Your Next Hire Shouldn't Be a Recruiter

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. One of the things in our pregame, you kind of told me that hiring a go-to-market person for a recruiting company might actually be more important than hiring another recruiter.

Benjamin Mena [00:00:49]:
I mean, that's a bold statement. Please explain that to me. What the hell is GTM? And why are recruiters seeing it and hearing it all over the place?

Reyhan Khan  [00:00:58]:
GTM in broader context is go-to-market for anything, and it's— 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.

Benjamin Mena [00:01:21]:
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Benjamin Mena [00:01:55]:
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Benjamin Mena [00:02:29]:
Don't miss the future of recruitment. Get started with Atlas today and unlock your exclusive listener offer at recruitwithatlas.com. I'm excited about this episode of the Elite Recruiter Podcast because I've been hearing it nonstop. GTM, GTM, GTM. What the hell is GTM? Why is it becoming so important for not just tech companies but recruiters? So excited to have my guest today who is actually an expert in the space to tell me and share with me what the hell is it, like, why is it actually important nowadays? You know, it's 2026. So, Rayhan, welcome to the podcast.

Reyhan Khan  [00:03:06]:
Thank you so much, Ben. Thanks for having me. And yeah, that's kind of how, why I got into the space as well. I would love to tell you more, but I'm excited to be here.

Benjamin Mena [00:03:13]:
All right. Quick 30-second self-introduction.

Reyhan Khan  [00:03:16]:
Okay. So I'm a systems and operations expert who over the last 4 years has gotten into systems for recruiters and now helps recruiters set up GTM systems as well as place people, offshore talent that runs those GTM systems for them. So I'm trying to give recruiters the full suite of systems as well as the team that they need to kind of scale confidently in this rapidly changing space where there's a new system almost every single day.

Benjamin Mena [00:03:43]:
Yeah, talk about new system every day. Yeah, I actually had one of my good buddies, Jay Bernard, who's actually going to be speaking in the Spring Conference, hit me up. I was like, you need to talk to Rayan. And I'm like, talk to him about what? Don't worry, just talk to him about this go-to-market thing. And like, I know it's stuff that we've talked about at some of our summits, especially the AI one, but my God, things are just moving so fast. So let's, let's Let's take a few steps back. What the hell is GTM and why are recruiters seeing it and hearing it all over the place, at least on LinkedIn?

Reyhan Khan  [00:04:13]:
That's a very good starting question. So GTM in broader context is go-to-market for anything, and it's mostly heard online for SaaS products or tech products where, okay, we have the product where it's almost built now. Let's take it to market. It's sales, marketing around it, what budgets go into it, a little bit of, a lot of RevOps also, actually, this could be an alternate name for it. However, for recruiters and for this space where there's smaller businesses, agencies, you know, they want to scale lean, it is, I'd say, the technical and systems side of sales and marketing. That's how I'll put it. It's an intersection of data as well as automation, the sales psychology, and then obviously the recruiting context around it. So it would be how do we map your recruiting market? What's your niche? What data do you need? What pain points do your ideal customers have? And then how do you turn that into, let's say, an actual actionable list? What do you say to them? What systems do you use to get that message to them? And then how do you turn that conversation into, let's say, eventual revenue? So the whole engineering around this, I am an electrical engineer by my education background, But this is actually more interesting, to be very honest.

Reyhan Khan  [00:05:26]:
All right.

Benjamin Mena [00:05:26]:
So, I mean, we've seen this in like the tech space. We've seen this with just about every SaaS product out there. Why is it now coming to staffing and recruiting?

Reyhan Khan  [00:05:36]:
To be fully honest, I've been in staffing about 3.5, 4 years. I've been coaching recruiters and I feel like there's probably the adaptation curve in the recruiting and staffing space. It still has a long way to go. We're still early. We're still probably like 20, 25%, you know, going up the curve. So one, the systems, I won't say it's outdated, it's just that transition from recruiters kind of doing things, I won't say the old school way, but the traditional way, which obviously work, to now adapting to how can we just let, you know, systems or AI do these things for you. So it's kind of that there's some resistance as well in recruiters kind of letting go. There's also not enough tools, to be very honest, or systems that are built solely for recruiters.

Reyhan Khan  [00:06:21]:
So that's where people like me step in who will pick up, for example, you may have heard of a tool called Clay, which is mostly used for data enrichment, for BD, for sales teams, for GTM teams, right? Now we are trying to give it a flavor for recruiting for the last couple of years where we use it to source people because at the end of the day, it's people which you could use to place and fill a job or people to reach out and ask for a job. So it's mainly a lot of new systems, but less adaptation for the recruiting space. But now it's happening. Now you're seeing I think you connected me actually with a couple of tools as well. I see, you know, people on your podcast as well talking about their problems. Then it's just about which specific system kind of addresses that problem. I think in the net, by probably in the next 2 years, 24 months, this would adapt more. That's how I see the space.

