How To Build A $1.3 Million AI Recruiting Desk

Benjamin Mena [00:00:00]:
So I'm actually pulling this session out of the elite recruiter community, the library

Benjamin Mena [00:00:06]:
in the community on the left hand side for everybody that's part of it. So we have every single summit as

Benjamin Mena [00:00:12]:
part of the community membership.

Benjamin Mena [00:00:15]:
But I want to pull this one

Benjamin Mena [00:00:16]:
out because the team at Penn is actually going to be kicking off the AI recruiting summit that's going to be starting on July 13th. They are doing the introduction, the State of the Union on what's happening. But the reason why I want to share this is because I truly believe we need to keep the human in the relationships, we need to keep the humanity in recruiting, but also we can power a lot of the things that we're doing. So that way we can have the time to focus on the conversations and focus on the candidates and focus on the clients. So I'm sharing this from the library. This is a recruiter who has billed over a million dollars this year. He's kind of like walking through some of the things that he's done. You might have heard his podcast interview with me.

Benjamin Mena [00:01:02]:
This is kind of like a bit of a secondary, but I want to make this as a little bit of an introduction for everybody that hasn't been to one of my summits, who hasn't been to the AI Summit that we hosted last year. You're going to see stuff like this, but you're also going to see walkthroughs, you're going to see the tech, you're going to see the tools, you're going to see the things that are capable and possible for you as a recruiter. So that's my goal, is for everybody to kind of walk away from July 13 through July 20 as a chance for them to grow, a chance for them to learn, a chance for them to see what's possible. Because the future is changing fast. I truly, truly believe that 2026 is your year. So make sure you get registered. Remember all my summits, the live sessions are free, so you can pop in, pop out, whenever you want, depending on how your schedule goes. If you want a copy of the replays, there's a VIP option.

Benjamin Mena [00:01:59]:
Or you can join the elite recruiter community. And the replays for every single summit pass and forward will always be in there. But I want to share this with you guys. I am excited to see because I know what is possible for you as a recruiter. So I want to see you at the summit. Make sure you get registered. 2026 can be the year that you draw the line of the sand. This is the year that you go all in.

Benjamin Mena [00:02:21]:
And you know the way that this kicking off in Q3 in the community, the Elite Recruiter community, we're doing a 100k quarter challenge or a 250k quarter challenge. So even if you're not part of the community, write down your goal, write down what you think is possible, write down what you're going to go all in. Make this your year and I'll see you at the Summit. Enjoy this session.

Jacob Price [00:02:44]:
Welcome to the Elite Recruiter Podcast with

Nick Poloni [00:02:47]:
your host Benjamin Mena where we focus

Jacob Price [00:02:50]:
on what it takes to win in the recruiting game. We cover it all from sales, marketing,

Nick Poloni [00:02:56]:
mindset, money, leadership and placements.

Benjamin Mena [00:03:02]:
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Benjamin Mena [00:03:33]:
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Benjamin Mena [00:04:10]:
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Jacob Price [00:04:19]:
way of introduction, my name is Jake. I'm the Head of customer success@pin.com it's an AI sourcing platform. We've been on the AI summit. Myself and Connor are our Head of Revenue. We've been working with Ben a lot and we've been on a lot of these and I think that we have an audience of folks who are probably tired of hearing us talk about pins. So I thought what would be fun would be to bring Nick on here. Nick Pelloni. He is an unbelievable recruiter but also does some stuff that kind of blows my mind.

Jacob Price [00:04:49]:
So just a quick background. I met Nick because I actually met his mom who is a big biller in her own right at a conference now, a year and a half ago, the Pinnacle Conference is my favorite conference to go to. And I talked to her about pin. She's like, not for me, but my son is going to love this. And I showed it to Nick and he. We immediately started texting back and forth, became friends pretty quickly. And he starts texting me about all this other stuff that he's doing with the platform. He is doing stuff that I hadn't thought about.

Jacob Price [00:05:20]:
And I am supposed to be the person who is teaching everybody how to use it. And so I thought it would be awesome for this community to hear just sort of Nick's story. One, he's been crushing this quarter, but also his story about how he got into AI, how, like, how he got into recruiting, and how he's using AI in a way that I think very few people are. So I think this is like a really fun intro to all of you. Anybody who hasn't heard of Nick, I think you're going to be hearing about him a lot. Nick, anything else that I missed in that intro?

Nick Poloni [00:05:50]:
I don't think so. No. Thanks for the intro, man. And nice to. Nice to virtually meet everyone. Like Jake said, I'm Nick. My focus recruitment wise, is in the pharmaceutical biotech space. And probably like most.

Nick Poloni [00:06:03]:
What was it post Covid. Somewhere in there, the blur, like, it sucked. The market was brutal. I didn't have, like, I don't. I'm not all shiny. I have had bad years. And at some point in time between end of COVID rise of AI and like, everything going on, I'm sitting there going like, okay, this is a new. Like, Ben was just talking about, new quarter, new fresh start.

Nick Poloni [00:06:26]:
For me, it was like, all right, this is new. This is fresh. Figure it out. Do something bigger and better. And I'm. I'm like, I'm competitive. I'm. I'm probably one of the most competitive people out there.

Nick Poloni [00:06:38]:
And like, Kobe is my idol of competition, the Mamba mentality. And I was just like, all right, I had a good year. It could be better. And that was. That was last year. It's like I did 1.3 million. And I was like, okay, that's great. I finally passed a million for the first time.

Nick Poloni [00:06:55]:
And that was only, what, probably about a half year with Pen. And I was like, all right, that's solid, but we could do better. 1.3 is great. Let's do more. And so I set my goal for this year at 1.5 which was a stretch, but I was like, I did it with pin. Why can't I do it again? And I started off this year doing, doing really well. I was pretty excited and I honestly, I was just chugging away at the day, making the calls, texting, doing what we do as recruiters. And then one day I looked at, I was just like, let's go.

Nick Poloni [00:07:31]:
I think I'm doing pretty well. Like, let's go see what we're at for the billings. And it was like seven something. And I'm like, holy cow. Okay, this is, I'm doing it right. And I think what my big thing is is we have AI. We can utilize AI if it's done right. But I do think a lot of people are trying to just blanket it over everything and just have it run our lives.

Nick Poloni [00:07:53]:
And I think that's bad. I think that's where it's not a good thing because the candidate experience is going to deteriorate and candidates, they know that. And so from my standpoint, I look at how do we, as a small growing agency, how do I essentially take everything from behind the scenes, from an operational standpoint? And that's where we can be incredibly efficient doing the things we don't want to do, sourcing with pin. Perfect example. And I think one of the pieces that Jake and I, or I was telling Jake a while ago is like, I make AI make the prompts in PIN for me. So I have AI write the prompt for AI and essentially I take a combination of. I use a program that essentially records, it's called Cluly, that records all of the hiring manager intake calls and hey, what do you want? What's been the struggles Remote versus not like what, what's. What do you want? Hiring manager.

Nick Poloni [00:08:49]:
And you take all those notes, you combine that with the job description and then you combine that with the role and just industry knowledge. And I throw all that into. I'm a huge fan of claude and I throw all that into Claude and say, build my prompts in pin. And it's usually pretty damn accurate. And I have found PIN to be unreal. I think that's component one is the actual sourcing of it. And then the other component is the outbound Outreach is it's gotta be short, it's gotta be sweet, but it's gotta be really, really specific. And that's the only downfall the PIN is candidates are like, is this real?

Jacob Price [00:09:26]:
Are you real?

Nick Poloni [00:09:26]:
Like, how did you take the time to do all the research on my background and when I started to get those. Yes, Ryan, pin.com is the platform. When I started to get those, I was like, okay, if I'm getting people that are responding just to say, hey, I want you in my network, I'm not interested, but thanks for the outbound outreach. Then I was like, all right, don't change anything. It's working pretty well. And that's just on email. And then when I can add in LinkedIn into it, then that's, that's a whole nother can of worms. But LinkedIn limits me on how many outbound messages we can put out there with the inmails.

Nick Poloni [00:09:58]:
And so I think at one point I had a response rate between LinkedIn and email of like 70% on over a thousand different candidates for a bunch of different roles we were working on. And LinkedIn, as much as I get frustrated with it, it's just another channel of communication. And for me, as many channels as we can have, that's your secret sauce.

Jacob Price [00:10:19]:
So, yeah, man. All right, so I, I, so you breezed past the, like, who are you? And, you know, what space are you recruited? But I just, like, that was great. I just wanted to let you cook there for a little bit.

Nick Poloni [00:10:29]:
Yeah.

Jacob Price [00:10:29]:
But I think I want to let, I do want to take us back a little bit. So I think, like, where I want to start start is like, you said last year you broke a million for the first time, which is awesome. You go back, like, you know, when you first got into this, you said coming out of the pandemic maybe 18 months ago, 24 months ago, before you, like, completely, like, overhauled your tech stack with AI stuff, what did it look like? Like, what did you start out with? Who.

