From Chaos to Control: Implementing EOS to Scale Your Recruiting Firm

Are you a recruiting firm owner feeling like your business is held together by duct tape and long nights? You’re not alone. In the latest Elite Recruiter Podcast episode, host Benjamin Mena sits down with EOS expert Derek Pittak to reveal how the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) can tame the chaos and build a business that runs on systems, not heroic efforts. “Recruiting is absolute chaos. And how do you control the chaos? By systems,” Benjamin notes. EOS is that system – a practical framework (popularized by the book Traction by Gino Wickman) that replaces ad-hoc hustle with vision, accountability, and consistent execution. Derek Pittak would know: he’s helped implement EOS in over 40 staffing companies, transforming founder-dependent agencies into scalable, well-oiled machines.

In this article, we’ll break down tactical takeaways from Benjamin and Derek’s conversation on EOS. From getting out of “founder firefighting” mode to running disciplined weekly meetings, these insights show how EOS isn’t just theory – it’s a decision-making framework and a cadence for execution. If you’re a solo or boutique recruiting firm owner trying to scale and regain control, read on.

Part 1: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5PKK4P6Ir9KYkij4E0eh0a?si=LWfvKYeDQBiHYOwUMhdbkg 

Many recruiting entrepreneurs start as top billers or salespeople and suddenly find themselves wearing every hat as their business grows. The result? Chaos – everything runs through you, and nothing is truly systematized. Derek Pittak sees it often: “What often happens in smaller firms is that the owner tries to be in every seat… they’re the visionary, the integrator, the head of sales, the head of ops, and sometimes head of finance, and that doesn’t work… something usually slips”. In other words, when you’re the bottleneck, your firm hits a ceiling. The first step to scaling is moving from a heroic, founder-centric operation to a business built on repeatable processes and defined roles.

EOS forces that transition. It gives you a playbook to install structure where there was none. Instead of chaos, you get an “accountability chart” (EOS’s smarter take on an org chart) that outlines who owns what in the business – so every function is covered by the right person. Derek recommends brutally honest reflection on your strengths and weaknesses as a leader. What do you do best, and what should you offload? “As a leader, if you want to grow, you need to find the thing that you do well… Any leader should cling to that,” Derek says. The flip side is letting go of the rest. Maybe you’re a great rainmaker but awful at ops – EOS pushes you to delegate and elevate: “If you really love to sell and that’s what you’re great at, maybe you’re just the head of sales for that organization, even though you’re the owner… you have to find people [for the other roles] – delegate and elevate to your unique ability”. By trusting others and defining process, founders stop being bottlenecks. The business can finally run without everything depending on you.

Importantly, EOS treats process as a core pillar, not an afterthought. Documenting how you do things may not be glamorous, but it’s transformative. “Process is the work that’s not sexy, that’s not fun, but it’s everything that matters in a business,” Benjamin emphasizes. In many recruiting firms, the “process” lives only in the founder’s head or gets informally passed along by shadowing – which doesn’t scale. EOS pushes you to get those core processes out of your head and into simple documentation everyone can follow. (No, it doesn’t mean a 100-page SOP nobody reads – even a one-page checklist or a flowchart is fine as long as you train your team on it and keep it updated.) The goal is consistency: when your team follows the same playbook, service quality becomes predictable, new hires ramp up faster, and you reclaim time and sanity. In short, structure beats chaos – and EOS provides the structure.

Vision, Alignment, and Accountability

Chaos often reigns when there’s no clear vision or alignment in the team. EOS tackles this head on by getting leadership to define and communicate a clear vision for the company. Instead of a 50-page business plan gathering dust, EOS uses a simple two-page Vision/Traction Organizer (V/TO) to answer 8 essential questions about your business’s identity and direction. These include your core values, core focus, long-term target, marketing strategy, 3-year picture, 1-year plan, quarterly Rocks, and immediate issues. The power isn’t just in writing these down – it’s in sharing them consistently so everyone is on the same page. In the podcast, Benjamin notes that you can’t just roll out your vision once and assume it stuck. You’ve got to say something seven times for people to hear it and absorb it. EOS operationalizes this by having leaders review the vision with the team every quarter and with every new hire. The result? Every recruiter, salesperson, and coordinator knows the “north star” (where the company is headed) and the plan to get there. It’s no longer “founder knows the vision and everyone else is winging it” – EOS makes sure everyone is rowing in the same direction.

