How to Go Fully Retained Without Losing Your Clients

Benjamin Mena [00:00:00]:
Are you still trying to grow your recruiting desk or business on your own? Join the Elite Recruiter Community and connect with recruiters who know your challenges. Members get unlimited access to replays from the AI Recruiting Summit. Finish the year strong and all our past events plus biweekly roundtables where we dive into sourcing, business development and mindset. You'll also tap into our Billers Club for accountability and a split space to partner on roles. Join the number one growth environment for recruiters. For just $49 per month, you'll be part of a tight knit group that pushes you to grow and you can cancel anytime. Visit the link in the show notes and click Join now to get started and start mastering your craft today. Coming up on this episode of the Elite Recruiter Podcast, how was this first year for you in the in recruiting?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:00:43]:
I loved it. I mean, talk about finding your passion early. The anticipation of telling my clients, hey, I would love to take this on. I can't do this the way we've done this in the past. Let me walk you through my new model and why this works and why it works more effectively went far better than I ever would have imagined.

Benjamin Mena [00:01:04]:
Welcome to the Elite Recruiter Podcast with your host Benjamin Mena, where we focus on what it takes to win in the recruiting game. We cover it all from sales, marketing, mindset, money, leadership and placements. 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.

Benjamin Mena [00:01:45]:
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Benjamin Mena [00:02:30]:
Don't miss the future of recruitment. Get started with Atlas today and unlock your exclusive listener offer@reruitwithatlas.com I am so excited about this episode of the podcast because here's the thing. Even the elite recruiters, the best of the best, the top billers, sometimes are a little too broad. Sometimes they stretch themselves out a little too thin. So we're going to talk about how even if you're in a niche, maybe you need a niche down even more. But here's the thing. While you're in this niche, you can also move from contingent to retained. And we're going to talk about exactly how this guest did it.

Benjamin Mena [00:03:09]:
Actually, we're going to talk about how the guest did both of these because it's really been the secret to her success. Like, she was already great. She got even better by doing this. So, Andrea, I'm so excited to have you on the podcast.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:03:21]:
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Benjamin Mena [00:03:24]:
So, quick 30 second self introduction.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:03:27]:
Hello everyone. I'm Andrea Colabella. I am the founder of Cardea Group. We are an executive recruitment firm based in New York City focused on the investment management space, specifically within legal and compliance. So nice to meet you all.

Benjamin Mena [00:03:41]:
So I got asked the age old question, how did you even end up in this land of misfit toys? Recruiters.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:03:49]:
So I was a trader right out of school because I have my master's in applied mathematics and was recruited to be a trader on the NASDAQ desk. This was a job that many of my friends completely envied and I did not want it. So when I lost my job as a recruiter, as a trader, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but everyone else seemed to know they wanted the job I just had. And I ended up finding a recruiting posting where you could help people find their dream jobs. So I thought that sounds pretty interesting. And then I heard the sky was the limit in terms of earnings and that if you were competitive, which I am, that you could be very successful. So I went on one interview for a recruiting job and fell in love with the idea.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:04:39]:
And then I started cold calling recruiting agencies to see if they'd want to hire. And I finally found one that just resonated with me. So I actually met with a whole bunch. I knew I wanted to be a recruiter after that first interview.

Benjamin Mena [00:04:51]:
So you literally cold called recruiting firms saying, I want to be a recruiter. Hire me?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:04:56]:
Yes. Yes. And my favorite story is my first boss. Her name is Jen Keane. She's phenomenal. But I cold called one agency. And the woman I got on the other line whispered into the phone, you don't want to work here, called Jen Keane. And she introduced me to who my now boss is.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:05:16]:
So it was hilarious, because as we all know, there are some terrible agencies out there and people you don't want to work for. And that woman, I don't know, I don't remember which firm she worked for. This is back in 202005 in Boston. But she saved me and got me on my way to recruiting for Jen Keen.

Benjamin Mena [00:05:34]:
Okay, so how was that, this first year for you in the. In recruiting, going from trading to be being a recruiter?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:05:40]:
I loved it. I mean, talk about finding your passion early. I was 23 at the time. Extremely social. I loved my firm. My firm was so great. My boss, Jen Keane, that I just referenced was so wonderful, so generous. I recruited everything.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:05:57]:
So my group was predominantly administrative assistance and hr. And so I recruited admins and HR professionals up and down the food chain. And then I found a little niche for myself of software salespeople, and I just kind of grew that little vertical all on my own. It was, you could do whatever you wanted under Jen Keane's control. She was great, and she didn't say no to anything, and she was pumped about any job you got in. So it was a real mishmash. Talk about misfit toys. We were a really interesting group of humans, but we were all young, in our 20s, having so much fun.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:06:34]:
And I just love. I loved the cold calling aspect. I loved the headhunting aspect. I loved the. Jen was very good at breaking down companies, so understanding, like, who worked where by working the receptionists. So I learned how to do that very early on because this is before LinkedIn, all of those cool tools. So it was just a very. I loved the diversity of it, and I love the socialness of it.

Benjamin Mena [00:07:01]:
So did you love it or did you learn to love it? And if you learn to love it, how did she teach everybody to learn to love, like, the hard parts of the job?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:07:09]:
I think I just loved it. I don't think I learned to love it, because if you learned to love it, I probably would have learned to love trading, and that just didn't happen. I just loved it. I loved the game of it. I loved the competitiveness of it. But also, there was a big collegiate aspect of it. My group was so great. We all worked just in rows, and so everybody was basically two rows, and everyone's backs were to each other.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:07:32]:
And whenever a new job came in, everyone just swiveled their chairs around. And then I think of like Suzanne Burbage be like, this job is hotter than anything in the entire world. And she'd get everyone stoked to work on her job. And we all had file folders and would go through our file cabinets to see which candidates we had for those jobs. It was just dynamic and fun and super engaging. And I don't know, it was just a lot of fun.

Benjamin Mena [00:07:54]:
Like, I know we have so much to cover, but I, I'm so curious of that. Like looking back at that now, looking at your firm, looking at like the other places you've been, like, how do you create that kind of atmosphere for your team?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:08:05]:
Jen made it fun. She would have competitions for us. She would. And they were little ones. But that's what I do for my team now is sometimes I give them individual competitions, sometimes team competitions, and just creating excitement around doing what you need to do. Because sometimes getting through 50 calls a day was a slog when you're 24 and potentially hungover or 24 and want to go to happy hour. So it was. And she would make it inspiring to get through it all.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:08:34]:
We had so much fun. And sometimes if you got a really. So we used to also meet all of our candidates in person back then, every single candidate we met in person. And when I first started recruiting, I used to spend an hour with each of my NCIS in person. And then I went to a training and Greg Dorschinger was there. I'm not sure if I just butchered his name. And I remember getting in an argument with him. I was 23, 24 years old as a rookie and he was telling me I was wasting too much time on NCIS.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:09:03]:
And he was 100% right. But I was emphatic that I was right and that he was completely wrong. Even though he was the one at the front of the room teaching everybody. And I was just this very precocious 23 year old that thought I'd figured it all out already.