Nick Poloni [00:10:55]:
When I first got into recruiting, we had pcr, which was, hey, got us somewhere is better than an Excel spread. Spreadsheet, phones, emails. I'm pretty sure that was it. I tried to get like, Google Docs as like a side quest of, like, I gotta have something that I want to add to my tech stack of recruiting. But it was like I was junior. I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I just knew that there had to have been something better because it was pretty basic. But I also didn't know the concept of AI.

Nick Poloni [00:11:25]:
Like, it just, it wasn't in my brain of, like, what's possible? And so it was that it was LinkedIn recruiter, and it was a ton of manual work of just click, click, click. Every message I want to send out, click. I don't even think at the time when I started looking back on It. I don't even think we had Outbound like an email campaign. I think it was all. We'd all did it by hand. I think at that era, which was in 2000, it was about nine years ago. that era it was.

Nick Poloni [00:11:53]:
I mean, people weren't bombarded quite as much, maybe with like advertisements and shopping emails. But like from a recruiter standpoint, I don't think as people were bombarded as much. So it was like when you got an email in their inbox, you were one of a few, but not as many as there are now. But that was my tech stack coming out, was PC recruiter and email and LinkedIn recruiter and Outlook. I didn't even have a special. I didn't even have Superhuman for.

Jacob Price [00:12:18]:
Yeah, so like Superhuman, I think is another thing that's like, I was like one of the best kept secrets in just like tech. So yeah, like, they get a free plug for me. They always get a free plug. If you haven't looked at Superhuman, it's amazing. It's just like turning your keyboard shortcuts into navigating your inbox. Like never using your mouse to touch your inbox just makes you faster. So like free plug for them. They did not ask us to do that.

Jacob Price [00:12:43]:
I just love that. I just love their platform. But okay, so you start out basically PCR and like your email and just like a lot of elbow grease. Like when, when were you like, okay, enough, there has to be a better way. And how did you start, like, thinking about that? I can't, I can't imagine that, like, you got a text from me and then you were like, okay, cool, AI done. There has to have been some other stuff.

Nick Poloni [00:13:07]:
It was honestly, I was just like, in this, in this mindset of like, all right, understand recruitment and kind of some ins and outs. But then the other variable I had was a dynamic that it's. People from the outside would most likely assume parents are in the industry. You were handed the business. And in those scenarios that we all hear of, that either goes really bad or really bad, really great or really bad. For a lot of times I hear of like stories in any business that doesn't go well. So my uphill battle, I love my parents, but was like, proving them. I always had, like, I got to prove them, I got to prove them.

Nick Poloni [00:13:43]:
And for forever in life, you always listen to the parent and the parent's always the one telling you what to do. So in the scenario here, it was like, all right, I'm fairly junior to recruiting at the time. They'd been in the space for recruiting and pharma. So they were in pharma then recruiting in pharma. So it was like they had been in the pharma space for like 30 years and here I am a couple of years in saying, hey, this is how we should do things. And it was like, how do I tell them otherwise? And it's like, I obviously know the tech side of things, but do I know the recruiting and the pharma side of things? At the time I thought I did, but there's always more and more and more to learn. So I was, I was learning more and more and more, but it was like, we gotta do something different from a tech stack standpoint. And the first thing was the ats, because that to me is the central hub where the most stuff lies, whether it's emails, whether it's.

Nick Poloni [00:14:38]:
And then we. And for me it was like, what is a good all in one? And at the time, like there weren't that many options. And at the time it was loxo. And I was like, all right, good. All like from what I see out there, there's maybe three or four, like solid ones at the top and they were growing one that I was like, okay, this is better than pcr. But the other big thing was I did like, I knew moving databases was huge. It was the training of the people. We had a larger size office at the time.

Nick Poloni [00:15:08]:
It was the integrate, like actually moving the data over. It was just like so many variables that I never thought about going into it. But I was like, I'll look back in three or four years and go, that was a good idea. But the six month window of doing it is going to suck. And so it was just like convincing my dad at the time, like, we need a better option because they were just used to like, oh, one update on PCR every three years is good enough. And I was like, okay, like we need contact finders now. We need, like, we need to be able to log all the emails. And then as I started to get more and more and more into like tech, I'm like, all right, all of those emails that have been logged over time will serve a purpose at some point.

Nick Poloni [00:15:50]:
You know, lo and behold, AI is now going to be able to go read all of those emails and kind of understand tones and voices of candidates and capture all of that data. Yeah. Long story short is it was convincing parents we should do something different when they've always told me and life is like, this is how to live. And it was Like, I was in my early 20s, too, so I. I was figuring life out. Like, everybody is at that point.

Jacob Price [00:16:16]:
Yeah. And, you know, and that. And I think that kind of like, that curiosity about, like, there has to be a better way, like, what's out there is something that I, like, really admire about the way that you approach all this stuff. Right. And that's like, sort of what got me on to here is like, you were like, okay, I have pin into Loxo. And then you told me about, you know, how you were taking your clulee notes and putting them in a Claude and then throwing that in a pin. And I'm like, okay, that's cool. And then I started doing it, and now I'm teaching people how to do that.

Jacob Price [00:16:47]:
So I'm literally, like, stealing some of your tricks and like, using it in my onboarding calls. But what else is there in your tech stack? There has to be some. Some other secret stuff, some other stuff that you've been evaluating, like, where's your head at in terms of tech?

Nick Poloni [00:17:01]:
So my big thing with tech is within claude, and I do a lot of, like, custom cloud bots. So I have a cloud bot that is specific to, like, like Cascadia Search Group. So I call it csg. This kind of wild. I just looked at this and realized it's called csg. Csg.

Jacob Price [00:17:18]:
GPT.

Nick Poloni [00:17:19]:
Like wearing Claude. Come on, what are you doing the most? That's whatever. But that's my big one for, like, recruitment is it understands I don't have to go and explain to it what I do. And it's very specific. And I also had Claude, like, I basically just got on my phone and I was like, here's what I want this to do. And I just start talking and I just, just ramble. You know, I work in pharma biotech. On the commercial side.

Nick Poloni [00:17:46]:
Companies usually want this, they usually want that. And then I. And then I said, write a prompt for. For a. What do you call them? A skill, and boom, it's in there. And then the other thing I do too is I've gotten down the Rabbit holes on GitHub of computer engineers or nerds that have built out entire. I don't know what you call them. I guess they are skills too.

Nick Poloni [00:18:09]:
And one of them is a humanizer. So it writes emails or it writes stuff or it talks like a human does. So I'm huge on taking the foundation of Claude and making it like a hundred times smarter with what I do and what I need it to do. And then I Have another one for like on the side, like travel hacker. Like, it knows my credit cards, it knows. And if I'm like, hey, I want to go to Las Vegas, then it'll tell me, book the trip through the Chase portal. Even though you're paying 20 bucks more a month or a night, you're also getting eight times the amount of points. So it's like my brain is just like wired like that from like an efficiency standpoint.

Nick Poloni [00:18:47]:
And then I have one for branding. Like I just got into. It was like, I don't. I mean our branding Cascadia Search Group wasn't bad, but it was like six out of 10. And I'm like, I want to make it better. So for people watching now, like I went and built our entire website, cascadia searchgroup.com In Cloud, hard coded. It's not hosted through anything. I don't have Squarespace or wix or whatever.

Nick Poloni [00:19:11]:
Like the pre built templates are. And it literally is. I just was like talking to it. I don't like this, do this, do that. And then I kind of started to go, ooh, I really like the colors that it used and the font that it used. Boom, that's our branding. So like, and then it made pitch decks, slide decks, everything. So it's like kind of like the ATS is the hub of candidates.

Nick Poloni [00:19:30]:
Claude is my hub of just like work stuff. And it knows everything about me, which is probably scary in itself, but it is. And then I hooked Claude into Loxo, which is then into Slack. And so every morning I get a report and it's the C, it's the CSG pipeline bot. And it tells me that if a candidate is sitting and sending resume, which is like, hey, I'm looking at the job. We talked to them about the job. If they're sitting in there for more than four days, it'll tell me a rundown of all of those candidates so I can go back to them and say, hey, are you doing, Are you moving forward? And then if they're in submitted to the client for more than 48 hours, I go back to the client and there's an email drafted in my out Outlook right now. So I connect to my outlook to it and it just says, hey, following up on so and so for the ever, the role is are you interested in.

Nick Poloni [00:20:22]:
In a conversation? So it's just like, again, that's for me, it's an efficiency standpoint of like, I'm not automating my initial touch points with these companies and these people. It's like, I'm already working with you and I'm just sending you a one liner of. Are you interested? So it just keeps. And it goes out to everybody. I built it for everybody in the, in the firm. So then it looks up the most recent communication of that candidate and then it says, all right, if it's Nick, then it's going to go in Nick's Slack channel. If it's Tony, it's going to go in Tony's Slack channel. So that's like a beta thing I'm trying out and it's, it works really well.

Nick Poloni [00:20:52]:
I'm like, this is sweet.

