Laid Off At 5 Weeks Postpartum. $1.3 Million In 2.5 Years
Key Takeaways
- Julia Arpag built Aligned Recruitment to $1.3 million in revenue and 30 clients in just two and a half years while working only 30 hours a week.
- She achieved this incredible success starting from scratch without any prior sales experience after being laid off at five weeks postpartum.
- Instead of focusing solely on money, Julia optimizes her business for both time and personal freedom.
- Her growth strategy leverages an audience of 74,000 on LinkedIn combined with a strategic DM and voice note sequence to drive discovery calls.
- She emphasizes serving rather than selling, which removes anxiety and builds genuine trust with prospective clients.
- Investing in multiple coaches to fill specific business gaps and learning from expensive mistakes were crucial parts of her entrepreneurial journey.
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-workshop.heysummit.com/
Julia Arpag was laid off at five weeks postpartum with a newborn, a toddler, and two teenage foster sons at home. Two and a half years later, as she tells it, Aligned Recruitment has closed $1.3 million in revenue and 30 clients while she works 30 hours a week. And she built all of it having never sold a single thing in her life before starting the firm.
This talk is pulled straight from the Elite Recruiter Community library as a primer for Finish The Year Strong, where Julia is coming back with a brand new session. It is the rare talk where she steps back from tactics and lays out the ten principles underneath everything: optimizing for time and money instead of money alone, hiring multiple coaches for different gaps, building an audience of 74,000 on LinkedIn, and the DM plus voice note sequence that turns profile views into discovery calls. She walks through the five CRM categories she works for just twenty minutes a day, why warm leads are the closest to the money strategy in the entire business, and how aiming to serve instead of sell keeps the anxiety out of your voice on every call.
She also gets honest about the expensive misses, including a $30,000 mastermind that produced zero closed leads, and why she would still rather try and miss than sit frozen waiting for the perfect move. If you are heading into the final quarter wondering whether you can build a real firm without sacrificing your family, your health, or your sanity, this is the mindset reset before the summit.
The year is not written yet. Register for Finish The Year Strong 2026 and catch Julia's next talk live.
🎯 Finish The Year Strong 2026: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/
🤖 The Recruiting Agents Workshop: https://the-recruiting-agents-workshop.heysummit.com/
⚡ Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/
🔗 Julia Arpag LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julia-arpag/
👥 Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community
📩 Newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscrib
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Julia Arpag and what is her recruiting background?
Julia Arpag is the founder of Aligned Recruitment who built a million-dollar recruiting firm after being laid off five weeks postpartum, despite having no prior sales experience.
How much revenue has Julia Arpag's firm generated?
Aligned Recruitment has closed $1.3 million in revenue across 30 clients in just two and a half years while operating on a 30-hour work week.
What is Julia Arpag's strategy for getting clients on LinkedIn?
Julia leverages an audience of 74,000 followers on LinkedIn and uses a specific direct message and voice note sequence to turn profile views into discovery calls.
CEO
Julia Arpag is the cofounder and CEO of Aligned Recruitment. Her company specializes in hiring for startups in the tech industry. She started Aligned Recruitment in August 2023, scaled it to half a million in revenue by April 2024, and isn't slowing down. She is also a foster parent to two teen boys, a mom to two little boys, a wife, and a transplant to Atlanta from New York. Her "why" is her faith, her family, and getting to literally change lives for her clients and candidates.
