AI-first recruitment platform built for modern agencies. It doesn't only track CVs and calls. It remembers everything. Every email, every interview, every conversation. Instantly searchable, always available. And now, it's entering a whole new era. With Atlas 2.0, you can ask anything and it delivers. With Magic Search, you speak and it listens. It finds the right candidates using real conversations, not simply look for keywords. Atlas 2.0 also makes business development easier than ever. With Opportunities, you can track, manage and grow client relationships, powered by generative AI and built right into your workflow. Need insights? Custom dashboards give you total visibility over your pipeline. And that's not theory. Atlas customers have reported up to 41% EBITDA growth and an 85% increase in billings after adopting the platform. No admin. No silos. No lost info. Nothing but faster shortlists, better hires and more time to focus on what actually drives revenue. Atlas is your personal AI partner for modern recruiting. Don't miss the future of recruitment. Get started with Atlas today and unlock your exclusive RAG listener offer at https://recruitwithatlas.com/therag/ ---------- Episode Sponsor: Hoxo Every recruitment founder is investing in LinkedIn, but AI has turned templated posts and outreach into a commodity. When everyone sounds the same, the market stops listening. The recruiters winning now are the ones the market trusts. At Hoxo we help recruitment founders become the most influential name in their niche, using AI to multiply output while trust stays the product. Our clients turn their existing networks into £100K to £300K in new billings within months. Watch the free RAG listener training to see how: https://hubs.ly/Q03lBpYC0

October 13, 20261 hr 22 min

Season 10 | Ep2 Mike Williams: My Team Can Bill $250K Off My Accounts. That's the Problem.

Mike Williams was handed a cold desk in a rural US town and told to place accountants. There weren't any. So he placed an engineer instead, and kept going, until his boss's boss rang to tell him the whole thing was going to fail and he'd be fired when it did. He became Rookie of the Year and made President's Club all 5 years. Then he quit, moved from Massachusetts to Charlotte, North Carolina, and billed over $900,000 in his first year on his own, from a spare room in his house. 4 years on, Carnegie Search is a team of 14 and he's at $3.5m going into the final quarter against a $4m target. And he says it isn't good enough. The reason is sitting in his own office, and it's the same problem in most agencies this size. On this episode of The RAG Podcast, Mike breaks down why a team that bills well on his accounts still isn't the business he's building. He isn't chasing an exit. Two years ago he wanted to be the biggest firm in town. He's dropped that, and what replaced it is a harder target than any revenue figure. If you've ever looked at a team billing well on your accounts and felt uneasy about it, this episode is for you. ---------- Episode Sponsor: Atlas Admin is a massive waste of time. That's why there's Atlas, the AI-first recruitment platform built for modern agencies. It doesn't only track CVs and calls. It remembers everything. Every email, every interview, every conversation. Instantly searchable, always available. And now, it's entering a whole new era. With Atlas 2.0, you can ask anything and it delivers. With Magic Search, you speak and it listens. It finds the right candidates using real conversations, not simply look for keywords. Atlas 2.0 also makes business development easier than ever. With Opportunities, you can track, manage and grow client relationships, powered by generative AI and built right into your workflow. Need insights? Custom dashboards give you total visibility over your pipeline. And that's not theory. Atlas customers have reported up to 41% EBITDA growth and an 85% increase in billings after adopting the platform. No admin. No silos. No lost info. Nothing but faster shortlists, better hires and more time to focus on what actually drives revenue. Atlas is your personal AI partner for modern recruiting. Don't miss the future of recruitment. Get started with Atlas today and unlock your exclusive RAG listener offer at https://recruitwithatlas.com/therag/ ---------- Episode Sponsor: Hoxo Every recruitment founder is investing in LinkedIn, but AI has turned templated posts and outreach into a commodity. When everyone sounds the same, the market stops listening. The recruiters winning now are the ones the market trusts. At Hoxo we help recruitment founders become the most influential name in their niche, using AI to multiply output while trust stays the product. Our clients turn their existing networks into £100K to £300K in new billings within months. Watch the free RAG listener training to see how: https://hubs.ly/Q03lBpYC0

