Episodes

90% of her business comes from referrals. She has never made a cold call, never sent a cold email, and never pitched herself at a networking event. And she built the whole thing in four years, starting with zero recruiting background. April Ben-Sabat became a recruiter by accident. She spent six years as the right hand at a transport company, told them in her first interview she would own a business within five years, and when they could not find a transport recruiter to backfill her, her own b...

Ryan Sheppard mapped an entire market for a senior pharma search, tracked down the exact molecule types, built the shortlist, and then got one line back: sorry, we're on a hiring freeze. The fee that vanished was somewhere between eighty and a hundred thousand dollars, and it was not the first time. That was the moment he decided he could not keep working for free. Before we get into it, Finish The Year Strong kicks off September 28 through October 5. All live sessions are free, and if you wa...

Greg Benadiba has been a recruiter for 21 years, and he opened his new book with the most expensive phone call of his career: the one he didn't make. In this return episode of The Elite Recruiter Podcast, Greg sits down with Benjamin Mena to put the principles from Recruitment Principles: Timeless Truths in the Age of AI to work, starting with the three he would keep if a recruiter could only live by three. Before we get into it, Finish The Year Strong 2026 kicks off September 28 through Octo...

What if everything you were taught about growing a desk was optional? Finish The Year Strong 2026 kicks off September 28th through October 5th, and the live sessions are free. This is your line in the sand for the rest of the year: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ This episode is sponsored by Atlas, the CRM that actually understands context. Atlas captures every call, email, and message automatically, then tells you the next action to take. And whether you place perman...

Sign up for Finish The Year Strong 2026, free for all live sessions, September 28 to October 5: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ This episode is powered by Atlas, the CRM that captures every call, email, and LinkedIn message automatically and tells you the next action to take: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ Join the Recruiting Agents Workshop with Seb Sharp, August 25 and 26, and build your own autonomous lead agent and placement agent live: https://the-recruiting-agents-w...

Finish The Year Strong 2026 is coming September 28 through October 5, and it is packed with sessions exactly like this one. Register free now: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ The Recruiting Agents Workshop with Seb Sharp runs August 25 and 26. Build an autonomous lead agent, a placement agent, and connect your entire tech stack, with recordings, templates, and a week of Slack access to Seb included: https://the-recruiting-agents-workshop.heysummit.com/ This episode is sp...

Two years ago, the role of talent engineer didn't exist. Today a16z is funding a fellowship for it, and Benjamin Mena sits down with one of its founding members to find out what it means for every recruiting team, agency and in-house alike. Dan McCarthy took the least likely path into this seat: jazz musician, New York bartender, wine educator, and Brooklyn CrossFit gym owner before Shopify hired him into tech recruiting at 40 years old. Two layoffs later, he's a Senior Talent Engineer at Zapier, where he built a talent intelligence MCP in about a month using completely free APIs including the Department of Labor, WARN Act data, and Indeed Hiring Lab, so recruiters walk into every intake call armed with real market data. Benjamin and Dan get into the ego build problem on LinkedIn, the difference between building to learn and building to ship, what a solo recruiter could stand up in a weekend to change their next client pitch, whether a three person agency could really bill five …

Cold email is dying, so Brian Abrams went old school. His boutique IT project management staffing firm grew from $1.5M to $6M while the staffing industry contracted three years straight, and 30 to 40 percent of his gross profit now comes from one channel: industry conferences. In this episode, the founder of PMO Partners lays out his entire four part playbook. How he picks his conference slate a year out, the pre-work almost nobody does including the exact no-pressure LinkedIn message he sends 30 days before every event, how his team works the floor, the follow up system that turned a 10 second booth conversation into his biggest client ever, and the story behind the legendary Run PMO shirts.

David Fishman built a $1.5 million recruiting desk with no college degree, an eight-year Coast Guard stint, and a chip on his shoulder that never went away. Thirty years in, his longest client has been with him for three decades, and he just ran a streak of ten placements from ten straight presentations, first candidate presented, first candidate hired. He breaks down the intake questions that shape every search, why he reads resumes like photographs, how he wins back lost clients by outliving the HR leaders who cut him, why he tracks deals instead of dollars, and the Monday-through-Wednesday rhythm that protects his momentum. At 58, something is still chasing him.