Benjamin Mena [00:09:18]:
I gotta ask, you figured it out already? The age of 23. I think that's also like the perfect. You know, you start, you learned a bunch and then you're like, oh crap, I realize I know nothing. And then until you get to the expertise where you are now. But okay, so fast forward you like you did end up leaving that place and it was so awesome. Like why? Why'd you leave?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:09:37]:
Boston was not the place for me at all. And so when they opened a New York City office, I moved to New York City with two people, Brenda and Jason. And we opened the New York City office and we had just as much fun. So Brenda was just now my new gen and she created such a fun environment. We had other again, young 20 year olds that were just on the phone cold calling. We did everything. So when I moved to New York, my clients were L' Oreal and Ro Co. And Unilever.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:10:06]:
And we did everything under the sun. And I moved to accounting and finance because that's what Brenda did. And I was not supposed to come to New York. I just asked if I could come. And since I was a good recruiter, they were like, sure, go. But you're no longer going to do admins. You're going to have to figure out accounting and finance. So moved to New York, but then you're kind of the ugly stepsister.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:10:26]:
Everyone kind of forgot about us. Up in Boston, that's where all the founders were. And I really did want to become niche, so I moved, I left that firm, Brenda and Jen's firm, to join a very specific investment management focused recruiting agency.

Benjamin Mena [00:10:42]:
Okay.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:10:43]:
They did all accounting and operations there as well.

Benjamin Mena [00:10:46]:
And is that the niche that you kind of wanted to end up in because of your investment background?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:10:50]:
I think so. I really don't know what drew me to the investment management space because trading on the NASDAQ desk is very different than being at a hedge fund or a private equity firm, which is what the niche that I'm in now is. And I just found it very intriguing, I think, because there was part of me that thought maybe I should have been a quantitative analyst and that also would not have worked out. So it's adorable for me to think that that would have been a career path because I'm confident it would not have been. But I think because I thought maybe I could have been a quant in an investment fund, I just gravitated towards that industry.

Benjamin Mena [00:11:26]:
If you want a good laugh. I wanted to become an intel analyst for the military and I've now hired hundreds of them.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:11:32]:
Really?

Benjamin Mena [00:11:33]:
Yes.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:11:34]:
Interesting. Why? What is the. I'm so curious. You hire them for you or you hire.

Benjamin Mena [00:11:38]:
I mean, I've hired them as my niche, like within the recruiting, government contracting. But I was like, oh yeah. It's kind of. It's kind of funny like how like what you thought you want to be ends up being the place where you sometimes do spend some time recruiting.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:11:48]:
Right, right. Okay, that makes sense. Sorry, I misunderstood.

Benjamin Mena [00:11:51]:
All good, all good. Okay. So you went from there and then you decided to make the jump for Your own company?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:11:57]:
Yes.

Benjamin Mena [00:11:58]:
So we'll finally kick you out the door.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:11:59]:
So, Jen and Brenda, the firm I worked for, it was called Boston Networking Group and New York Networking Group. And as I described, it was the most wonderful environment. They did everything right by candidates, by clients, and really specifically by their employees. They put us first. Jen would give you jobs right out from underneath her, say, take this, work this, get the full fee, extremely generous. And they realized that the success of their team meant the success of themselves. And the firm I went to work for, that was in the investment management space, was the complete antithesis of that. And so I didn't realize just how different people operated their businesses.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:12:37]:
And while they talked about having tough owners or which can be fine and well and true, tough and greedy are two very different things. And tough and dishonest are also two different things. So I found a way to really run a business. And then I worked for a firm that was the opposite of the way I wanted to run a business. So I turned to one of my colleagues at that firm and said, this isn't the way it's supposed to be. You don't have to scream at candidates because they turned down your job or tell people, oh, they did really, really terrible things to candidates in particular. But clients do. I just knew it was the way.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:13:14]:
I did not want to have my name associated with it. So I talked to one of my colleagues, and I was like, I think we can do this, and I think we can do it better. And he believed me. And so we went out on our own and started Cardeo Group in 2009.

Benjamin Mena [00:13:27]:
And you're still young, but you started Cardea Group. It was your mid-20s.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:13:31]:
Technically, 27.

Benjamin Mena [00:13:32]:
Yes, 27. Like, looking back now, like, was that the perfect time for you to make the jump?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:13:40]:
Oh, for sure. We probably could have made it a year earlier. 2009 was a great year to do it. Danny Cahill was someone I had sought out for advice as to whether or not I should do it. And he had said, if you can start a business during a financial downturn or in a bad market, which was 2009, for sure, and you can be successful, you're gonna be far more successful in great markets. Right. If you can do it now, if you can cut your teeth now as a business owner, you're gonna be fine. And he was right.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:14:09]:
So maybe we should have started a year earlier. Cause it was an even worse market then. But I would not change a thing about what we did.

Benjamin Mena [00:14:17]:
So 2009, for anybody that's Young, that's listening. It was bad. How was that first year? How did you get the new business in one of the crappiest markets in, like, decades?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:14:30]:
So my very first job order came through Facebook from a buddy I went to college with. He sent me a message and said, I think you do recruiting in the finance space. I just joined this fund administrator. It was called the startus at the time, which has now been through a whole bunch of acquisitions, but it's now called Conifer. And no joke, the very first placement we made at Cardea Group still exists at Conifer today. Rosemary Gilchrist. She's there. We love her.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:14:59]:
So that was our first job. We got our first job the week we started the business and we made our first placement. So we started the business November 16th of 2009, and we made our first placement December 30th, 2009.

Benjamin Mena [00:15:12]:
I love that. Okay, so was the next placement hard or did they just start rolling in?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:15:16]:
I mean, yes, especially if you look at what we're doing today from a billings perspective. And what we thought was great back then is a bit laughable, but another one of my clients from New York Networking Group was the next client we had and asked us for an admin hire. So we did it. And then the second hire she asked us to do was a compliance hire. We had never done a compliance search in our lives. Didn't even know what it was, honestly. And talk about right place, right time. I know we're probably going to delve into this later, but that has now become my complete and exclusive niche within the investment management space.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:15:50]:
And I talk about a blessing. It was like we got into legal and compliance before it took off, so. And that was all thanks to an old client that called me up to say, I'd love to work with you again. What can we do here? So 2010 was a, you know, we did well. We also had a very, very big lawsuit chasing our tails.

Benjamin Mena [00:16:13]:
So are you allowed to talk about that?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:16:15]:
Sure.