October 6, 20261 hr 4 min

Season 10 | Ep1 Jordan Shlosberg: Why Your Old Conversations Are Now Your Best Asset

Three years ago Jordan Shlosberg walked up to me at an expo and asked to sponsor this show. I said no. I'd had enough of CRM companies. Two years on from our first conversation in a Sheffield hotel, Atlas is in the multiple thousands of users, with 60 staff spread across Greece, Bosnia, Italy, India, Colombia and Liverpool. He still won't disclose revenue. He's aiming at Vincere and Loxo first, then Bullhorn. Last November on this podcast he predicted a renaissance for agency recruiters and told internal talent teams they had a lot to worry about. Ten months on, I made him mark his own homework. His answer: it's happening. Atlas customers are growing headcount while the job market stays sluggish, which means recruiters are taking share. On this episode of The RAG Podcast, Jordan breaks down what to actually buy in 2026 and what's about to be automated. Jordan is not selling the idea that AI turns bad recruiters into good ones. He's blunt about it. Atlas is only as good as the conversations feeding it, and crap calls with no network behind them give you very little to work with. What he is arguing is that the gap is widening. The average recruiter gets marginally better. The strong ones get considerably better, because twenty years of relationships suddenly became searchable. If you've ever wondered what you should actually be doing with AI right now, not in theory but this month, this episode has the blueprint. ---------- Episode Sponsor: Atlas Admin is a massive waste of time. That's why there's Atlas, the AI-first recruitment platform built for modern agencies. It doesn't only track CVs and calls. It remembers everything. Every email, every interview, every conversation. Instantly searchable, always available. And now, it's entering a whole new era. With Atlas 2.0, you can ask anything and it delivers. With Magic Search, you speak and it listens. It finds the right candidates using real conversations, not simply look for keywords. Atlas 2.0 also makes business development easier than ever. With Opportunities, you can track, manage and grow client relationships, powered by generative AI and built right into your workflow. Need insights? Custom dashboards give you total visibility over your pipeline. And that's not theory. Atlas customers have reported up to 41% EBITDA growth and an 85% increase in billings after adopting the platform. No admin. No silos. No lost info. Nothing but faster shortlists, better hires and more time to focus what actually drives revenue. Atlas is your personal AI partner for modern recruiting. Don't miss the future of recruitment. Get started with Atlas today and unlock your exclusive RAG listener offer at https://recruitwithatlas.com/therag/ ---------- Episode Sponsor: Hoxo Every recruitment founder is investing in LinkedIn, but AI has turned templated posts and outreach into a commodity. When everyone sounds the same, the market stops listening. The recruiters winning now are the ones the market trusts. At Hoxo we help recruitment founders become the most influential name in their niche, using AI to multiply output while trust stays the product. Our clients turn their existing networks into £100K to £300K in new billings within months. Watch the free RAG listener training to see how: https://hubs.ly/Q03lBpYC0