Jacob Price [00:20:54]:
Yeah. And so you've built like, you know, you built like Cascadia GPT, you built your travel hacker, you completely rebuilt your website, you built all these automations for your team, like that moves like that analyzes the stuff that you're doing and sends you like kind of your Slack digest. Let's like be clear here. You don't know how to code.

Nick Poloni [00:21:13]:
No, no, absolutely not. I'm like, yeah, I'm like a one out of ten. Like, I, I understand, like there's, this is how bad my level of coding is. I understand there's multiple languages and after that I couldn't even tell you other than like Python and I don't know what the other ones are. I couldn't tell you. That's my, that's it. And then once I'm there, I'm just like, all right, just do it. And I, I understand like where you need to go in Claude to make that happen, but I have absolutely no idea what the hell I mean.

Jacob Price [00:21:42]:
And that, that's sort of what I want to get at because I think that, like, there are a lot of people here that like, they're gonna hear that and be like, oh my God, like you, you built this website and you went to GitHub and you like downloaded all the stuff and like, I could never. And I think like, what I want to get across here, like talking to you is like, you and I are not technical people, but I think if you look at our text threads, like, it's just like us being like, check out what I built in Claude. Yeah, and literally it's like we, like, I think both of us attack this the same way, where it's like, I have this problem, can I talk to my buddy Claude and like have him build this thing for me? And the answer is like, almost always yes. Yeah, it's just like you're just chatting back and forth until you get the thing that you want. And so I like, I would encourage everybody just like listening to this, like it is possible go out there and like just ask, right? Like we, I think both of us are like pretty big Claude stands at this point. But it doesn't have to be Claude. It's just like pick your favorite AI platform and just talk to it and tell it what you want to do. And like, at a certain point you will get some sort of output that you couldn't, that you didn't think was possible without hiring somebody.

Nick Poloni [00:22:48]:
So I could low key be a sales rep for cloud because I get a lot of like, oh, all of my history is in GPT or all my history is in Grok and I don't want to lose all of that. You can go into G. You CLAUDE gives you a copy and paste prompt to put into GPT or Grok and then you can get that output and paste it into Claude and it's basically your history. Which by the way, it is also really crazy to go, whoa, it does know a lot about me. Like, yes, but that was me. I was like pushing it off and then I was like, okay, based on what I'm reading on the Internet of like what it's capable of doing, I gotta just try it. And then I did the copy and paste. Like I put the prompt into.

Nick Poloni [00:23:29]:
GPT was mine at the time, because it is. GPT was great for enterprise. What? Because it does hook up to a lot of different Outlook and third parties. And I was like, I can't do that. And then I did it. I got sucked into the vortex and I was like, holy cow. When I did the website coding, that's where I was just like, what? Cause like, I'm not. I have a visual eye to say like, okay, that looks good.

Nick Poloni [00:23:53]:
Or like, nah, that's not it. And when I saw what it was doing, I was like, holy cow. And then like you said, I have no knowledge of coding, but I would like go onto the website it built and say, hey, this picture looks funky. Or I don't know, like this link isn't working. And I would literally just send it a screenshot and. And then Claude can go in and debug it itself and say, all right, here's where the error is, I fixed it. And so that's where I'm like, when these companies, like, tech companies have bugs, I'm like, dude, you got a frickin AI robot. And I don't even know how to.

Nick Poloni [00:24:26]:
I don't even know how to freaking, like, code. And I'm like, I'm fixing my own bug on my website. I'm like, geez, come on.

Jacob Price [00:24:33]:
So anyway, I will asterisk that with if you try to vibe something incredibly technical.

Nick Poloni [00:24:40]:
Yes.

Jacob Price [00:24:41]:
Steve, our founder, he yells at me when I like get like, I go too deep into it and he's like, no, you built this thing that like is so buggy and we can't use that. Also just, I think I have to put a disclaimer out there. Use MCPS if you're getting into Claude. Do not use APIs, because if you use API keys, you can accidentally like permanently rewrite data that you shouldn't rewrite. So just use MCPS for all those who are getting out there. I got yelled at for that. I made an API key and luckily Steve caught me. He was like, you could rewrite all of our financial data, so don't do that.

Nick Poloni [00:25:17]:
Okay, that's good to know. I know that.

Jacob Price [00:25:19]:
So don't do that. Okay, so I want to change gears a little bit. I think what everybody here has now heard is like, you have all the stuff that you've built out with, with Claude. Your tech stack is like, you know, it's, it sounds like it's Loxo pin Claude and like a lot of these bots that you built with Claude. And I think a lot of the people in this room, like a lot the, the kind of journey from like client to, to job orders to placements is going to look something like cold calls to get your clients or like, you know, word of mouth. You get your clients, you like put the job orders into your ats and then you just sort of like bang out in mails and connection requests on LinkedIn and do a lot more cold calling on the candidate side of things. I imagine that's not what your, your kind of life cycle looks like. So can you take us just like, can you just like pick any placement that you've made in the past like, you know, couple months and just walk us through that life cycle? Yeah, through the lens of the like the tech that you're using.

Nick Poloni [00:26:22]:
Growing up with old school recruiters and getting trained by old school MRI network is going to, this is not going to be good. But my, my bd, I have done zero, not an ounce of BD in the traditional sense. My, like, if you think about the time somebody spends doing bd, call it two hours a day. Just as a block of time. My two hours of a day is spent 100% towards like just how can I be the most helpful resource to people Possible. And it's mostly taking conversations and phone conversations with people in my industry where they're like, hey, I'm looking. And then that slowly has built up over time. This, I don't know, call it snowball effect, where it grows and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.

Nick Poloni [00:27:06]:
And then my name gets passed out more and more and more and more and more. And so it's not. I mean, yes, there is definitely a value there to the people I'm talking to, but it's just me hearing people out. It's like, some people want to vent, some people want to say, hey, this is what's going on. And I'm a straight shooter and I share in. Maybe 5% of people don't like the straight shooter approach, but I'm going to cater to the 95% that do. And the biggest client I have came from me. Just like, helping out at the time was a vice president of marketing.

Nick Poloni [00:27:36]:
So she would report into the C suite, and I wasn't looking at it like, oh, I'm going to get her business and I'm going to help her out. Like, it was just being a good human. And if I do that to everybody, it's bound that some people are gonna say, hey, and be appreciative of it. There's gonna be people that are not appreciative of it, and they don't talk to you ever again. That's okay. I don't have the brain capacity to, like, remember that and take note of it. I'm just like, all right, cool. If I have the philosophy that everybody I talk to is gonna walk away from the conversation going, holy cow, that was a lot of good information.

Nick Poloni [00:28:07]:
Or I didn't even think about that, or a different perspective or somewhere in that general vibe, like, I'm happy. And my biggest client I have had is. Is. I mean, it was the same thing. I was like, helping the VP of marketing just, like, navigate the market. What the hell's going on? Ghosting, just all that stuff. And it was like a combination of, like, her venting, a combination of me trying to give her different ways of getting in to these. It was just like a combination of us, like, brainstorming.

Nick Poloni [00:28:39]:
And at the end of the day, like, nobody's going to know what the exact secret sauce is for that exact scenario, because everybody's different. Like, every company's different. The people you're working with are different. You can say, hey, this is what's most likely. And fast forward, she gets me into her company and they're like a probably a $1.5 million company and I just signed a 20k a month retainer with them and I'm doing their sales build which will be like 100 reps in the next probably, I don't know, two or three months. It's going to be a lot of work. I'm going to be like, holy, I'm probably going to have to hire somebody. But it's.

Nick Poloni [00:29:11]:
I didn't like my business development wasn't me saying, hey, I want your business. I think that's burnt out. I think that's dead. I think it's happened. I don't think society operates in that, that communication style anymore. I think it's like, okay, he has a lot of value and we should have him on our team because he has a lot of value. And the hardest part honestly is like getting them to conceptualize pin is like when I'm with these companies I'm like, I don't. It used to be in pharma recruiting like you only do marketing or you only do sales roles or you only do.

Nick Poloni [00:29:45]:
And it's probably the same I'm imagining in every industry. But I'm like, we don't, we don't. That's not us. Like we do everything and but people think the one stop shop is like they're okay at everything versus really good at marketing or really good at sales. And so getting people to realize like that is not the case of recruiting anymore due to the advancements of technology. They, most people are skeptical and when they, when they finally give us something that's different like that company has tested me, we have a data engineer right now and for with them and luckily they have, we have the relationship where they trust us. But if this was day one they would have been like, absolutely not. But we've done data engineers, we've done marketing market access.

Nick Poloni [00:30:29]:
I did their sales build. I mean it's been like everything and they're just like, okay. Like they've got to the point where they're like, all right, cool, we trust this person. But back to the BD thing. Like I never did an ounce of BD and picked up the phone and called their hr. It was just like I showed them so much value that at the end of the day, if I'm in their shoes and this, this person is not overly salesy and is showing so much value, I look at it and say how do I make, how do I, if I'm in their shoes, make them. It would be a stupid decision not to go with Nick because Nick is not going to just find us candidates and find his candidates quick in screen candidates and vetted candidates, but he's going to provide a wealth of resources. I write all their job descriptions.