Benjamin Mena [00:16:16]:
Just because I'm sure, like, other people have dealt with that too. Okay, so you guys start your firm and you had a lawsuit chasing after you guys.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:16:23]:
Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:16:24]:
Was it an NDA?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:16:26]:
It was a non compete.

Benjamin Mena [00:16:28]:
Okay. Non compete.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:16:29]:
Non compete. Yep. And we were the first people to leave that firm to start our own. And if I didn't, I'm not gonna completely disparage these people or I'm gonna try my best not to disparage them at all. But I had described what their business model was like previously, and that was just who they were as humans. So it's not surprising. They chased us for three years.

Benjamin Mena [00:16:50]:
Oh, three years.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:16:51]:
Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:16:53]:
I mean, so once you've dealt with a, like a lawsuit or two, you're like, okay, this, this sucks. But that was the first one that you were dealing with, right?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:17:00]:
This only one? Knock on wood. It's the only one I ever were out of.

Benjamin Mena [00:17:03]:
Knock on wood. So, like, dealing with the lawsuit is like, heavy on your shoulders. How did you guys, like, sit there and still, like, attack the business, Attack everything. Still chasing the dream wall is sitting there like, oh, crap. I got another email from a lawyer.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:17:16]:
Yes. So honestly, a young lady that I'm mentoring right now in the business called me yesterday because she was getting really stressed out about how she's doing. And I said to her, jessica, the only way to get out of your own head is get on the phones. That's it. So all we did, we were vigilant about our plans. We made plans every day. We made 50 cold calls a day. We did all the things that I make my recruiters that start off with me today do, which is plan deliberately and specifically execute unsaid plan and be conscious of your time and how you spend it.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:17:52]:
So I wouldn't sit there and sulk over a legal bill or new news from my lawyer every time it came in. Sure, I can't completely compartmentalize it would be there, but there's nothing that'll inspire you than the legal bills that follow a three year lawsuit. So we just went to work and we were really, in my humble opinion. And sure, the other firm probably has a very different opinion on this, but we were really polite. We stayed in our lane. We did our best to just let the business come to us and try not to touch their big relationships. There were relationships that I had had from my previous firm and then from the industry and being relatively social, like I had mentioned, my buddy Corey was our first client. And we ended up placing maybe 24 people with his firm over the next.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:18:37]:
I mean, not in that year. Certainly not in that year. That would have been lovely. But over the next eight years, we did. So we just fostered the relationships that we did have and tried to mind our business when it came to them.

Benjamin Mena [00:18:49]:
All right, so moving past that, I'm kind of curious. So, like, in your first few years, you got all sorts of different positions. I've heard you speak, I've talked to you. Like, why did you zone in on this legal and compliance lane?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:19:04]:
Sure. So as our business grew, Cardea Group and our niche within the Investment management space. And we did all these different verticals. We did at the end of one year, I want to say 2012, we did a look back to see what our fill ratios were of all the positions we worked on, and specifically administrative roles. We were filling one in 12. Because as anyone knows, that's hiring an admin assistant. You need a lot of agencies working on it because admins are typically unreliable. You want to see as many people as you can in the market, and no one agency has all the relationships with all the administrative assistants.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:19:37]:
So we were like, okay, no more admin. Once we cut that out, we saw our billings go up a fair amount. And then we did another look back, and when we realized that legal and compliance was taking a bigger and bigger portion of the pie, we realized that not switching between talking and recruiting a general counsel or a legal associate versus a controller or a management company accountant, staying in our lane, made everything much more seamless. And we became smarter and smarter. And then the people that were getting referred to for these legal and compliance roles, that as 29 or 2011, 2012, 2013, everything starts rolling along. They're becoming a bigger and bigger priority for these funds. It just made sense for us to zone in and become these specialists because at that time there really wasn't one. So we, we blazed a path that didn't really exist there before.

Benjamin Mena [00:20:30]:
So when you guys started blazing this path and started like, hey, we're going to become a specialist, like, how did you, like, tell the market? How did you network the market? How did you market map to really make that the focus?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:20:40]:
A lot of it was through referrals and word of mouth. A lot of it was npcing. So we would call these organizations that had perhaps a CFO or a coo, which stands for chief financial officer or chief operating officer, and they perhaps didn't have a chief compliance officer yet and pitched them a compliance officer because we knew one of those two folks were doing that job and didn't want it because there's actually personal liability associated with being a chief compliance officer. And so we just started peppering the market with, these are the people we know, and these are the people we place, and we have the best people in the market. So when you're ready to make that hire, you should be calling us. And then of course, you do a great job for one firm, they're talking to others. And the legal and compliance space is also some of the kindest people I've worked with in the industry. So I really gravitated towards them.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:21:28]:
And they're really kind with their referrals. So it was. It feels like it was natural, but we were very targeted in our approach and making sure that people knew we could cover these areas of focus for them.

Benjamin Mena [00:21:43]:
So you started focusing on this. This niche, like this whole space.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:21:47]:
Sure.

Benjamin Mena [00:21:47]:
And you guys have had the business, what is it, 14 years now or 16 years now? Yes, 16 years now. In that. When did you realize that you're like, okay, we have. We have a niche, but we need to narrow this niche down even more

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:22:02]:
to just legal and compliance. Yes. Probably nine years ago. So six, seven years in, we started taking less and less of the accounting, the operations, investor relations, the risk roles, because our time was just disjointed in terms of who we were talking to and the types of people we were recruiting. Whereas when we became extremely focused, insanely focused on legal and compliance, you could call the same people. And then the jobs that rolled in, you'd have multiple opportunities to showcase to these awesome candidates versus one candidate for this job and. Or one job for this candidate, one job for this candidate, et cetera. So the recyclability of opportunities or candidates to these different firms was very helpful.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:22:50]:
You got one great candidate, and you knew you could place them because you'd have four or five great roles.

Benjamin Mena [00:22:55]:
I've heard you talk about recyclability multiple times and how it is.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:23:00]:
It doesn't. It doesn't sound very flattering when you're speaking about humans in a recyclability way, but at the end of the day, it's true. We have a candidate right now who's in three processes, and he was looking all summer, didn't have any, and he's struggling with what do I do? But when it rains, it pours. And when you have all the opportunities and they finally come to market or become of urgent hiring priority for these firms, they now have options. So it's interesting. I'll never forget the May of 2020, when every firm, every firm just put all their hiring needs on hold because of COVID and we don't know if we're coming to the office. We have one candidate that had four competing offers through us, and every single one of my clients was asking me, what do I need to do to get him. I'll never forget.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:23:46]:
I wonder if he knows how infamous he is. In my mind. Infamous is not nice. How famous he is in my mind, because he had four offers in May of 2020, when everyone else was not sure if they were even gonna have a job in a Month.

Benjamin Mena [00:23:59]:
I gotta ask you this. So all four of those offers were from your clients?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:24:03]:
Yes.