Kimberly Laipple was a single mom at 18 who was told she would never get a degree. She survived foreclosure, fed her kids through food banks, and poured herself into a recruiting desk at Scientific Search. Eighteen years later she is president of that same firm, a $1.4 million personal biller, and one of only 80 recruiters admitted to the Pinnacle Society, where she serves as vice president of the board. In this episode she breaks down the inner work that took her from years stuck at $550K to her first million dollar year, the Mr. Miyagi deal she makes with every new recruiter, the repeatable process behind back to back $100K months, and the path she used to climb from recruiter to president: prove yourself, then ask for it. If you are sitting at a plateau and blaming the market, this one will challenge you in the best way.

A hiring manager types "accounting recruiter near me" into ChatGPT. Somebody comes up. Steve Gipson's argument is that it is almost never the best recruiter. It is the most visible one. Steve is Director of Sales and Operations at Recruiters Websites, now in its fourteenth year and used by over a thousand recruiting firms. One of those clients is a two person firm that had closed $404,000 of inbound business as of the day this was recorded, pulling twenty to thirty leads a month from people who had never heard of them. Steve is direct about the caveat. They started this work seven or eight years ago. Inside the episode: what Google actually changed and why SEO did not die, how topical authority works on a recruiting site, whether Wix and Squarespace can rank, the listicle and directory play for getting cited by AI, and the one on page fix to make this week. Figures are self reported and not independently verified. Recruiters Websites: https://recruiterswebsites.com/ Finis…

Across more than 5,000 recruiters, Michelle Flynn has run the same values exercise, and money has never once come up as a core value. Part 2 starts tactical and goes somewhere most recruiting podcasts never touch. The top biller's morning. The pre call ritual before dialing a Fortune 500 C suite. What flow state actually looks like on a recruiting desk, and a live breathwork session you can follow along with in real time. Then the payoff: how to find your real driver, why money never survives to the final list, what shows up instead, and what that means for how you build your desk or your firm. Michelle walks through pieces of the Life Audit live, shares the most dramatic client transformations she has watched, and gets honest about the two fears that quietly trap founders, the loneliness of going solo, whether AI is actually costing recruiters money, and the question she wishes recruiters would ask her but never do. If Part 1 was the collapse and the foundations, this is what all the…

Michelle Flynn was living the recruitment dream: 20 placements a month as a solo recruiter, working 9:30 to 4:30, every client on exclusive, no cold calls. Then, three months after her wedding, a suspected heart attack at 39 put her on the hospital floor. From her hospital bed, she asked for her phone because an interview was still running. In Part 1 of this two part conversation, the health and performance coach recruiters call the Wendy Rhoades of the industry takes us inside the dream desk, the collapse, the second warning at 42 that finally forced the wake up call, and the foundations she now coaches into top billers and staffing firm owners. Why you cannot outwork burnout. The fact versus excuse test. The four factors of sleep quality. The breathwork reset elite athletes use before a penalty kick. And the time audit that found one recruiter 36 hours a week hiding on Instagram. Essential listening for agency recruiters, executive search professionals, and recruitment founders runn…

Welcome to another episode of The Elite Recruiter Podcast! Today, host Benjamin Mena sits down with Dougie Loan, a recruitment tech leader who has analyzed billions of recruiting messages and has his finger on the pulse of what’s truly effective — and what’s no longer working — in modern recruiting. In this data-driven conversation, Dougie Loan shares candid insights from behind the scenes, busts outdated outreach myths, and reveals strategies that are winning business in 2026. Tune in as we talk AI's impact, wasted workdays, assembling high-growth playbooks, and actionable advice for recruiters who want to move from average to elite. Whether you’re struggling with low reply rates or searching for a competitive edge, this episode is packed with practical tips and forward-looking strategies to help you thrive in the rapidly evolving world of recruitment.

The AI Recruiting Summit 2026 is happening now through July 20th, and registration is free for every live session. Recruiting engineers, operators, and recruiters actually running AI on their desks are showing what is working behind the scenes. Do not miss it. Register here: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ This episode is brought to you by Atlas. The resume never tells the full story, and most of what candidates share ends up buried in notes and forgotten. Atlas is the AI first ...

Gary Stauble started his firm in 1998 and almost immediately lost control of his mornings. Circumstances at home meant he could not rely on being at his desk on any given day. He had less time than his competition, and he was not hitting his goals. So he stopped measuring hours and started measuring what the hours produced. He compressed his workday, front-loaded everything that mattered into the morning, and produced more, not less. This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the AI-first recrui...