Hand-in-hand with vision comes accountability. EOS implements the mantra “right people, right seats” – meaning you not only need great people, but each person must have a clearly defined role where they can excel. The Accountability Chart is the tool that replaces the fuzzy, overlapping responsibilities of a small firm with crystal clear ownership. You map out all the key functions (Sales, Recruiting/Delivery, Operations, Finance, etc.) and who is accountable for each. This often exposes gaps or redundancies immediately. In Derek’s experience as an EOS Implementer, sometimes just doing the accountability chart leads leadership teams to an uncomfortable realization: they might have the wrong people in roles, or even too many people wearing overlapping hats. “When the pain is bad enough… you get help,” Derek says about confronting tough people decisions. EOS provides a framework (like the People Analyzer and GWC – Get it, Want it, Capacity to do it) to evaluate if someone fits their seat. It’s not easy – conversations about long-time friends or family in the business might arise – but tackling these people issues is crucial. As Derek puts it, “you can’t delegate and elevate, you can’t grow… without fixing your people issues. It’s the easiest thing to spot and the hardest thing to solve”.

The payoff for pushing through? A team that’s truly aligned. EOS instills transparency and forces issues into the light. Instead of polite avoidance or confusion, leadership meetings turn into productive problem-solving sessions. Everyone knows who’s accountable for what, so issues don’t linger in a gray area. One agency owner told Benjamin that before EOS, meetings were aimless and nothing got solved; after EOS, “no more random acts of recruiting” – every leader understands the core goals and is accountable week by week. When you have the right people in the right seats and a shared vision, the culture shifts from chaos to ownership.

90-Day “Rocks” and Weekly Level 10 Meetings

EOS brings a potent antidote to the short attention span nature of running a business: the 90-day world. In fast-paced recruiting, it’s easy to chase new ideas constantly or get pulled off course by daily firefighting. EOS implements a discipline of 90-Day Rocks – essentially the top 3-7 priorities that the company must achieve in the next quarter. Why 90 days? “It’s because most people can’t focus for longer than 90 days. The wheels start coming off,” Benjamin explains. A year-long goal can feel abstract and gets overtaken by events, but a 3-month target is close enough to drive urgency while long enough to make real progress. By breaking big goals into bite-sized quarterly Rocks, EOS helps you create focus amid the chaos. As Benjamin says, stuff happens – the market shifts, a big client issue erupts, etc. – but with Rocks, you at least agree, “These are our must-do priorities this quarter,” and you reset new Rocks every 90 days based on the latest reality. For a recruiting firm, a Rock might be “Implement a new ATS by Q2” or “Land 5 new clients in the healthcare niche”. Whatever it is, it’s written down, owned by someone, and given a due date. This prevents the shiny-object syndrome and ensures the team is zeroed in on what moves the needle right now.

Complementing the 90-day planning is EOS’s famous Level 10 Meeting rhythm. A Level 10 (L10) meeting is a high-impact weekly meeting for your leadership team (and even down to each department) that runs on a tight agenda: reviewing the Scorecard metrics, checking progress on Rocks, tackling the top issues of the week, and rating the meeting at the end (striving for a “10” – hence the name). Derek jokes that every business has issues, “I dealt with six this morning already,” he laughs – the key is having a system to address them regularly. The L10 meeting is that system. Each week, your team brings up issues and uses a simple process called IDS (Identify–Discuss–Solve) to get to the root cause and define a solution. Crucially, EOS then drives those solutions into actionable to-dos: short-term tasks due by next week’s meeting. Benjamin illustrates this with an example: if the team decides “our ATS isn’t cutting it” is a major issue, the first step might be research new ATS options – which becomes a to-do assigned to someone, due next week. Bigger issues may get parked on a “long-term issues list” to be resolved in a quarterly planning session if they’re too complex for a quick fix. But nothing is allowed to just sit in limbo indefinitely. This weekly cadence creates an execution rhythm: every 7 days, you’re checking in on key metrics and priorities, and clearing out obstacles through frank discussion. It’s amazing how much dysfunction gets cleaned up when a team commits to meeting and solving problems every single week. And remember those to-dos? EOS holds each owner’s feet to the fire – by next meeting, you’ll have to report it “Done” or “Not done.” This kind of built-in accountability can be a game-changer for recruiters who used to chase issues reactively and never close the loop. As one EOS follower put it, meetings went from boring status updates to “the most valuable hour of the week” because we actually solve things now.