Nick Poloni [00:31:10]:
I do, I do all their admin work and it's like, and I hired somebody from the Philippines to do all the admin work because it just, it makes it like it's a no brainer. And so they have become self reliant on us, which is awesome. And I love it because it takes me like what I use my CSD GPT and say, hey, I need to write a job description. Consumer marketing in the dermatology space for this company. Arcuitis is the company. I'll put it out there. It's old school. Recruiter would say you're crazy.

Nick Poloni [00:31:37]:
But it's just like I do everything for them because if I'm in their shoes and like the job is done and their life is easier, they can go have dinner or go have like just sign off early. I'm like, let's keep going. And so I think from the BD standpoint it's just, I look at every other component around it where it's like shows so much value that it's a no brainer. Because I think a lot of people think recruiters are just, they find candidates, it source candidates and at some point as it goes down the cycle of, you know, of, of the candidate process, the recruiters fall off. They fall off and the really good ones will help close the candidate and help with resignation letters, examples and all of that stuff. And then, you know, the good ones continue to trickle further and further out in terms of what their scope is and what they'll do for help. And I'm like, anywhere I can get my feet wet and hands dirty in their process, I'm in. Because I know at the end of the day it's going to get done well and they're going to be happy.

Jacob Price [00:32:35]:
So there's a, so there's a couple threads in there that I want to pull on a little bit. So I think the first thing that you described here is like you've differentiated yourself from all other recruiters, right? And I think this is something that like I hear a lot from my clients is like, how do I get out there and show that I am different? And you know, your kind of value prop that you just brought here is it's not just I'm a recruiter, it's like, I'll help you with your marketing, I'll help you with, you know, help you with, with your job descriptions. I'll help you with all this kind of stuff that you haven't really thought about, you know, and that's a strategy that, that we like to just call like giving something away for free. Right? And so, yeah, you know what? You, the big thing that I tend to recommend to folks is in your outreach, you're not saying, hey, let me help you find your next candidate for this job, where you're saying, here's why I'm an expert in the space and this is why working with me is going to provide value to you. Right? Like, there are all sorts of variations of this, but like, for the people in this room here that like, have not gone out and tried this, like, what would you recommend doing to get that message out there? And what would you, what kind of threads would you pull on that you think that generally across industries are pain points that are not being attacked.

Nick Poloni [00:33:49]:
So what I do with candidates, I've probably given a, like, if I, if I really wanted to get in the weeds and count NPCs as the old school way, like, I probably have given away like at least five or six this year. Hired, I don't care. Like, I don't have the, like, I just want to show so much value. And I know a lot of old school recruiters like, holy cow, like that it's the dumbest thing you could do giving, it's like, yes, but I could turn that off if I want to tomorrow.

Jacob Price [00:34:13]:
And when you, when you say you're giving away NPCs, are you like literally sending over, like, here's the resume, here's their contact info. If you like this person, I'll do

Nick Poloni [00:34:21]:
LinkedIn profiles, I'll do LinkedIn profiles. So I'm not, It's enough where it's like they can see who it is and if they want to go reach out to them on their own, by all means do. But I, but here's the thing with the candidates in their job search, the senior ones is I say if you do the homework for me and you send me the job, the link and who the hiring manager is, chances are I probably have a connection with them or at the very least a second line connection. And I'll go reach out to them because they're not used to seeing that they're used to the recruiter saying, hey, I see you have an opening. I have candidates, everybody has candidates. But if it's like, hey, I see you have an opening, you know, this person would be great and I'll make sure that person is probably a good fit. I'm not going to just send whoever. But most of the time when it's a director level pharma biotech executive, like they're not going to send me jobs that they're not a fit for.

Nick Poloni [00:35:08]:
And then it's just like, here you go. And then that generates a conversation.

Jacob Price [00:35:13]:
So yeah, that was going to be. My next question is like, what's the outcome? What's the outcome for you if they, if you send over a candidate and that candidate's really good, they interview them and then hire them, is that it, does that generate good outcomes for you? Like what, what do you get out of that?

Nick Poloni [00:35:27]:
What I get out of that is gratification that I help somebody. But then the other piece that I get is I know deep down in their head they're going, he helped us out, he helped us out. And they'll take my call most likely at some point down the line or. And if they don't like, I don't care. I'm not going to be like, oh my God, like you do that to enough people. That's how you're, it's like the marketing piece, like my, that's how I market myself to people is again, there's so much value there. And people usually don't have the audacity to come to me and say, hey, we can't pay you for a fee. Can you work on this job? They'll come to me and say, hey, I need your help and you helped us before and we know you can perform because at the end of the day, like it took me five minutes to put together that email with a LinkedIn profile and, and say, hey, here you go packaged up for you.

Nick Poloni [00:36:14]:
It, it, it, it was so quick and simple. And then I will send the screenshot back to the candidate and say, hey, look, I reached out to him for you. I can't do anything past that. But I'm. But no, but people are not used to anybody doing that for them. So it took me five minutes and sure, one could say, oh well, what about the time it took you to develop the mark to develop the network and get to the point where you could do that again. I don't get in the weeds like that because it's just I'm spending too much time focusing on things that don't matter but not matter. And so there have been plenty of.

Nick Poloni [00:36:42]:
Like, that's how I got into the biggest client is I floated her resume by, to a couple different organizations that ultimately didn't work out. And if I remember, I, I honestly probably floated her resume into the organization that, that she's in now. And it, it got me in there. And the thing about pharma is like, if you get into some of these companies when they're early there, it's

Jacob Price [00:37:06]:
an

Nick Poloni [00:37:06]:
absolute rabbit hole of fees and where you can do good for people. And so I don't really keep track of the candidates essentially doing the bd for me, they're the mpc. They package it up to me and say, hey, go after this company. Here you go. And they don't want to do it because applying online gets them nowhere. And then they get ghosted. And then it's like they'd rather have that buffer layer in there. It's worked very, very, very well sometimes.

Nick Poloni [00:37:32]:
And other times it's like, hey, thanks, we're in final rounds. And then I can go back to the candidate and say, hey, just so you know, like, hiring manager and the lead candidate are meeting for lunch. It's probably a done deal, but at least we gave it a shot. And so people remember that in a different way, that's value. It's not talk, it's value. And so it does keep me very, very, very busy. But it also has gotten me into a lot of different companies. And then what ends up happening is if that person doesn't work out for whatever reason or, you know, whatever, I'm not working with them.

Nick Poloni [00:38:04]:
So if they're too expensive or they're not screened properly, like, I don't know that I'm not working with you guys. If you want to, if you want me to screen people properly, then let's partner. But it has gotten me into a good number of organizations. And yes, it has Also, like probably 4 or 5 this year of $40,000 plus fees have I've lost out on. But I'm not like, either we both lose or I lose. I mean it meet both being the candidate and myself. So it's just like, I don't know, I just, how do I help people? And then everything else follows.

Jacob Price [00:38:35]:
So I think that's like a really refreshing take here. And I think it sounds to me like you have built up this, like, network of candidates that you really, really trust. And when you're having this conversation with them, I imagine you're telling them, like, hey, like, I'm going to use you to try to like, create business for myself. So what does that conversation look like? How do you choose which candidates are going to be sort of your, like, marketing Candidates and which ones you're going to be like, okay, I'm going to try to make a placement on these folks.

Nick Poloni [00:39:02]:
I. If I know, like, I know, first of all, I know my industry really, really well of like, what defines a good candidate and like, what are the patterns and trends that companies go after? And so when I run into those candidates, either via referral or wherever they come from, it's just, I tell them, like, hey, if you see an opening out there that you are very, very interested in right now, and this is after I've done 10, 10, 15 minutes of just value talk. Like, you've got two options. Option one, apply online. We all know that doesn't work, goes to a black hole. Option two, you can go through my network and that's again, it gets you maybe a first round. But what I'm finding and hearing from your peers is that is not working like it used to work. So with both of those options gone, people freaking out without a job because of downsizing, layoffs, people are looking for a job, and those are the two options that they're presented with.

Nick Poloni [00:39:56]:
What do you do? And I say, if you want to send me jobs, all I need is the link. And if you want to take it a step further and send me the hiring manager, because it's in pharma, it can be pretty easy to guess. I will go after them for you and I will reach out to them and see where they're at in the interview process and leave it at that. And I think people are like, wait, what else do I have to do? Do I apply online? I say, if you want to apply online, I won't get the fee. But. But then they're, ah, nah, it's not gonna really get me anywhere. And then at the end of the day, I get them feedback and they're not used to that. Like, they're like, what? And then like, a lot of people are like, what do I owe you? And I go, nothing.

Nick Poloni [00:40:35]:
Why do you think you owe me something? Because there are agencies out there, I've heard of them. They like you. They charge the candidate like ten grand or something. They charge them something and it's like, okay, now you go from value to transactional, and there's a sliding scale and it's hard to. There's no way you can be on both extremes at the same time. And once money gets involved, it's game over. Like, you're not, you're just another recruiter. And so at some point you have to show so much value.