Welcome to The Elite Recruiter Podcast! In this episode, "How To Build A $1.3 Million AI Recruiting Desk," we dive deep into the strategies that are revolutionizing the recruiting industry. This episode serves as a preview for the upcoming AI Recruiting Summit 2026, running from July 13th to July 20th. Join us for free live sessions to gain actionable insights or opt for the VIP package or Elite Recruiter Community membership for permanent access to replays. This episode is proudly sponsored ...

In part two, Danny Cahill takes Benjamin Mena behind the scenes of how he actually builds million dollar billers. He draws a sharp line between where AI genuinely helps and where it makes every recruiter sound the same, and argues that as everyone outsources their voice to a bot, the ability to write and think originally becomes the last real competitive advantage. He dismantles the myth that you need no life to be great at this, then opens up on mentorship. Why top billers become a protected class no one will push, the hidden wound behind most high achievers, and why you do not luck into a 22 year career. He closes with a challenge to rethink the pricing and sales DNA of the entire industry

Danny Cahill is one of the biggest names in recruiting history. In part one of this two part conversation with Benjamin Mena, he unpacks how he survived four recessions and a pandemic across a 40 year career, why leaning on AI for your sales conversations is quietly making recruiters passive, and how he built a firm of recruiters who last entire careers instead of burning out in year one. He gets into what really motivates top performers, why he spends more time with his veterans than his rookies, the fundamentals even 20 year veterans still get wrong, and a hard truth about your pipeline. When you think you have four job orders, you really have one.

Half the year is gone. This episode is the reset. Pulled from a live session inside the Elite Recruiter Community, this talk from Brent Orsuga is a mid-year line in the sand for any recruiter who looked up and realized the clock is running. Brent has spent 23 years in recruiting and 11 years running his own firm, Pinnacle Growth Advisors, and he lays out the ten habits, behaviors, and identity shifts he says separate million dollar billers from everyone else. The power of it is how he shrinks the number. A million dollar desk stops feeling impossible once you break it into quarters, into deals, into your average fee. From there it becomes a decision and a 90 day sprint rather than a fantasy. And as Brent points out, the framework holds no matter what your actual goal is, whether that's your first six figure quarter or your best year yet. What you'll learn: Why belief is the first habit, and why the math of a million is smaller than you think How to claim a niche and become a pa…

Picking up where Part 1 left off, Allie gets into the money and the machinery. She explains pipelining projects — building a talent bench for a client — and why she keeps at least 20% of her business there for cash flow. Then the math: why a recruiter running five to eight retained searches can out-earn one juggling fifteen contingent reqs. The centerpiece is her contrarian thesis that "great delivery is your business development" — she tried being a salesperson, failed, and found that doing the work exceptionally well is what actually generates referrals and repeat clients. From there she walks her full kickoff-to-close process: scoping, building team alignment, writing job descriptions that captivate passive candidates, presenting offers herself, and where she does and doesn't trust AI. She closes with the hardest search of her career, the most common mistake recruiters make going retained, and three things a listener can do this week — starting with leveraging the network they alre…

Allie Milbrath, founder of the Quinn Roberts Company, returns to make the case that the biggest shift recruiting needs is the move from contingent to retained — and that AI is forcing the issue. Her opening frame: stop panicking about AI and ask the harder question of what part of your service was ever actually valuable. If it was speed, you're in trouble; if it's judgment, trust, and honest market feedback, that's what clients will keep paying for. Allie shares that she's run her firm 100% retained for a decade with zero cold business development, then unpacks the real barrier holding recruiters back — what she calls "emotional exits," the contingent habit of bailing when a search gets hard. The episode covers who retained is and isn't for, how to separate fear from a market that genuinely can't bear retained, a full live role-play of pitching a contingent-only client, and the mechanics: fee structure, holding your price, and the contract terms that protect you.

Your best biller is the person bringing in the most money. So how could promoting them be the most expensive mistake your firm ever makes? Duncan Taylor has spent more than 30 years on the executive side of recruiting, with one unusual specialty: recruiting for recruiting companies. In this conversation he lays out the producer-manager trap in brutal math — how a single promotion that looks like a reward can send five million in gross profit out the door — then maps where recruiting leadership is actually heading. Why dialing for dollars is fading. What the future leader looks like when AI eats the entry-level grind. The business-model shift from billing hours to guaranteeing outcomes. And the one Friday habit that turned candidates he never placed into his biggest clients. If you want to grow into a leader as the ground shifts under this industry, this is the blueprint.

Rebecca Stewart serves the LA Rams, Chargers, and Forbes 400 households with a 3-person team and zero outbound. Twenty years in, every deal is referred or inbound. How she built it — and the niche thesis every recruiter needs to hear.