August 4, 20261 hr 16 min

Season 9 | Ep40 Max Learmonth: From Kitchen Table to £2.4m in Three Years

Max Learmonth was a professional rugby player who fell into recruitment by accident. He answered one trainee ad at Robert Half, started two weeks later, and never looked back. He climbed fast. £180,000 in his first year, £300,000 in his second, then off the tools rebuilding offices for a global giant. But somewhere in the grind, he lost himself. 'I'd become an arsehole,' he says. 'A typical Wolf of Wall Street recruitment dickhead. All I cared about was what my P&L looked like.' In May 2023, with a young daughter at home, he finally made the move and started again from his kitchen table. He turned down over £500,000 of investment to keep it 100% his. The plan was narrow on purpose: finance and accounting recruitment in the North West, and nothing else. Three years on, Forge Talent is a team of 16 that did £2.4 million in net fee income last year, entirely bootstrapped, built on a single stubborn belief: relationships, not transactions. On this episode of The RAG Podcast, Max breaks down exactly how he did it, the one KPI his whole business runs on each week, and why he thinks the average recruiter is finished while the specialist is only getting started. Max is not building the biggest recruitment business in the country. He is building the most dominant finance and accounting firm the North West has ever seen, and he already has a date on the exit. The difference is that he is doing it in the open, on his own terms, with a team of 16 who all know exactly what the 10-year goal is. If you have ever wondered whether going smaller and more specific is actually the smartest way to grow in the age of AI, this episode is evidence of that idea working right now. The Season 9 finale with Max Learmonth of Forge Talent is available now. ---------------------------------------------- Episode Sponsor: Atlas Admin is a massive waste of time. That's why there's Atlas, a CRM that actually understands context. Atlas captures everything you say, hear, read and write. Every interview, every client call, every LinkedIn message, email and WhatsApp, automatically. Not because you typed it up, but because Atlas was listening. Then it goes one step further and tells you the next action to take. So when you need to fill a role, People Search ranks your best candidates and tells you why, no digging required. That same memory turns your BD into a shortlist of exactly who to chase and why, so you win more clients. And when you want to see your pipeline, you just speak to your dashboards and Atlas builds the view for you in real time, tracking only what you care about. Whether you place permanent or contract, Atlas covers both. Its Contract Suite means you never chase a timesheet again, with live margin visibility across every placement. And with its new MCP and API, Atlas plugs straight into your LLMs and the rest of your stack, so the low-value admin that keeps you from billing gets done for you. This is not theory. Atlas customers are seeing 50% higher candidate response rates, a 35% increase in new clients won, 15+ hours saved every week, and monthly billings jumping by 85%. Some agencies are hitting 130% of their annual revenue target after building their business around Atlas. So if you're thinking you need to bolt AI onto your CRM, don't bother. Take a look at Atlas instead. Head to https://recruitwithatlas.com/therag/ to find out more. ---------------------------------------------- Episode Sponsor: Hoxo Every recruitment founder is investing in LinkedIn, but AI has turned templated posts and outreach into a commodity. When everyone sounds the same, the market stops listening. The recruiters winning now are the ones the market trusts. At Hoxo we help recruitment founders become the most influential name in their niche, using AI to multiply output while trust stays the product. Our clients turn their existing networks into £100K to £300K in new billings within months. Watch the free RAG listener training to see how: https://hubs.ly/Q03lBpYC0

July 28, 20261 hr 16 min

Season 9 | Ep39 Scott Lechley: How a Solo Founder Went 100% Retained and Had His Best Year Yet