Nick Poloni [00:41:07]:
As I Kind of said earlier that it would be a no. Like, you don't want to be on Nick's bad side. And if I can show them so much value, you would be very surprised. With a world that we live in now where people are just shady and there's a lot of bad people out there, you would be very surprised how much people will be in your corner. And then you will also notice patterns and trends with people and you'll find that there's candidates that you think are pretty solid and they'll start sending you like 15 jobs. And I have those. And I tell them, like, you get a reasonable amount, you define reasonable, but just know that I'm working with a lot of people out there. So you define reasonable.

Nick Poloni [00:41:47]:
And most people have a realistic expectation and they'll play the safe card and send one or two a week versus one or two a day. But it keeps people honest too, because they're like, all right, if I have one pass to give to Nick, I'm going to spend it on my best one. And I tell them, like, I say, I don't want Big Pharma. I'm not going to be able to help you in Big Pharma. I'm another cog. I want, because I want small biotech, but I also tell them I want to make a bigger difference for you. And we know Big Pharma is just a big cog and I'm not going to be able to do much for you. And then it's just like, you start to have this banter of like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nick Poloni [00:42:19]:
And then goes on to another tangent. Like, again, it's like, if I'm in the candidate shoes and this guy calls me and gives me the whole rundown on the market, what's going on, what happens behind the scenes. And oh, by the way, I got the fast pass into some of these companies. Then it's like, holy cow, like, and then, and then we keep that conversation goes from, I just met you and spent 20 minutes talking to you to, like Jake and Nick level, where we're texting memes back and forth and, like having a great time. And then, and then all of that happens in like a 15 minute conversation. And then my name gets passed along to so many people. It's like my name is the fast track to their entire network. And it's just, yeah, yeah.

Jacob Price [00:43:01]:
And then. And you're sort of like upfront with them. You're like, hey, I like my. I might not make money off of you, but that's fine.

Nick Poloni [00:43:07]:
Yeah, right.

Jacob Price [00:43:08]:
Yeah, I think like that that is something that I basically never hear. And so that has clearly led you to a lot of success with your clients. I didn't want to bring it up unless you did. You Talked about this 100 person sales team that you're filling. How do you do that? Because I. The idea, I think of somebody just being like here 100 jobs go. Like, I think that sounds scary to a lot of people in the room. That sounds scary to me.

Jacob Price [00:43:32]:
So like how do you handle that?

Nick Poloni [00:43:34]:
It was a lot. It was like I was working too much. My wife was like bringing me food into my office and I was just like, hey. So I took on this project and it's kind of big and it's also. It was like a. What was the time frame? The company just needed help with a lot of things and realistic time frames and milestones were another were a piece of that. And so for me it was a learning experience. To be honest with you, I've never done that big of a salesforce by myself.

Nick Poloni [00:44:02]:
But like that's where the AI came in to like keep me organized. But then it was also like pin. I sourced the Entire Salesforce, like 50 candidates give or take in each territory with myself and John the assistant I got. And it was just like emails going out, going out. But I had to. For me, the problem was there's two problems. My email domain was only me because it was coming from me. So that means I can only send out about 200 emails a day if I didn't want to fry my domain.

Nick Poloni [00:44:32]:
So that was problem number one. And then problem number two is just the sheer amount of like time to talk to people. So I opened up my weekends and it was like three weeks of just non stop. Probably wouldn't do it again. But it was like a good learning lesson to say, all right, where do we need. Where do I need to improve our internal process internally to make sure that we are incredibly efficient? And I'll be the first to admit it, like there were some gaps. They weren't massive, but there were some gaps in there. It was number one.

Nick Poloni [00:45:00]:
And then number two, if I set somebody into this role, like what are the big pieces I need to tell them are like what success looks like. And so yeah, it was. And it was during the holidays too. So it's just like it was every variable, like, damn, this kind of sucks. All stacked on top of each other. And then they, I don't know if I said they were like, oh yeah, we want this done in like two and A half weeks. And I was like, when we first did the pitch, it was like three months out. How did this just go from three months out to like two and a half weeks? But like, my philosophy is kind of like Amazon, like the customer's right.

Nick Poloni [00:45:37]:
And if that's what it, if that's what you need done, like, we will do that. You guys are paying us a lot of money to do that and giving us the opportunity to do that. I guess we're going for it. So, yeah, it was.

Jacob Price [00:45:49]:
Yeah. And so can you give a can? Like, I think something that, like, surprised me when we were talking about this just like, outside of this is you showed me your calendar and it was basically just like, interview, interview, interview, interview, interview. Can you give us a breakdown of sort of like, what your split in, like, what type of work you were doing is? Because I think, like, there's just a lot, I think it's like one thing to talk about how great AI is and, like, how much it's helping you. But, like, yeah, truly, like, how much did you spend on like, admin and kind of like tech, like, futzing around and how much did you time did you spend just like on the phone?

Nick Poloni [00:46:26]:
So I will tell every, like the secret sauce. And this is like, I feel like this has been an uncovered one for a while is Calendy. Because it's just like, here's my calendar link. And it's, if you text it in an iPhone, like, it shows the link Cascadia Search Group, the logo. It looks pretty. Like, all that looks good. So that was number one. Is Cal.

Nick Poloni [00:46:44]:
Like, it saved so much admin back and forth type time. And then it was just like. And then what I would do in Calendy is I would have 15 minute appointments, but then I would buffer them with 15 minutes after. So then if I really needed to talk to somebody in that buffer period, I would have that ability to. Or if the call was going over, you just, it gives you a little bit more flexibility. John, my assistant, is unbelievable. I, I, he was like an absolute goat. He just helped with, I was like, hey, do this, do that.

Nick Poloni [00:47:14]:
Like, just move. And he was in the fire. Like, that was like his third weekend probably. And he was just like, oh, wow, what did I get myself into? And I was like, just it like, you, this is nothing. And we, and then we got into it and he was just having a great time. But it was Calendy, it was John. I set John up. I got him a Mac because most people in pharma have an iPhone.

Nick Poloni [00:47:34]:
And then I set the Mac up with the Cascadia search group imessage so then he could message people and say, hey, it's John from Mix team. It had the logo, it had Cascadia search group email. So that was helpful. And then we just had a process down. Like, I set up all. Like, they didn't have an admin, so I set up all the, all of the Zoom invites and I just told him, like, we have a whole process, like, each. I love Slack. Like, I had.

Nick Poloni [00:47:58]:
I hate anything Microsoft. I'm like, anti Microsoft. It's terrible. And so I, except for Outlook, I have to have a roll of it. But. But I switched everything over from teams to Slack. And then every Slack channel has its own or every Slack channel has its own client. So it's like if the client is.

Nick Poloni [00:48:15]:
In this case, it was fathom, Fathom. And so then it would be like, hey, we put the job title, the candidate, the time, the hiring manager, and he would just know, boom, sent out. And then he had a little emoji. The eyes were like, hey, I see it and I'm getting on it. And then the checkbox was like, hey, it's done. So then he could go back through each channel every day and say, all right, check, check. All done. So there was nothing slipping through the cracks.

Nick Poloni [00:48:37]:
And there were some, there were some bumps in the road the first little bit. And so I said, hey, people are money motivated. And I said, hey, for every mistake, for every perfection that we get through, Bonus for you. And it was life changing for him. It wasn't based on him getting on the phone because that's not fair. It wasn't based on any of that. It was based on. You are a representation of all of the pieces that a lot of people get pissed off with recruiting agencies, which is just chaos, clutter.

Nick Poloni [00:49:06]:
Like, you own it. And the more you own it and the better you do, the more you will get paid. So he has his like regular, regular hourly pay. But then anything on top of that that is just, you know, if you think something crazy happened and you want to come back to me and say, hey, I deserve, you know, a bonus. Awesome. But if I see something and I'm like, holy cow, you crushed it. Which he did. Bonus.

Nick Poloni [00:49:26]:
And so he ended up getting microscopic focused, laser focused. He was like, hey, why don't we do this? This will work better. And then we just have a process down that is just lock in. And, and people have commented on it. They're just like, holy cow. Like, this is so organized and yet so simple. Because we simp. That's the thing is like we're recruiters.

Nick Poloni [00:49:48]:
Like, simplify is like the name of the game. Like, what are we doing? Making some ultra robust. Trying to be all like corporate, complicated interview process. It's two people or a panel and one person talking. And let's get everybody on the same page and let them do their thing. And like all we need to do is send out invites, make sure they're at the right time, follow up with the candidate after. So that was his thing too is like he would follow up with the candidates. He would send an email that said, here's who you're speaking with with their LinkedIn profile.

Nick Poloni [00:50:17]:
Here's their email for a thank you follow up. And it just, it was. People were like on the same page with so much chaos happening, like in a two week window.

Jacob Price [00:50:28]:
That's crazy. So, so it sounds like, okay, so you have your, like, your sourcing stuff. We know that pin is helping you with that, right? You're basically like, yes, no, yes, no, yes, no. You load in your candidates and it's just sort of like Tinder. Yes, no, yes, no, really quick. And then from there they're getting on your calendar link. You're screening basically everybody. And then you have John doing everything beyond that.