Benjamin Mena [00:24:04]:
Like, how did you work that with. Did you tell everybody, like, hey, like, you know, this guy has an offer with one of my other clients? Or like, how did you play that?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:24:11]:
Yeah, of course we're very honest. And so again, at that point we were contingent. And you alluded to it at the beginning. We're now retained. But at that point, you know, our allegiance is to each client. I will present the best offer that you want to present. These are the figures. We do always have a sense as to where a candidate is leaning in terms of opportunities.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:24:29]:
So we knew what his top two were and what his bottom two were. And we told the bottom two. You know, just so you know, he's got two other opportunities he's much more keen on. If you want to make this really compelling, it's probably going to have to come in the stat status of financials. So here's what he's asking for from there, et cetera. And then the client ended up scoring him and he's still there today. My girlfriend ended up being the global head of HR for that shop. And she just called me one day, was like, what do I need to do? And I would have done that for anybody that called me to ask me that.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:25:05]:
But when you have, in her instance, she had the money to back whatever offer and whatever guarantees. At that point it was guaranteed money for 20, 20 compensation earnings that she had to guarantee him. And she did. So we just tell people, make your best and final because it's silly to play a game when you have someone that's very well liked in the industry and well compensated and going to be shown the love by somebody. So show them as much love as you can. Don't hold anything back.

Benjamin Mena [00:25:38]:
So you started off for many years you were a contingent firm.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:25:42]:
Correct.

Benjamin Mena [00:25:43]:
And then you slowly started moving into a little bit of engagement fee and then started playing around into, into retained and you're now fully retained. Can you talk about that, that transition from even just like contingent to contained and then from full on movement into retained?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:26:02]:
Yes, I can. So I have Pinnacle to thank for a lot of this because it hadn't really occurred to me that there was this in between the contained model or the engagement model where somebody pays an upfront fee that comes off of the final fee upon completion of the search. It was both Dani Cahill and Catherine Gerald who introduced this concept to me and it made a ton of sense. I remember Danny sharing a concept of a menu where clients want to see options and people want to pick an option, and more often than not, they like to pick the middle option. And so if you offer them contingent at one fee and engage at another fee and then retained at a third fee option, they're usually going to pick engaged. And then you have some sort of financial commitment from those clients, which is meaningful just because, as any contingent recruiter knows, you have clients that send you out to recruit on their role, and either they send you on a wild goose chase or they're not serious about the hire and say no to everybody, or they just completely ghost you and you put in hours of your time and that of your team's time for absolutely nothing in return. So I love the idea of, okay, at least we walk away with something. And then the reality of us going retained was I bought my business partner out in 2023, and at the same time, someone introduced me to another recruiting association called the International Retained Search association, ursa.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:27:34]:
And that's a smaller organization than Pinnacle, but several Pinnacle members are members of both. And they invited me to come and they were like, if you're thinking about going retained, consider this. So I went to that meeting and they had shared a lot of the intel about how they conducted their searches. And the reality is we were conducting our searches at the white glove level or white glove service level of retained search firms, but we weren't receiving those fees. So it made sense to me. I was just pretty strategic in not rolling that out. While I had a business partner, I was buying out to have him see how I was going to do that and how I was going to transition the organization to retain. So buying.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:28:18]:
Once he left, we actually did retrained, which is a coaching company, on moving from contingent to retained, and they're based in the UK and they were wonderful. So it was a process and it was exciting. Retrained is like an intense eight weeks of learning how to do this, but phenomenal. And the coaches are outstanding.

Benjamin Mena [00:28:43]:
Was there like one client that really, like, pushed you over the edge? Like, I'm, I need to do retained.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:28:48]:
I would say there's more than one, honestly think. I mean, I've had at that point, 18 years of recruiting experience. Of course, there was more than one client that pushed me over the edge and it was the people that were, I need to hire, I need to hire. Urgency, urgency. Get me these people, get me these. And you stop, drop and do everything to get them people and crickets for weeks or months. And it's this. I'm not going to say it's a disrespect for me because I know these people actually respect me.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:29:21]:
It's like they don't have an appreciation for this is my livelihood, this is my job. And when you ask me to stop, drop and roll to do whatever you need me to do and I do it for nothing in return, not even a response is a waste of my time, energy, and it's prohibiting me from doing business with people who are serious. And so retained search aligns you with people who are serious about making the hires and who wouldn't want that. And they also believe in your value prop. And again, now that we're so niche, I know I don't just know the players they want to hire, I can also warn them of the players they don't want to hire. Right.

Benjamin Mena [00:29:58]:
For those that don't understand the retain model, it's like, how does pricing, like, how does that work?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:30:05]:
So there's a financial commitment upfront. We typically ask for 40% upfront, then 40% upon acceptance of a short list, and then the remainder, which is not always 20% because maybe they hired somebody less than the. Because it's. All of the 40% are based off of anticipated total compensation for the individual. And then the remainder is paid upon completion of the search. And, and I think that's what you're asking, is there more?

Benjamin Mena [00:30:31]:
That's exactly. And like, how'd you, how'd you get the structure of like the anticipated salary versus like, you know, many times like just basic first year salary or you know, base salary or something. How did you weave that into your contract? Like, I anticipate the salary is going to be xyz. Like how do I bill on that?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:30:46]:
The target comp, that was another Danny Cahill nugget of information, but that was much earlier. We did that with searches. So I have done these seminars where I've talked about how my billings have increased over the years and there are little things that I've learned along the way that have major impact. And billing off of first year total target comp is a huge one because especially coming from admin recruiting, you were just billing off of base salary. But the reality is, specifically in the investment management space, people's total comp is largely bonus dependent. So. So we were leaving a lot on the table for these individuals who were extremely high performers and expected to earn usually at least double their base salary. It made no sense that we were only tying our fee to just the base.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:31:37]:
So we go off of target comp because it's the reality of what their compensation package looks like.

Benjamin Mena [00:31:43]:
So that was a lesson that you had to learn over time then, right?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:31:45]:
Oh, absolutely. And don't like looking back at what our billings would have been all those other years, but it's okay. That's like the beautiful part about recruiting is that you're constantly learning how to improve a host of things, whether it's your engagement skills, your business development skills, your negotiation skills, framing, your pitch skills. And that's something we learned. And again, I don't begrudge any of my beginnings. Could I have earned more and be retired? Probably still no. But I'd at least be sitting a little more comfortably.