Scott Lechley started Lechley Associates with £10,000, a new baby at home, and six months of recruitment experience. Twenty four years later he is still the only person in the business, and he is on track for the best year he has ever had. Lechley Associates places the people who run the UK's biggest construction and infrastructure programmes. Framework directors, board level hires, the leaders behind HS2 scale rail and new hospital builds. Clients like Laing O'Rourke, Balfour Beatty and Hochtief. One retained search at a time. Six months into this year Scott had already cleared £300,000, with another £150,000 confirmed. He did it by doing something most recruiters never attempt: going fully retained, staying completely solo, and building an AI stack that means he now wakes up to a BD intelligence report, an automated outreach system, and a dashboard of ranked opportunities before most people have made their first coffee. He also did something almost no recruiter would admit to. This year he deliberately lost £40,000 in fees by talking a client out of a hire he did not believe in, and it does not cost him a minute of sleep. On this episode of The RAG Podcast, Scott breaks down exactly how the stack works, why 24 years of saying no to the wrong things is the real engine behind the numbers, and what a solo business actually makes possible when you stop trying to grow headcount. Scott is 54, having the best year of his career, and building a community for the next generation of construction professionals on the side. He is not slowing down. If you have ever wondered whether the pressure to build a team, hire more people and grow headcount is actually the only way, this episode is your answer. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Episode Sponsor: Atlas Admin is a massive waste of time. That's why there's Atlas, a CRM that actually understands context. Atlas captures everything you say, hear, read and write. Every interview, every client call, every LinkedIn message, email and WhatsApp, automatically. Not because you typed it up, but because Atlas was listening. Then it goes one step further and tells you the next action to take. So when you need to fill a role, People Search ranks your best candidates and tells you why, no digging required. That same memory turns your BD into a shortlist of exactly who to chase and why, so you win more clients. And when you want to see your pipeline, you just speak to your dashboards and Atlas builds the view for you in real time, tracking only what you care about. Whether you place permanent or contract, Atlas covers both. Its Contract Suite means you never chase a timesheet again, with live margin visibility across every placement. And with its new MCP and API, Atlas plugs straight into your LLMs and the rest of your stack, so the low-value admin that keeps you from billing gets done for you. This is not theory. Atlas customers are seeing 50% higher candidate response rates, a 35% increase in new clients won, 15+ hours saved every week, and monthly billings jumping by 85%. Some agencies are hitting 130% of their annual revenue target after building their business around Atlas. So if you're thinking you need to bolt AI onto your CRM, don't bother. Take a look at Atlas instead. Head to https://recruitwithatlas.com/therag/ to find out more. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Episode Sponsor: Hoxo Every recruitment founder is investing in LinkedIn, but AI has turned templated posts and outreach into a commodity. When everyone sounds the same, the market stops listening. The recruiters winning now are the ones the market trusts. At Hoxo we help recruitment founders become the most influential name in their niche, using AI to multiply output while trust stays the product. Our clients turn their existing networks into £100K to £300K in new billings within months. Watch the free RAG listener training to see how: https://hubs.ly/Q03lBpYC0

July 21, 20261 hr 9 min

Season 9 | Ep38 Louise Archer: From Zero Retained Revenue to £12M and 1,500 Recruiters Trained

Louise Archer spent more than twenty years as a contingent recruiter. She believed retained was probably smoke and mirrors, something dressed up to justify a bigger fee, and definitely not a pool she was ever going to swim in. Then her employer handed her a project called Most Money Soonest, with a brief to make the permanent division's revenue predictable enough to survive a major acquisition. She and one colleague started visiting clients, asking better questions, and converting them to retained one conversation at a time. The division went from five million pounds in annual revenue to twelve million, all of it retained, from a standing start of zero retained revenue. Then Louise walked away and set out to teach the rest of the industry how to do the same. Since founding Retrained Search in 2018, she has trained more than fifteen hundred recruiters across thirty-one countries. In December 2024 she completed a management buyout with her three directors, and the target now is three point four million pounds in revenue by the close of 2027. On this episode of The RAG Podcast, Louise breaks down how the retained conversation actually works, why exclusivity is the worst model of all, and why the industry is now splitting in two. Louise Archer did not just theorise about retained search. She built the proof of concept inside someone else's business, walked away, and has spent the last eight years showing thousands of recruiters around the world how to do the same. The numbers do not lie. The contingent model is under pressure, the industry is splitting into trusted advisors and commodity suppliers, and the window to move is still open. If you have ever looked at your fill rate and thought something feels wrong, this episode has the blueprint. ----------------------------------------------------------- Episode Sponsor: Atlas Admin is a massive waste of time. That's why there's Atlas, a CRM that actually understands context. Atlas captures everything you say, hear, read and write. Every interview, every client call, every LinkedIn message, email and WhatsApp, automatically. Not because you typed it up, but because Atlas was listening. Then it goes one step further and tells you the next action to take. So when you need to fill a role, People Search ranks your best candidates and tells you why, no digging required. That same memory turns your BD into a shortlist of exactly who to chase and why, so you win more clients. And when you want to see your pipeline, you just speak to your dashboards and Atlas builds the view for you in real time, tracking only what you care about. Whether you place permanent or contract, Atlas covers both. Its Contract Suite means you never chase a timesheet again, with live margin visibility across every placement. And with its new MCP and API, Atlas plugs straight into your LLMs and the rest of your stack, so the low-value admin that keeps you from billing gets done for you. This is not theory. Atlas customers are seeing 50% higher candidate response rates, a 35% increase in new clients won, 15+ hours saved every week, and monthly billings jumping by 85%. Some agencies are hitting 130% of their annual revenue target after building their business around Atlas. So if you're thinking you need to bolt AI onto your CRM, don't bother. Take a look at Atlas instead. Head to https://recruitwithatlas.com/therag/ to find out more. ----------------------------------------------------------- Episode Sponsor: Hoxo Every recruitment founder is investing in LinkedIn, but AI has turned templated posts and outreach into a commodity. When everyone sounds the same, the market stops listening. The recruiters winning now are the ones the market trusts. At Hoxo we help recruitment founders become the most influential name in their niche, using AI to multiply output while trust stays the product. Our clients turn their existing networks into £100K to £300K in new billings within months. Watch the free RAG listener training to see how: https://hubs.ly/Q03lBpYC0