Jacob Price [00:50:48]:
It's like, okay, this person's good. Send them across. Put that into the Slack channel. You take care of that. Yeah, that, that sounds roughly right.

Nick Poloni [00:50:56]:
Yeah, yeah, roughly right about.

Jacob Price [00:50:57]:
Yeah, okay. And so something that this is like, I'm just curious about. And I think, like, actually I have to imagine that other people are curious about this. You said that you're basically, you're basically like, if you do something extraordinary, I'll give you money for it. And if I see that you do selling extraordinary, I'll give you money for it. I think a lot of people hear that and be like, oh, my God, what? Like, how do you, how can that possibly be your commission structure? Do you have a like general percentage in your mind? Like, how do you make that structured? And how would you, how would you like recommend somebody do that if they didn't have just a John? If they had like 5, 10, 20 people that are doing this job, how do you add any sort of structure to that while still making it feel like fun and like limitless and getting this like, yeah, this energy out of John. Right. You said he became so focused.

Jacob Price [00:51:47]:
He's like, oh, if I do anything cool, I get money.

Nick Poloni [00:51:50]:
So I think the big piece is. It depends on like, for me, we're remote. And I think remote is probably hardest to build a working culture. And like, this is a silly, minor thing, but slack versus teams, it's much more fun. It's much less micromanaging. You can't see if somebody's read the message, so you can't micromanage in that regard. But you just say, here's the expectation. And I think you just be honest and transparent with people and you just say, hey, for me, for John, it's like, hey, if I forward you a resume via email, like that resume is in our database within an hour.

Nick Poloni [00:52:27]:
And then if we have a, like, if it's during the hours of 8 to 4 and we put something in the slack channel of a invite that needs to be sent, that invite is sent in, give or take 30 minutes. Like, I'm not going to be counting down on my, on my arm. But just so you have an idea of are you doing your job? Like, that's it. And from a commission structure, it's different from a John because he's not incentivized on candidates and he's not incentivized on a typical recruiter. I do have a recruiter commission structure and it's basically in tiers of 100,000 in billings starting at 10%, 15, 20, 25, 30% at 400,000. And I've gone like back and forth with that. I've reached out to some mentors about that side of things because ultimately the less you pay somebody, the more incentivized they are to go off and start their own deal. But then the more you incentivize them, the more they're staying.

Nick Poloni [00:53:22]:
But the business has got to make money. So it's like this real back and forth thing, but with, with John and the commission, like his job is not like a recruiter is to find candidates and to place candidates. And John is there to make sure that all of the little pieces in between just chaos are, are done. And so I started with saying, you come up with your title because I don't care. And it like gives him the autonomy and the I have a difference. And I'm not just coming in here and being another cog in the wheel. So he came up with the chief of getting stuff done. People love it.

Nick Poloni [00:53:56]:
People comment on it all the time. And I'm like, hey, that wasn't me, that was him. So chose his personality. And then from a day to day, just like Slack channel, we have a Slack channel dedicated towards like wins. And I'm like, John, your Wins are not going to be placing people. So if you have a win, share it and share it in gift form. I like gifts. They're more fun.

Nick Poloni [00:54:19]:
And Jake knows well about that one. And so it's just like, things like that. And then from the standpoint of, like, the interviews, like, for the first week, we had candidates missing the interview, like, one or two. And I was like, this is too much. It doesn't make us look good. It doesn't make them look good, even though it's the candidate's fault at the end of the day, because it's on their calendar and they accepted it. Come up with the second step. So the second step was send the invite.

Nick Poloni [00:54:46]:
Send a second email. Just an email. Hey, I'm John. I work on NixTeam. Here's who you're speaking with. Please confirm that you got the invite by responding to this email or accepting the invite. Here's the person's name. LinkedIn, email, that whole thing.

Nick Poloni [00:54:58]:
So then he was like, let's send a second email. So then they really have no excuse. And lo and behold, nobody missed interviews. So we went like, basically three months, probably 500 to 800 interviews over virtual. Not one interview missed.

Jacob Price [00:55:14]:
That's insane.

Nick Poloni [00:55:16]:
Yeah. Unless it was like, hey, I'm sick, you know, and they canceled the day before. But, like, nobody was just like, hey, where's Joe Schmo on the interview? Because in the candidate's mind, I think they're going, all right, I accepted the invite. I responded to John, I cannot miss this invite. And so it was just one of those things where I'm like, again, give people every tool that they have possible so they don't mess up in a way. And granted, some things are going to happen, but ultimately, even if it's one, I don't want one mishap. And so I told him, I said, you're doing awesome.

Jacob Price [00:55:50]:
Boom.

Nick Poloni [00:55:50]:
Here's your bonus. So it's tough because I don't really have a bonus plan for him, but he's in the Philippines and he's making, like, $1,000 bonus on a build is, like, unbelievable for them. So it's awesome because it's life changing for him. And he's just like, I am doing everything I can to make sure I have this. And I'm like, you have this job. You are without him. He's been gone like, one or two times in the last, like, six months. I'm lost.

Nick Poloni [00:56:15]:
I'm lost in the sauce. I'm like, what do I do? Where do I go?

Jacob Price [00:56:19]:
Well, so that's awesome. With John, and he sounds like. He sounds just like a great hire. How would you, like, set boundaries with them? Like, has he ever brought something to you and just, he's like, check it out, Pay me. And you're like, that's 15 seconds of work. No, like, how do you. How do you have that conversation? Or you just never had it?

Nick Poloni [00:56:35]:
No, I haven't. But I would tell him now. I'm just like, this is your job and this is your role. And yeah, you know, if you're. If you're on the. If you're on, like, we're a team and it's not like all of a sudden, like, I don't know, like, basketball terms, like, Kobe's on the team and then somebody joins the team and is like, hey, I'm going to be the power forward and start shooting and be the main shooter. Like, no, that's not the team dynamic. And I think, you know, I say that humbly, not just like, blown it off.

Nick Poloni [00:57:00]:
It's just like we have our own roles. We all know what we're good at and we all know how those roles connect. And as soon as we change something, the dynamic shifts. Now, granted, I will add people to the team and I will build and affirm, and those dynamics will change and I will have to adjust accordingly to those. But I think at the end of the day, like, when I talk to people about it, like, here's the mission. Here's what we're. Here's what we're known for. Here's what we're good at.

Nick Poloni [00:57:28]:
Are you on board or not? And I know a lot of agencies operate very differently. Like, I've talked to the old school ones that were in my parents era, if you want to call it that. And there's like, the biggest difference that I had with one of them is like, remote versus not. And I'm like, look, I want every recruiter possible across the country.

Jacob Price [00:57:46]:
That's good.

Nick Poloni [00:57:47]:
There's not many in Vancouver, Washington, like, realistically. And I don't want to buy an office space. And I want there to be more incentive for people to join. And if I can pass the money that would traditionally go to paying for an office space to commission structure, that's the way I'm going to roll.

Jacob Price [00:58:03]:
That's right.

Nick Poloni [00:58:04]:
Yeah.

Jacob Price [00:58:05]:
So I want to be. I do want to be cognizant of time. So I think, like, the big thing that I sort of want to get out of, out of this, I think for a lot of folks in the room is Just like a lot of folks, I think have not yet implemented any AI into their workflows, you know, have not really kind of gone down this rabbit hole. And I think listening to this conversation may feel a little overwhelming because, like, you've gone and you've really dove deep. I've. I've dove deep. Like, yeah, I literally work at an AI company. Like, what would you, like, what would you tell people? Somebody who's just like, I have PCR, I have LinkedIn recruiter, that's it.

Jacob Price [00:58:38]:
Like, how would you tell them to get started?

Nick Poloni [00:58:43]:
I would say this, like, asking Claude in layman's terms or, or whatever AI you prefer. Like, just ask it what you want to do, who you are, and give it as much background context and then let it tell you. And if you don't like it, then say, I don't like this. Revise it. Because at the, like, you don't have to feel bad. It's not a person where they're like, they just did this whole proposal and did it and got it to you by some certain deadline. It's just, it's a robot. I personally love Claude for a variety of reasons, but I think Grok would be a close number two.

Nick Poloni [00:59:15]:
I think ChatGPT is, is the PCR of, of like, AIs, but I think they all are better than a human, realistically, in certain ways. And so I think the only downside to Claude is you have tokens and you have a limit on how many tokens you can use. But I think if I was telling somebody that just is like pcr, Outlook, Excel, spreadsheet, like, basically when I first joined, like, what would I do? Take it step by step. Implement one thing. Implement one thing that you feel comfortable with, whether that's a new email client, like, superhuman. Again, not paid there. I never thought I would pay, by the way, for an email client. I was like, hell no.

Nick Poloni [00:59:57]:
I'm still paying for it three years later. It's unreal. It's unreal. But like, start with something. Start with something. Start with, with. With Claude and having conversations or building your own cloud bot. Like, you don't have to just ask it.