Benjamin Mena [00:32:17]:
You mentioned earlier in the episode that you were already doing a white glove service. Like, you were almost already like doing the level of retained search compared to like the average contingency search. We hear this white glove all the time. What does white glove actually mean?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:32:30]:
To me, it could be very different than somebody else. So to me, it is a high touch approach to both clients and candidates. It is not just throwing a whole bunch of people at a client and saying, who do you want to pick? Without giving them any sort of color as to why we think they're a really strong fit for the role. What are the intangibles that you can't see on a resume that speak to the company's culture? It's knowing the real motivations of these candidates. We're not a high volume place. We are a high quality place. So to me, that's white glove service. It's making sure that the people you are aligning with and the clients you are aligning with, you're giving them the very best experience and the very best candidates and the most reach within a market without diluting the quality of the individuals in which you're providing them to.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:33:22]:
So we're very big on saying no. We say no a lot to searches, many searches every year, even in bad years. Yes, we say I've said no to searches this year. I know it's been a tough year for a lot of firms, but if I don't have the capacity, I'm not going to take on the search. If I don't think you're going to be, even if you're willing to pay me a retainer, if I don't think you're going to be a strong partner to us because your value prop, your employee value prop is not strong or your reputation isn't strong, we will say no. We'll gladly bow out.

Benjamin Mena [00:33:53]:
Have you ever had to? I Mean, this is mostly for those listening, like, pull out of a retainer. Like, hey, like, we. We can't work this rule.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:34:00]:
We haven't. We have a client right now. We've waffled on this. And it's because what they think exists in the market under their comp structure and what their employee value prop is, doesn't exist in this market. And there's a big misalignment. I probably should have had my recruiter nip this in the bud many, many months ago when it became obvious that one of the things you do when you are retained is you're offering your clients a process, not a placement. Luckily, all of our processes have resulted in executed searches. This is one where we delivered on the process.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:34:42]:
There hasn't been an executed search because what they think exists for them doesn't exist. And it's just unreasonable expectations and extremely low comp.

Benjamin Mena [00:34:54]:
Oh, that's always the worst. Like, I'm gonna be honest with you. I really believe that 2026 is your year. I truly believe in you. I truly believe with everything in my heart that this is the year that you can own it. This is the year that you could hit your dreams. And to help you do that, we are kicking off a summit called this is your year. You are elite.

Benjamin Mena [00:35:17]:
You were born out to be elite. You were born to be the best. You were born to be the greatest. And I'm pulling together some of the industry's best speakers to help you get there. Going to be kicking off April 27th. You do not want to miss this. Make sure to run to the show, notes, get registered. All the live sessions are free.

Benjamin Mena [00:35:35]:
I'm bringing in Mike Williams, Brianna Rooney, Mark Whitby. We have an entire week of stacked speakers that are going to help you achieve your dreams. This is going to be the industry event that you do not want to miss. I believe in you. I believe in you so much that I'm pulling the best to help you achieve your dreams. 2026 is your year. Where do you come up with these numbers?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:36:03]:
Sometimes, like, it's tough. And they've changed the job many times. I think we've had six pivots. It was something. Again, this is probably us overextending the White Glove service. Like, okay, we'll accommodate. We'll accommodate. But we've again learned our lesson that in the future, should something like this happen, we will nip this in the bud much sooner because we've tolerated and allowed this behavior.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:36:25]:
So they believe this still exists and that we will continue to work on it. And the reality is I'm not sure we're going to find a result. They have. They have anyways. I won't get into the details.

Benjamin Mena [00:36:36]:
Yeah, don't get into the details on this one. So what were some of the biggest challenges that you guys had to go through? From going from contingent and contained all the way to 100% retained?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:36:46]:
I think everyone assumes that the hardest part is converting existing clients to the retainer model. But if you have a very strong reputation and relationship with these people, they get it. I think it's more intimidating. Similar to the conversation we have with candidates before they resign. The anticipation of resigning is far worse than actually resigning. And so the anticipation of telling my clients, hey, I would love to take this on. I can't do this the way we've done this in the past. Let me walk you through my new model and why this works and why it works more effectively went far better than I ever would have imagined.

Benjamin Mena [00:37:26]:
Good to know. I think you hit it. Right. The anticipation of the conversation, you just overthink it.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:37:33]:
Absolutely. There was one client that we had worked with, Oof, I want to say, in 2021, and unfortunately, we had two turndowns for their opportunity at that point. One accepted a counteroffer. The other candidate just blatantly lied and moved to Arizona, so didn't take the jobs. And so they were really upset with us at that time. We were working contingent. They decided to go a different direction, use another agency. I felt awful.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:38:00]:
I know they didn't feel great about it either because we worked really hard on these searches. We just had two unfortunate circumstances, and they came back to us late last year with an opening. And I explained to them how our business model had changed and how we were now retained. And so this is now not just talking to an old client, but an old client that had what I would consider a bad experience with us because we had two turndowns. Not a bad experience in terms of our relationship because they obviously enjoyed working with us. But it wasn't my favorite record to show or to speak to, even on a live podcast. But it's the reality. And they came back to us, and I shared with them, this is our new model.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:38:39]:
And they bought in and they made three hires through us since then.

Benjamin Mena [00:38:44]:
Oh, wow, that's amazing.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:38:45]:
All through the retainer model. And again, I pitched this to a client that didn't love our contingency bottle. But now we've got believers in the retain model, and they call it their dream team because they hired three People on this legal and compliance team through us in the past year. And I'm so happy because I love the hiring managers I was working with. And I'm sorry, grateful they gave us another opportunity to. I don't want to say right or wrong because again, some of this does not fall on our shoulders. Some of it does. But to course correct and get them the real dream team.

Benjamin Mena [00:39:15]:
You've said multiple times during this, this interview, this conversation about relationships, how are you keeping these relationships so good? Is it like events that you go to? Do you see them in person all the time? Like, how do you make sure you're having good relationships as a recruiter with your clients in your industry and your network?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:39:33]:
Well, first of all, I love relationships and I love people. I love people. You can ask any of my friends from college. I am the person that keeps in touch with everybody. My friends from home. I just organized my entire 25th high school reunion because I love being united and staying in touch with the people in my orbit. Being in touch is so important to me. I am fueled by people.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:39:54]:
There are people that are completely depleted after a night out with a whole bunch of people they don't know. I am so energized by this, it's insane. So I do a lot of events. I live in New York City. I have the huge benefit of living in New York City, being in the epicenter of legal compliance professionals within the investment management space. And I've made a very focused effort to host a lot of events. So this year, I hosted two separate events with another executive recruiter who does work in the exact same vertical as me, so in the same niche, but she focuses on investment professionals and marketing professionals, and I focus on legal compliance. So we're not competing.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:40:33]:
As a matter of fact, we refer each other business. And she and I hosted two different fireside chats or informational sessions. One was this past Tuesday. And we're getting together people in our industry because one of the things I would suggest to anyone that's trying to figure out, like, how do I host an event? What am I talking about? What am I doing? First of all, everyone loves a happy hour. So I do plenty of just plain old fun, social happy hours. What I also realized at a Pinnacle event was some of the education that I can offer these people is not by having a phenomenal general counsel that I interview and give all these other general counsels advice. People want to know what I see, what I'm hearing, what trends are in the market, what's going on with Compensation, who's hiring, what level, how are they buying out Carry, how are they retaining their top professionals in such a competitive market? And I didn't realize that until I was at a Pinnacle meeting maybe two years ago and someone said, you're the expert that you need at these events. And so that's where this concept came from.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:41:33]:
The woman I host these with, her name is Robin Judson. She's phenomenal. And we've had smaller groups of people that have come to join us and it's been tremendously meaningful because they take value out of it and they see the value that we create in the market as well.