July 14, 20261 hr 21 min

Season 9 | Ep37 Tom Kelly: £10M NFI in Space Recruitment With 35 People

In 2022, EVONA had eighty staff, a Manchester office, a six-hundred-thousand-pound monthly cost base, and had just spent three hundred thousand pounds flying the whole company to Monaco. Tom Kelly calls it the moment four first-time founders lost perspective. What followed was one of the more honest rebuilds you will hear in recruitment. Contract team gone. Marketing team gone. Management team restructured. Tom moved to the US, took the wheel as sole decision-maker, and rebuilt around two metrics: twenty-five interviews per person per rolling four weeks, and a thirty-day close on every job. Three years on, EVONA is projecting ten million pounds net fee income this year. Three and a half million EBITDA. Thirty-five people. Two inbound client enquiries arrive every single day. Tom Kelly has been in the space sector since 2018. He has never taken outside investment. And last month was the largest in the company's history. On this episode of The RAG Podcast, Tom breaks down exactly how they got there. EVONA is now the dominant name in space sector recruitment. Ninety-five percent US clients. No cold outreach. No single client above nine percent of revenue. A thirty-two day average time to fill on roles that take competitors sixty. Tom Kelly is thirty-nine. He does not have a rigid three-year exit plan, but he does think there is a short window, and he does believe AGI changes the calculus for anyone thinking about an acquisition in this space. What he is building now is the version of the business that is worth something, the lean, high-output, brand-trusted version that took cutting fifty people to find. If you have ever wondered what it actually looks like to rebuild a recruitment business properly after it nearly breaks, this episode has the blueprint. Episode Sponsor: Atlas Admin is a massive waste of time. That's why there's Atlas, the AI-first recruitment platform built for modern agencies. It doesn't only track CVs and calls. It remembers everything. Every email, every interview, every conversation. Instantly searchable, always available. And now, it's entering a whole new era. With Atlas 2.0, you can ask anything and it delivers. With Magic Search, you speak and it listens. It finds the right candidates using real conversations, not simply look for keywords. Atlas 2.0 also makes business development easier than ever. With Opportunities, you can track, manage and grow client relationships, powered by generative AI and built right into your workflow. Need insights? Custom dashboards give you total visibility over your pipeline. And that's not theory. Atlas customers have reported up to 41% EBITDA growth and an 85% increase in monthly billings after adopting the platform. No admin. No silos. No lost info. Nothing but faster shortlists, better hires and more time to focus on what actually drives revenue. Atlas is your personal AI partner for modern recruiting. Don't miss the future of recruitment. Get started with Atlas today and unlock your exclusive RAG listener offer at https://recruitwithatlas.com/therag/ Episode Sponsor: Hoxo Every recruitment founder is investing in LinkedIn, but AI has turned templated posts and outreach into a commodity. When everyone sounds the same, the market stops listening. The recruiters winning now are the ones the market trusts. At Hoxo we help recruitment founders become the most influential name in their niche, using AI to multiply output while trust stays the product. Our clients turn their existing networks into £100K to £300K in new billings within months. Watch the free RAG listener training to see how: https://hubs.ly/Q03lBpYC0