Nick Poloni [01:00:08]:
If you don't know, just say, hey, I want to build a cloud bot. What do I do? Or if it's like, I don't have any coding experience, go to just for people listening, not, not self promotion, but just like for conceptuality. Cascadia, searchgroup.com. that thing was built like, I don't know from. I guess you say it from the bottom up from a code standpoint, I don't know the proper. I'm not. That's how much of an engineer I'm not. But, like, basically it just built it all.

Nick Poloni [01:00:34]:
And I had to go through and pick different color schemes and say, oh, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. But, like, that thing built a website and that was my first intro to Claude. AI is like, I want to do something different and so just, just do it and just spend a weekend or an hour or watch a YouTube video. That's how, like, what kind of got me going is I saw something on X and I'm like, oh, cool, let's give it a shot. And it was code. And then I started to do it with my website. I'm like, holy cow. This just rebranded everything.

Nick Poloni [01:01:01]:
This looks sick. But you gotta just start somewhere. Honestly, like, don't go, oh, my God, I need to redo the whole agency. Redo my ats, redo. Like, that is too much. So I think it's just starting somewhere with one thing. It could be a workflow. If you don't have calendy, it could be inputting calendy into your thing.

Jacob Price [01:01:22]:
And yeah, oh, shoot. I, I, I was like, I'm gonna be cute and put this into the chat and I just put it into the hosts and panelists section. Let me put it into everyone. It's okay because you got your domain wrong. It's cascadiasearch.com it's all good. But yeah, the website looks awesome and I want to leave some time for questions. So we got a couple questions. I'll just answer the PIN ones really quick.

Jacob Price [01:01:45]:
I did not in any way want this to be like a PIN promotional thing. I wanted this to be like, everybody here, like, Nick's perspective is awesome.

Nick Poloni [01:01:52]:
Yeah, thank you.

Jacob Price [01:01:53]:
But really quickly, the answers to a couple of these questions, like, does pin only find LinkedIn profiles to scrape Internet? We find profiles from LinkedIn, GitHub, Crunchbase, Monster. Indeed. We basically consolidate information from all these different kind of job boards and smash them into these Frankenstein profiles and then layer our own LLMs on top of that to make it such that we basically create shadow resumes for candidates. And then we look at the shadow resumes using our LLMs to stack rank candidates based on the job descriptions you give us.

Nick Poloni [01:02:24]:
I'm going to say, like, as somebody who's not, like, I'm not here because we're buddies, like, PIN has changed my, like, I will, I have, I will not have billed 700 if it wasn't because of PIN. It's the efficiency increase. I'm not talking to, like, shit candidates. I'm talking to, like, all the perfect profiles that the company wants. And then the outbound outreach is unreal. It is. Like, when I get people that are like, hey, I thought you were a bot. I had to go look on LinkedIn and saw that you were legit on LinkedIn too.

Nick Poloni [01:02:53]:
The combination of those two things is unreal. And I'm telling you, when people were like, hey, I'm not interested, but I'm responding just because of the approach, I was like, all right, cool. Sweet. Yeah, there's that.

Jacob Price [01:03:05]:
Yeah. And I. And, you know, and like, I have had to use PIN to, like, recruit for myself. I, like, had to step into the TA circle. And I was like, it's really fun when you step into that. And you're like, oh, you know what? This product is really good. Right? Like, I got. I was telling you, I got a 48% response rate just through emails on my support engineer role.

Jacob Price [01:03:25]:
And actually just onboarded Derek, who's our new support engineer, yesterday, and I was showing him pin, and he looked at the message and he's like, that's what you did? He was like. So he was, like, a little mad at me. He's like, I thought you did so

Nick Poloni [01:03:41]:
much research on me. And, yeah.

Jacob Price [01:03:44]:
And then he was like, okay, but, like, it's cool. Fine. The product is cool, legit.

Nick Poloni [01:03:48]:
It's the best tech stack I have had, 100%.

Jacob Price [01:03:52]:
So, yeah, so, I mean, that was, like. That was really fun for me, but sorry, I'm just gonna really quickly rip through these questions here, so. Yeah, so you can use LinkedIn, you can use PIN without a LinkedIn recruiter license. I actually would recommend trying to get. Use the email side of things as much as possible, because if you can go down from a LinkedIn Recruiter License to a LinkedIn Recruiter License or a LinkedIn Sales Navigator License, you save a ton of money and you'll find that you don't really lose very much. Like, I think the big thing that people keep the recruiter licenses for is if you're really, like, hardcore using their job postings feature, that's something that we can't replace. But if you're mostly just using it for, like, finding candidates and sending emails and connection requests, you do not need the big daddy recruiter license. And to.

Jacob Price [01:04:40]:
So, Travis, you asked to repeat that, so basically, yes. So to repeat what I said before, we build implicit resumes for people. So we go and do the research on, you know, if they say they're like front end engineer at OpenAI. Right. We will. And, and that's all they put on their resume. We will go ahead and find people who have more verbose profiles who do the same job. We'll say, okay, implicitly we know that they have these skills.

Jacob Price [01:05:05]:
We, we'll look at old job descriptions for stuff. We can kind of go and do the more deep analysis of that. Something that I kind of like to use as an analogy when I talk about this is say you're looking for somebody who speaks Spanish. If you're doing that in LinkedIn, you put Spanish into your Boolean string and it looks for Spanish in the languages section. If you're doing it through like RPS plus, it looks for Spanish all over the profile. If you do it in pin, we look for Spanish and Espanol on the profile. We also look for did this person spend a lot of time in a Spanish speaking country? We look forward. Did this person write any essays in Spanish or is part of their profile literally written in Spanish? All of that will add up to this person speak Spanish.

Nick Poloni [01:05:43]:
That's where you guys are so genius with that kind of stuff. Because usually it's just keywords and you miss a lot of stuff.

Jacob Price [01:05:49]:
Yeah, I gotta take literally zero credit for that. Thanks, Steve. Steve's a genius.

Nick Poloni [01:05:55]:
Thanks.

Jacob Price [01:05:56]:
Yeah, I just, I get to attach myself to this genius and then and you know, go and like do fun things like go on the, you know, Ben Meadows podcast and interview my. Yeah, and then PIN customizes to every person in a campaign. Will it replace Recruiter Flow? We won't replace Recruiter Flow. That is an ats. We are not an ats. But we very much will replace the campaigning inside of Recruiter Flow. And I think you could talk to the Recruiter Flow folks. They will not get mad at you.

Jacob Price [01:06:23]:
If you do the campaigning through PIN and we send everything over and kind of you do everything post post, like setting up that first interview inside of Recruiter Flow. That's generally the way that our clients that use that integration work

Benjamin Mena [01:06:36]:
and you guys, it integrates with Recruiter Flow so it can actually make updates in there and drop candidates in there, right?

Jacob Price [01:06:44]:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we send everything over to Recruiter Flow. We'll add candidates, we'll give you deduplication warnings. Something that is like an often forgotten about thing with ATS integrations and sourcing platforms is deduplication. We dedupe against both the LinkedIn profile URL as well as the email address. So it's very unlikely that we create actual duplicates for you. So I think this is a problem for a lot of old school folks where they like plug in a sourcing platform and they're like, and Now I have 500 dupes that I can't do anything with. And that sucks.

Jacob Price [01:07:14]:
That just doesn't happen with us. And then atss, we integrate into. It's hard for me to say all of them. There's like 35 of them, but most of them. And then sequence steps via pin. The fun thing, Matt, so that answer, what sequence steps work best? We build it for you. So when you drop a job description inside of pin, one of the coolest things we do is we read the job description, we read your clients about us page, and we read inside of your email to match your tone of voice. And then we build you a five step campaign that's email, email, LinkedIn connection request in mail, and then another email.

Jacob Price [01:07:49]:
And it's good. Like, I promise you that it is good. It's actually like when I did my own recruiting, I took the AI language, I made like slight tweaks to the bullet points, but mostly it's like 95% the AI language, 48% response rate. I spent 15 minutes sourcing and the rest of the time was just interviewing like, Nick, correct me if I'm wrong. That's like usually your experience, right?

Nick Poloni [01:08:11]:
Real quick, there's two things to that. So there's this thing called AI personalized sends and you add that. It's like a filler, like a first name, last name company. But it's AI personalized sense. You put that in there, you give it instructions all the time. I'm like, keep it one to two sentences, hype them up, highlight, specific, whatever. If I'm searching dermatology sales reps highlight the dermatology sales experience. And it starts off, hey, first name.

Nick Poloni [01:08:35]:
And then it's like your experience, you know, did it and it's just like unreal. Like the first line they see is just like, what? You did this much homework on me. And it is unbelievable. Now I take that a step further and do that on LinkedIn because we all know LinkedIn's just templates. So when it's going out on LinkedIn, same thing, it's sending some really personalized, specific message on LinkedIn and then you stand out and then your response rate between the two is un. Freaking. It's unreal. Yeah, yeah.

Jacob Price [01:09:07]:
So we have, I have one question that's actually not PIN related. So I want to Bring that up. So if you were to start from scratch, what would be the first thing you would do to get clients? Your ICP in tech startups. And you specialize in AI talent.