Benjamin Mena [00:41:47]:
And you're seeing like huge benefits for your recruiting business because of these events and because you're actually being involved in seeing these people and going deeper on these relationships.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:41:56]:
I think so because people realize I'm not just somebody cold calling and talking about a job or pitching them a candidate. I am a human that is kind and generous and knowledgeable and care about what I'm doing and I think that that matters. They realize at the end of the day I'm just human. And so they don't feel as I'm not salesy, like I'm not sitting there telling people like when you're going to hire, you better call me. Those words would never come out of my mouth. I'm just there to be a resource because when you consistently demonstrate value to the network in which you're providing a service to, they will naturally come to you because you've been demonstrating value through whatever it is, LinkedIn content. I'm very big on these events. I'm very big on.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:42:43]:
And so I just think making yourself available to them. When they ask me for advice on their brother who's just graduating college, what should he be doing? Or their friend's neighbor, you know, when you just demonstrate value and add value and pay it forward, I think it comes back tenfold and I would do it anyways because it makes me feel better. Yes, recruiting is a lot about relationships and working on high profile jobs, but it's also about helping and absolutely making some meaningful impacts on people's lives.

Benjamin Mena [00:43:14]:
So we recruiters have such an impact on people's lives. Like you just said that right there. Some of the biggest decisions we're actively involved with, but we only have 24 hours in a day. How do you manage like all that? Like, who do you talk to? Who do you handle? Like, how do you handle this? Because like being a recruiter, I'm sure people reach out to you all the time for everything. Especially like other recruiters reaching out to you, like, hey, Annie, can you help me out?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:43:40]:
Yes, all the time. It's, I think calendar blocking is something I recently learned I've always known about time blocking. Calendar blocking meaning, or defensive calendar blocking, I think is what she called it. Defensive calendaring, where you block out time, where it's just for you and what you need to do. Because as a business owner, I am pulled in so many directions. I've got management questions from my team, I've got administrative questions from insurance providers or payroll, whatever the case may be. I have clients that need me. And now as a retained search firm, I have weekly steering meetings with each of my clients.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:44:14]:
Every week I'm getting on the phone or getting on a video call to walk them through. Here's who we're looking at, here's who's progressing through the process. That alone, the steering meetings, given how many clients, I have a half hour for each per week. That's hours of my time that's dedicated to my clients that I have promised I will deliver on. So I think it's impossible for someone to answer that and say I've done it, I've mastered that because I haven't. And it is hard to know. But what I do say, and I wish people understood this, is that if I am picking up the phone to call you, knowing that I used to call 50 people a day, if I am calling you now, you should definitely pick up because there is a reason and it's a darn good one if I'm calling you these days because it either means I have a super high profile job you need to listen to or a phenomenal candidate that you're going to want to hear about because I don't have time to waste on anything but things that are quote unquote closest to the money or worthy of that dial.

Benjamin Mena [00:45:12]:
I love that. And you mentioned about like just all the things you're handling as a team, like you're, you're a high producing recruiter, but you've also, I think, like, I think you mentioned one of your recruiters, like within two years of working with you is hitting that million dollar mark.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:45:26]:
She's pretty close.

Benjamin Mena [00:45:28]:
Like super close. Like I'm kind of curious, like how, how do you juggle being that, you know, the manager being the, the top biller, but also growing an elite team,

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:45:39]:
that's also a struggle. I don't think it comes easy. And I really believe it depends on the talent that you have because you can't create urgency or desire in the people that you hire, you need to hire the people that want it. And I just was very lucky. Jen Keane, the person I referenced at the very beginning of this podcast, my first mentor, introduced me to the young lady that you're referencing right now. How small of a world is that? How full circle? And she's just a powerhouse. She listens, she retains, and she executes, and she wants it, and she likes it. She also feels like she found her passion early.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:46:21]:
I think if you really know you want this job, it is so easy to do it and do it well, as long as you are aligned with. With an organization and a manager that has similar values and drive as you. Because if you're. If you have that passion and you have that drive, but you're aligned with someone that's on the tail end of their career or maybe has just a very pessimistic view of the world, and you're this blooming optimist, like, it's a misalignment in terms of being. So she and I are very much in lockstep in terms of how we view the world, how we treat the world, how we want to change the world for the better, and that. That camaraderie and that sort of mentorship of having someone that wants to do everything as best they can, doing right by people, but also hustling is. Is a hard combination. So I really think it depends on.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:47:13]:
On who you hire, and I don't think any manager can do that without having the right staff underneath them.

Benjamin Mena [00:47:19]:
Okay, and how do you mentor somebody? Like, if they. When they have those characters, how do you mentor them to become that elite recruiter?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:47:29]:
A lot of shadowing. I think that's what's made her extremely successful, is she would listen to all my cold calls, all my client calls, all my debriefs, all my preps, all my new candidate interviews, my intakes, my rolling out an offer. It's. It is understanding the language, the tone, the discussion, figuring out why I asked the questions when I asked the question. She's also bright. Like, she figured out why I asked those questions because they're not obvious. I think a lot of recruiters just ask the questions that somebody told them to do. And I read between every line, I pick up on the smallest tweaks in somebody's voice, a different use of a word that they've used in the past or a word they've never used in the past that all of a sudden triggers.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:48:18]:
I'm extremely attentive to Language and their emotional state. Whenever I'm speaking with people and talking

Benjamin Mena [00:48:27]:
about mentorship, a little more like, you know, you had a great mentor with your first company. Have you had like a mentor within the last five, six years that's had a good impact on you or is it just like the environment that you're in around Pinnacle?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:48:39]:
Well, certainly the Pinnacle members have been phenomenal and I have turned to them for many, many issues. Danny Cahill has been my mentor since I first met 2006 and I was at a rookie training in his office in Cheshire, Connecticut and I more or less forced him to be my mentor. I was like a. I basically just like latched on and wouldn't let go. And he assumed me as a mentee, I suppose. But he's been wonderful and often answers so many of my questions. There are people that are wired so differently that can answer, that can come up with rebuttals to objections and the very specific client or candidate objections that no one but Danny Cahill can handle. Maybe Jordan Taylor of Retrained, he's a very close second.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:49:32]:
But it's the way those two, their minds think is unbelievable. I couldn't come up with these things. And Jen Meyer, I'll give Jen Meyer has given me some really good tips as well. At a Pinnacle. She's phenomenal. So, yeah, I, I believe that having a mentor, someone that you can work with and speak to and kind of ping pong ideas off of is so important in this industry because nobody has all the answers. And there's always two human elements to any deal and no two humans are alike and no two scenarios are going to be the same because of the human elements.

