How To Become A Talent Engineer (Recruiting's New AI Role)

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 Zap

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 3

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 t

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 he

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 w

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