Benjamin Mena [01:09:20]:
Me.

Benjamin Mena [01:09:20]:
Oh.

Jacob Price [01:09:21]:
So yeah. So your ICP is tech startups and you specialize in AI talent. What's the first thing you do to get clients?

Nick Poloni [01:09:27]:
First thing I do to get clients is probably, well, if it was me, I would like spend a chunk of time like learning the industry. I think that would be step one so I can have those conversations and develop credibility in like five minutes with some of these people. I think that would be number one. Number two, I would look at an ats, because the ATS is going to be. That's how I remember everything. That's how I remember. I'll take notes on. On candidates, they have three kids, they live in whatever, they don't want to move.

Nick Poloni [01:09:57]:
Like that's. That would probably be my number two. And then number three, I would just have a side quest of Claude that I could just ask questions to. Or, or I use it every day for the most random things. Give me a rundown on this company or give me a debrief on this company or whatever. And then you can also write job description. You can, it's an extension to you that you can ultimately be a very, very good resource to your clients. So I guess that's not the first thing.

Nick Poloni [01:10:23]:
First thing is I would really like learn the industry very, very, very well to speak the ins and the outs. And by the way, I was looking through the chat, if people have offline questions they want to ask, just DM me on LinkedIn.

Jacob Price [01:10:37]:
Yeah, they're coming in really quickly. I'm like doing my best to like type out answers while you're giving answers. So really quick. I think questions that are like always going to come up, like the pricing pin. Pricing is really easy. It's 179 out of month. We don't require contracts, but if you are willing to commit to contracts, we give discounts on that. For solopreneurs, we basically have this plan that's like basically giving back to kind of small startups, people who are just getting going.

Jacob Price [01:11:03]:
Um, it's $1,200 for the year, which is $100 a month equivalent. It's a 45% discount. We're not going to offer this forever, but it's our way of basically giving back to the community. Our margins on that are basically zero, are like break even on that is like month eight. So it's the best it's like truly, it's the best possible deal in tech. If you're just getting started do that. Because it's just, we don't really make money off of that. And there's also a reason why you'll notice it.

Jacob Price [01:11:31]:
You can only buy one seed with that and you can't just like put your entire team on that because without, if everybody did that, we wouldn't have a business.

Nick Poloni [01:11:38]:
That's crazy. Good.

Jacob Price [01:11:40]:
Sweet. And Ben did drop his, Ben did drop his links into, into the chat as well.

Nick Poloni [01:11:48]:
That's a deal by the way. That's crazy. Like, yeah, I, yeah, people that are do it, you're going to make it back in the damn placement. And the likelihood you get a placement in a year that's $1,200 is like, I mean at least in my space it's like 40 of them. It's like a no brainer. Yeah,

Jacob Price [01:12:06]:
sweet. And I'm like going through the chat and I think actually I think we hit everything. Is the data enrichment there? Yes. So the data enrichment is there. We have partners with all the major players in the data space and we basically just a pass through to that.

Nick Poloni [01:12:20]:
The data is legit, by the way. Somebody asked a lot of them.

Benjamin Mena [01:12:26]:
There's like two more questions on there.

Jacob Price [01:12:31]:
Oh, I see. Do you zoom info with pin? You can if you like. I have kind of mixed feelings about zoom info because they're very much like here's all the contact data that you can possibly have. Also it's really expensive and there's no verification there. So there's a lot of kind of like throwing stuff at the wall and hoping it sticks. Something that we actually are in the process of building is the ability to kind of search your zoom info database using pin. So that's going to come out fairly soon. Give us a couple months to kind of build that out.

Jacob Price [01:13:01]:
But that's the one platform that we, that won't let us kind of plug in the same way that we do with our other vendors. So we're building kind of an alternative for our mutual customers. The PIN website lists just four industries in built for. We work in most industries. I think the one, the question that you should be asking is how likely are your candidates to put any information about themselves on the Internet? Right. So if you're looking for like local plumbers.

Nick Poloni [01:13:27]:
Yeah.

Jacob Price [01:13:28]:
If you're looking in New York maybe. But if you're looking for like local plumbers in like a, you know, 500 person town, they probably didn't write that much about themselves on the Internet, so we probably can't find them. But that's about as. That's about where the only place where PIN data falls off is just they didn't write anything about themselves on the Internet.

Nick Poloni [01:13:48]:
And here's like a, like a off track thing about that I've noticed about PIN is M software tech in general and I'm not going to throw any names out in terms of the other platforms are used, but the amount of updates that you guys do is unreal. And by the way, it's not updates because there's bugs and we're just patching bugs. That's a very big difference with tech, in my opinion. Like having really got into this, there are updates where you're like, oh, that's really smart. That makes me more efficient. This is awesome. And the amount of bugs that PIN has or doesn't have is unreal. Because if you think about Facebook multi billion dollar platform or Apple iPhone, like billion dollar platform, the amount of bugs that those platforms have, in my opinion, for how much money they have and how many senior engineers they have is like, damn, they got to get their shit together.

Nick Poloni [01:14:37]:
And PIN is, I'm not going to lie for. And I'm not just saying this because we're here. Like I would say this if it was just Ben and I like, PIN is like the. How smooth that platform is and how accurate the data is from my standpoint because a lot of people are online. It's just like, it's wild. And that's comparing it to a good number of either demos I've tried ATS as I use or currently use. Just my knowledge of seeing these platforms work and having worked with them, it is, you're not going to find something that's zero bugs ever, but it is like 99% damn good from what I've seen using it every day.

Jacob Price [01:15:17]:
And it's more credit to Steve, it's more credit to his ability to vet engineers who are really good. And I think even if you do run into bugs on pin, it happens every once in a while, right? Like we're not perfect, but we do our best to fix them up as soon as possible. So I think we're one of the only companies out there that like truly strives for no tech debt, no bugs. If bugs happen, we get our engineers on it and we just say like, okay, you know what? This can't exist in the platform for longer than two weeks, for longer than a month, right? Like if it's a really big bug and it requires a Lot like a month. But we don't have these kind of lingering things that just like stay in the platform for years. And you're just like, okay, we can forget about that. We did have one more question, which is like, if there's a lot about someone out of the Internet that you can scrape, won't most software find these people? It's a much hard. It's a much harder problem to solve than you might think.

Jacob Price [01:16:08]:
We have partnerships with all the major data scrapers out there. One of the hardest things about building the PIN platform is that we merged all that data together into not just kind of disparate slope, but truly matching all that data into a single profile, that's one of the hardest things to do kind of in all of data science. So again, I was like, steve is a genius. I have no idea how to do that. It's crazy he was able to do that. It's crazy. Our entire engineering team was able to maintain that. But it's also why we get a lot of requests for getting data from different countries that we don't yet support.

Jacob Price [01:16:41]:
Right. We don't yet support apac, for example. And they're like, why can't you just like throw that in there? It's because adding different from data from different countries means going to different providers and then making sure that all of that can be successfully merged into this giant database of billions of kind of profiles of disparate data without messing up everybody else's experience.

Benjamin Mena [01:17:02]:
What about France and Canada?

Benjamin Mena [01:17:04]:
Those are two questions that just popped up.

Jacob Price [01:17:06]:
Oh, France and Canada. They're totally good. I saw another one about putting in stuff in different languages. Generally you want to put in your inputs in English, but the output on the email templates will follow whatever your native language is in your in your email address. So if you're primarily speaking French in your outbound emails, we will write your outbound templates in French.

Benjamin Mena [01:17:30]:
Thank you guys for sharing today.

Nick Poloni [01:17:31]:
Awesome.

Jacob Price [01:17:32]:
Thanks y' all everyone.

Nick Poloni [01:17:34]:
See ya.

Benjamin Mena [01:17:35]:
You know, the resume never tells the full story. Candidates share what really matters during conversations, on calls and interviews, over email. Their motivations, salary, expectations, plans to relocate. Most of that detail ends up buried in notes and forgotten Atlas changes that. It's the AI first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin. It captures every conversation automatically and turns it into something you can use with MagicSearch. You can ask Atlas questions like who talked about wanting a four day week? Or who mentioned they're open to relocating next year? It searches across your entire database and pulls the answers instantly. No keyword guessing and no digging through old notes.

Benjamin Mena [01:18:12]:
You get insight from real conversations, not limited resume fields. Atlas also makes BD easier with opportunities you can track and grow client relationships powered by generative AI and built into your existing workflow. If you want visibility, smart dashboards give you a clear view of the pipeline across your business. And that's not theory. Atlas customers have reported over 40% EBITDA growth and over 80% increase in monthly billings after adopting the platform. It's built for agencies that want to grow without adding more manual work. Don't miss the future of recruitment. Get started with Atlas today and unlock your exclusive listener offer at recruit with atlas.com thanks for listening to this episode

Jacob Price [01:18:54]:
of the Elite Recruiter Podcast with Benjamin Mena. If you enjoyed, hit, subscribe and leave a rating.