Benjamin Mena [00:50:07]:
You've been in this business for a while. Has there been any like crazy things that have surprised you within this last year, like in the deal making process?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:50:14]:
Oh yeah. I feel like there have been so many things this year that have been outside the norm. So I'll tell you two, really, I don't know how much time we have, so I apologize if I'm just hogging all the time over here, but two of the crazy things that I saw this year for the very first time in all my recruiting, one of my clients was recruiting out of a direct competitor of theirs and the CEO of the hiring firm. My client said that before the candidate they want to hire out of their direct competitor could accept, he had to hear out a counteroffer. Yeah, exactly. Eyebrow lift. I have never heard that in my life. It was bonkers to me.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:50:54]:
And lo and behold, he Took the counter offers. A real bad situation it was. But never have I ever had to instruct a candidate to listen to authentically a counteroffer. And he took it anyway. So that was one. Number two was another one of my clients didn't want to buy out their, the hire's bonus, which is fine. It's normal. So normally if you don't want to buy somebody's bonus out, you wait for them to receive the bonus and then they join thereafter instead.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:51:23]:
In this circumstance, he said, well, why don't you have him resign? And if he's a good leaver, they'll probably give him a part of his bonus. To which I said, what are you talking about? Because I had never heard the phrase good lever before. He said, well, if people leave our firm and they're a good lever, if they're leaving in October, we'll give them, you know, 10 twelfths of what they were anticipated to earn. I said, I have never heard of this in all of my life. And he looked at me like I had eight heads. I looked at him like he had eight heads because I'd never heard this. And basically they structured an offer where whatever his firm wouldn't pay him, they would pay him the difference. And so he could have potentially earned more if he got a lot of money from his firm, but he could have potentially earned less if his firm paid him $0.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:52:12]:
So our candidate basically said, no, thank you, I'm just going to get my bonus and join in the new year. Because he's a compliance officer, of course he's cautious and I don't blame him because I have never heard of anyone giving partial bonuses. But I ended up pressure testing this with my fireside chat earlier this week. And apparently there are firms that do good lever bonuses. Not all that's crazy and not many, but it's, it's my, my client was not, was not fibbing to me, it does exist in this world. I just don't think it exists in the volume in which he thought so.

Benjamin Mena [00:52:46]:
So before we jump over to the quick fire questions, I have a quick question that to go deeper on something, but is there anything else that you want to go deeper on before?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:52:55]:
No. I mean, I feel like I've spent a lot of time talking about very random things. So unless there's anything I want to

Benjamin Mena [00:53:02]:
hear, your questions going back to this is just for like the listeners on the retained side of the house. You say that they're buying a system and a process compared to just the placement.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:53:10]:
Correct.

Benjamin Mena [00:53:13]:
What does that look like when you're pitching it?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:53:16]:
What does the pitch look like or what does the actual process look like?

Benjamin Mena [00:53:19]:
What does the pitch and the process look like?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:53:22]:
It's not exactly one and the same. So the pitch is that in going retained we can get to a. From launch of search to conclusion of search. So acceptance of an offer, we will reduce the time by up to 30%. Our average launch of search to acceptance of search is 52 days as compared to. I forget. Exactly. Maybe closer to 67 when we were on a contingent model.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:53:48]:
The other thing is that we expedite the entire process through video recordings. So we will do a recorded first round interview for all submissions. So for that long list that we submit for them to select a short list from, that long list has both resume profile, outline as to why we think they're a good fit for the firm, et cetera, all the details there. But also a recorded interview which is typically between eight and 12 minutes long, where the client has constructed three to five questions that we ask each candidate. So they are tailored to the client's needs. They can come up with the questions. We volunteer ideas, we oftentimes workshop a few together and it helps reduce up to five to eight hours of interviewing time throughout the process. So that's also what helps get to speed.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:54:36]:
But it also bridges the gap between the candidate as a human and their resume. Because as anyone who's recruited or hired someone in the past, what you see on a resume is not always a story. And within a couple of minutes you can often tell if that's going to be the right cultural fit, personality fit. And so this bridges a gap. The client doesn't have to necessarily meet them. We have my colleague, Jessica, does all these recorded interviews. She does these meetings and then they get to determine whether or not they want to pull them through their process. So it saves tons of time on the hiring side.

Benjamin Mena [00:55:09]:
Absolutely love that. So I'm going to jump over to the quick fire questions and they don't need to be quick answers. Okay.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:55:14]:
Okay.

Benjamin Mena [00:55:15]:
So you have a brand new recruiter that Nicole called you or walked in the office. I want to work for you. But here's the thing. If you can give me one piece of advice to have a successful career that kind of looks like yours, what advice would you give me?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:55:29]:
Work harder and smarter than anybody around you. Because if you're following what I'm doing or what Mary's doing, my other height performing recruiter, then all you have to do is work as smart and as hard as us and the rest will follow. So don't skip corners. Do the reps pay attention. And the one thing I will also tell them is I can't want it for you. You need to want this on your own.

Benjamin Mena [00:55:54]:
What about a recruiter that hits you up and they're like, I'm good, but I want to go elite? What's your advice to them?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:56:02]:
Get sharp in whatever that niche is. If you want to be elite, then you need to create the personal brand or the company brand around being elite. So that means being extremely attentive to both candidates and clients, not one or the other. Knowing your market inside and out, and being able to add value to every conversation that you enter.

Benjamin Mena [00:56:25]:
Has there been a book that's had a huge impact on your career?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:56:29]:
I love Atomic Habits. I also recently read the other 90% for like the fourth time, which is hilarious because it's about how most people only use 10% of their brain, but I have to keep rereading it. So I love self help bugs. Those are the books that I will read otherwise and probably the ones that anyone would resonate with anyways.

Benjamin Mena [00:56:52]:
What does the Pinnacle society mean to you?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:56:56]:
Community support. Idea generation, Ingenuity. Innovation. Being surrounded by people who are better than you. Something that a lot of pinnacle people say, and this is the first time it's ever going to come out of my mouth, but they always say iron sharpens iron, and it's true. So when you come out of these meetings, you realize you've just been surrounded by powerhouse recruiters or who have refined their tasks and refine their businesses and have mastered the art of recruiting. And we're all constantly learning from each other. So it's just an incredible group of humans who care deeply about who you are as a human.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:57:36]:
They also are passionate about the industry in a way that not everybody's passionate about our industry, but we certainly are and will help you in a pinch. I think just having the access to these brilliant minds, all of which have had different experiences that can culminate to help you come up with a solution, is phenomenal.