Scorecards and Measurables: Tracking What Matters

Another tactical EOS tool that Benjamin and Derek highlight is the Scorecard. If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it – and in a recruiting firm, it’s easy to drown in data (calls, emails, submissions, interviews, placements, revenue, etc.) without a clear view of health. EOS simplifies this by having you identify a handful of weekly metrics that tell the story of your business. “What’s the handful – truly a handful – of numbers that indicate if your recruiting company is working well?” Derek challenges. EOS typically suggests 5 to 15 metrics on a Scorecard (and less is more; Derek quips that in many cases you can run a staffing firm on under 10 measurables). For example, a boutique firm’s Scorecard might include weekly new job orders, candidate submissions, client interviews scheduled, placements, and cash collected. These metrics are reviewed in that weekly L10 meeting. If a number goes red (below target), it gets flagged and likely dropped down to the Issues list for IDS problem-solving. Over time, this creates a culture of managing by metrics, not gut feel. Even better, the Scorecard pushes authority downwards: each metric is owned by someone on the team, not just by the founder. It’s clear whose KPI is whose, which reinforces accountability. Derek admits his own firm’s scorecard grew longer than ideal, but he maintains, “there are only a handful of things that I actually want to issue-solve when they’re red. Other things are just pinpoints”. In other words, focus on the vital signs. The clarity a Scorecard provides is liberating – instead of reacting to anecdotes or one loud client, you’re looking at objective numbers every week and making decisions accordingly. It brings predictability to an unpredictable business: you can spot a slump in activity before it hits your revenue, or see a trend and address it early.

Tied to those metrics are the quarterly Rocks mentioned earlier. If Scorecard metrics are your steady heartbeat, Rocks are the big leaps forward. Together they create a balance of short-term visibility and long-term progress. In the episode, Benjamin and Derek discuss how Rocks and Scorecard work in tandem. For instance, say your 90-day Rock is to implement a new ATS system. You’d break it down into milestones and to-dos (e.g. research vendors, demo top 3, decide, migrate data) and perhaps even have a metric on the Scorecard like “% of data migrated” to track progress. By quarter’s end, if you executed, that Rock is complete – a major improvement achieved while still keeping the business running. Then you set new Rocks for the next 90 days. This cycle keeps the team laser-focused on what matters now, without losing sight of the long-term vision. It’s a cure for the whiplash of daily chaos. Recruiters used to chasing whatever is on fire today start to see the power of planning ahead. EOS turns ambition into actionable chunks. Instead of burnout from trying to do everything everywhere, you and your team work within a sane, sustainable cadence.

Letting Go and Leveling Up

Perhaps the most profound shift EOS brings for a founder is the mindset change: you must let go to grow. Derek and Benjamin drive this point home repeatedly. Entrepreneurs pride themselves on hard work and grit, but at a certain stage, clinging to every task becomes a liability. “There comes a time where [the] owner-operator elevates or they don’t, and that’s usually what breaks it,” Derek says bluntly. EOS provides the structure to elevate – to step back from the minutiae and empower your team. By having a vision you trust, people you trust in each seat, and numbers you trust to illuminate what’s happening, you as the founder can finally breathe. The business no longer feels like a volatile rollercoaster tied to your every move. This is how EOS serves as a cure for burnout. When Derek implemented EOS at his own firm and others, a common outcome was the founder rediscovering their passion. Instead of drowning in admin and constant “people issues,” you get to focus on what you love (maybe building client relationships or strategy) while the system handles the routine. As Derek puts it, find your wheelhouse and stay in that lane – let EOS handle the rest.

Moreover, EOS brings predictability to the business. For recruiting firm owners used to sleepless nights worrying about what might blow up next, this is huge. With weekly meetings and scorecards, there are no more black boxes – you have a pulse on placements, pipeline, and problems in real-time. Quarterly planning means surprises are minimized; you’ve thought about the upcoming challenges proactively. Of course, no system can prevent all surprises (this is recruiting after all!), but when issues arise, you have a framework to make decisions and resolve them rather than flying by the seat of your pants. EOS becomes the operating rhythm of the company. As Benjamin Mena emphasizes, it’s not abstract management speak – it’s a collection of real-world practices that force clarity and action. EOS isn’t just theory; it’s built for execution. Or as one key takeaway from the episode states: Structure beats chaos — EOS gives leaders a repeatable playbook. Implementing it requires work and commitment, yes, but the reward is a recruiting business that is both entrepreneurial and well-run. You get to have growth without losing your sanity.

Ready to break free from the chaos? The conversation between Benjamin and Derek is a masterclass in applying EOS to recruiting firms. They cover even more, from handling long-time employees who don’t fit the vision, to Derek’s story of firing a $5 million client and what it taught him about leadership. If you found these insights useful, make sure to take the next step below.

Next Steps:

• 🎧 Listen to the full podcast episode: “How to Build a 7-Figure Recruiting Firm That Runs Without You – Inside the EOS System” on The Elite Recruiter Podcast (Benjamin Mena with guest Derek Pittak). Listen here for the complete interview and even more tactical EOS tips.

• 🎟️ Register for the Recruiter Sales & BD Summit: Level up your skills and network with top producers! Don’t miss the upcoming Recruiter Sales & Business Development Summit – a free virtual event packed with expert sessions (Benjamin mentions they’ve had over 8,000 recruiters attend past summits). Reserve your spot now. - https://bd-sales-recruiter-2026.heysummit.com/

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Apple Podcast Part 1: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-build-a-7-figure-recruiting-firm-that-runs/id1547241660?i=1000736089308