Benjamin Mena [00:57:55]:
Do you have a favorite tech tool?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:57:58]:
Ooh, great question. I mean, I use ChatGPT every single day. I love it. I will always love it. LinkedIn I cannot live without. Talk about a lifeline. I. I actually probably could live without it, but it has become my social media platform which I'm constantly posting.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:58:16]:
I'm just constantly posting on for top of mind awareness. So that's been really meaningful to me. I want to tell you the coolest one that Rich Rosen shared with at a Pinnacle Society meeting. I tell everybody about this. I told the owners of my gym about this, and he was mind was blown because he was coming up with, like, business ideas. I've told my sisters about this. It's phenomenal. It's called Prompt Cowboy.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:58:37]:
AI. Do you know about this, Ben?

Benjamin Mena [00:58:39]:
No, I don't.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:58:40]:
Oh, my God. Okay.

Benjamin Mena [00:58:41]:
Rich hasn't told me. I just. I was just talking with Rich too.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:58:44]:
Is a gatekeeper. That is rude. No. So Prompt Cowboy is an AI tool that helps refine your prompt. So you'd put in whatever your prompt that you would Normally plop into ChatGPT or Claude or whatever you use, and it gives you a better prompt so that when you pull their prompt over to chat, it's so refined and it has so much detail. It's basically, it says like, here's your lazy prompt. Sorry. And then it's like, here's a good prompt, or here's like a cowboy prompt.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:59:13]:
I don't know what it calls it. And then you put that over. It's phenomenal. So that is a free tool. Everyone should use it. It's so cool.

Benjamin Mena [00:59:20]:
I am kind of curious, like, what do you use for the videos for your clients? Do you just zoom calls and record them?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:59:26]:
Hinterview. Actually, I probably should give a little shout out to Hinterview as well. So it's a platform that's intended for that, as the title describes Hinterview, it's for recorded interviews between candidates and clients.

Benjamin Mena [00:59:40]:
So you've been in this business for a while. You've had your own firm for a while, you've hired people, you've done a lot. What is one of the biggest challenges that you've had to walk through and work through?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [00:59:48]:
Knowing when to pivot. So whether it was from contingent to retain. But I mean, the honest to God truth is knowing when to say, I don't want to be business partners anymore. That was truly the most challenging.

Benjamin Mena [01:00:02]:
I'm sure that's a, you know, hard conversation to have.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [01:00:05]:
Probably weren't expecting that. So sorry. Woof. But it was. It's hard. It's. It's hard to know when to pivot when you've outgrown something. So we outgrew contingency.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [01:00:13]:
I outgrew my business partner. You outgrow employees, you outgrow processes. Sometimes I think it's knowing when to

Benjamin Mena [01:00:20]:
let go with everything that you know. Now if you got a chance to go back and have a conversation with yourself, we'll say early on in your Career. What advice would you tell yourself?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [01:00:30]:
Younger me. Okay, Bill on total compensation. Just do it. You will be very thankful for this later. And honestly, I would have joined, I would have applied for Pinnacle far sooner than I did. That was something Danny told me time and time and time again. And I just did not see the benefit, obviously, because I had made him be my mentor. So I thought I had access to it all and I probably did.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [01:00:56]:
But there's a whole different element in being a part of Pinnacle. So I would have said, Bill on Total comp. Become more specialized sooner and look into associations that will help you master your craft in far more rapid fashion than otherwise.

Benjamin Mena [01:01:13]:
I love that. So you're active on LinkedIn. You're active in the recruiting community. I've seen you talk. I've seen you, like, share. You've been on podcasts before with all that. I'm sure you probably get hit up by recruiters like, hey, what about this? What's the best mpc? What's working for business development? Like, all these questions are tactical, but within all the questions you get, do you ever just wonder, like, hey, like, I wish you would just ask this question, but nobody ever does. What would that question be? What would be that answer?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [01:01:43]:
What should I stop doing? What should I stop doing to increase my billings? Or yes, what should I stop doing to increase my billings? That's what people should be asking. Everyone's always asking, like, what should I do? What tools should I have? What more should I be doing? And we're in this world of insatiability in terms of tools and what we do. And I feel like one of the best things anybody can do is buy back their time. That's a big Dan Martell book as well. And I, I love Dan Martell. I think he's got phenomenal business advice, is instead of figuring out what more you can do, dial it back. What should I stop doing that's going to make me a better recruiter? That's what people should be asking, I think.

Benjamin Mena [01:02:24]:
Well, two last questions. I'll let you go if somebody wants to follow you. How do they go about doing that?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [01:02:29]:
I'm on LinkedIn. I think I'm LinkedIn.com Colabella. I secured that real early because I was a LinkedIn guru early on. I'm also@thecardeagroup.com and I'm pretty easy to find. Andrea Colabella is not the most famous name. There's somebody in Italy with the same name, though, and he's a gentleman. I have a man's name Only in Italy, though.

Benjamin Mena [01:02:54]:
Yes, only in Italy. And so before I let you go, is there anything else to share with the listeners?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [01:03:02]:
I would just say that if you love recruiting and you found your passion but you're not aligned with the person you're working for or want to go out and start something on your own, you can always reach out to me. I'm happy to offer the advice as to what managers I would seek out or what qualities I'd be looking out for in a future boss, or what types of entities or organizations I'd try to align myself with. And if you wanted to start your own thing, I have a very long list of things not to do.

Benjamin Mena [01:03:26]:
You know somebody's gonna be asking you for that list.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [01:03:27]:
That's fine. The long one. No, it's not that long. But there are things to do and things not to do.

Benjamin Mena [01:03:33]:
I just wanna say thank you for coming on and sharing. First of all, it's, you know, it's been awesome to chat with you over the time that I've gotten to know you, but just like watching you and how you've pivoted. Pivot, pivot, pivot, pivot. And you've gotten stronger every single time. It's lessons to absolutely learn and take away. So I just want to say thank you for sharing for the listeners.

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [01:03:55]:
Appreciate it.

Benjamin Mena [01:03:55]:
Keep crushing it. If you need a pivot, make the pivot. Just like she did. Make the pivot. Whether it's yourself, your desk, your business, your career. Because guess what? Once you're on the other side of that pivot, things will be so much better for you. Right?

Andrea (Annie) Colabella [01:04:09]:
You know, we tell candidates all the time that change is hard right ahead of their resignations. We say change is hard and it's uncomfortable. But man, the heights you can reach on the other side, Phenomenal. So do it.

Benjamin Mena [01:04:23]:
Crush it, guys. Talk to you soon. 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.

Benjamin Mena [01:04:45]:
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. 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.

Benjamin Mena [01:05:20]:
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@reruitwithatlas.com thanks for listening to this episode of the Elite Recruiter Podcast with Benjamin Mena. If you enjoyed, hit, subscribe and leave a rating.