Benjamin Mena [00:07:06]:
So one of the things in our pregame, you kind of told me that hiring a go-to-market person for a recruiting company might actually be more important than hiring another recruiter. I mean, that's a bold statement. Please explain that to me.

Reyhan Khan  [00:07:18]:
Yes, yes, for sure. That's— I'm glad that you remember it, right? Imagine a recruiter who runs solo or has one assistant somewhere in the Philippines, right? They're doing everything themselves. They go get the jobs, then they fill the jobs, they pick up the phone, they do some cold calling, they go to Indeed, they see a job, then they go LinkedIn, try to find that decision maker, try to get their number or whatever. So this whole system is done by a recruiter mostly the support that recruiters had when it got into the industry initially, I would say they have VAs who would just be doing copy-pasting, just finding, doing some basic stuff, and they don't even know what's good, right, with systems as well as people. So first is the educating part, but secondly, it would be to remove themselves obviously from doing that repetitive, not even the final lead gen, but the full top of funnel, you know, then researching on people, then reaching out to them. So it would be more important in my opinion, because you were a recruiter, let's say, and you were, your job, what you're really good at is let's say closing deals, building relationships, and then filling roles. Everything else involved in this cycle can be done by a GTM engineer. And my business is actually called RecruiterGTM mainly because for recruiters, GTM would also include the recruiting side of systems, right? So for a recruiter, recruiting offer to go to market, you obviously need to tell people about it, like awareness, some lead gen, but then also, okay, we got the roles.

Reyhan Khan  [00:08:40]:
What are we going to do now? You know, go manually call people? No, there has to be a system around that too. So a GTM engineer can one, set up all these systems, maintain them for you, and then a recruiter can just go to them with an idea. Hey, I want to test a new niche. Okay, this works in Texas. Let's try in California. And that person will turn your ideas into implementation. Hence, I think it's more important. To have a good team in the net.

Benjamin Mena [00:09:02]:
All right, let's take a few steps back. How the hell did you even end up in the recruiting world?

Reyhan Khan  [00:09:07]:
Very good question. I have a crazy journey, man, to be very honest. I started, I'm an electrical engineer, then I went into the corporate. I live in Lisbon, Portugal, but I'm originally from Islamabad, Pakistan, which is the capital. I used to work in somewhat of a dead-end corporate job, which I believe all are dead-end to a certain extent. So the full coffee mug, t-shirt, You know, the backpack, I got all of that. I escaped that space and I started freelancing and I became someone's operations VA. So one CEO, other CEO on a platform called Upwork.

Reyhan Khan  [00:09:38]:
And I just started solving different problems until I worked for a recruiter who wanted me to solve problems in his ATS system, you know, source candidates. I was like, wait a minute, this looks like a good industry. I didn't go into it then. I became head of operations at one agency that used to do marketing. So flavors of like different types of systems. Then another guy that was a coach in teaching people how to grow on Instagram. And then finally I started working with James Blackwell, who used to coach recruiters, and I started working as his head of operations, as his systems guy, his right-hand guy. And he asked me one day, he's like, hey, do you want to coach these guys in my community? And I had never coached before, but I also had almost never said no to opportunities like this.

Reyhan Khan  [00:10:18]:
So I said yes. And then every Friday for the next 2.5 years, people would jump onto my call and they would ask me questions around GTM systems related to recruiting. And by the last year, I was like, wait a minute, like this needs to be, and this space needs to be explored more. So that's how I ended up. And even during my days when I was the operations manager or head of operations, I was just that guy that was doing everything that the CEO didn't want to do, everything systems related. And a big part of that during, since I was working in smaller scaling agencies, 10, 20, 30 people max, I had to handle recruiting too. So I went up and said like an ATS system, I compared Workable, Lever, Greenhouse. So it was a combination of curiosity and then landing on a really nice niche where people would really open up in smaller businesses and you can build more relationships.

Reyhan Khan  [00:11:06]:
That's why now I've stuck with the recruiting as well, because I feel like there's bigger problems to solve and not enough people are trying to solve them.

Benjamin Mena [00:11:13]:
Love that. So with you seeing all these different areas of like sales and SaaS and these different agencies, what did you see across the board that's like good, but stuff that recruiters aren't even thinking about because we've always done it the way that we've always done it?

Reyhan Khan  [00:11:33]:
Yeah, it's actually a lot. Like some basic things would be, again, systems adaptation, right? This past week, I run a weekly call still in my school community and Somebody asked me about, so there's Recruiterflow, Atlas, a lot of these systems that we see online. Most of these systems built for recruiters have the ATS side, which is the applicant tracking system, as well as the CRM built into it. But what I realized out of like 30 people on my call, most, 80% of them didn't even know that their systems have the CRM side as well. So they were still tracking deals in Sheets or somewhere manually. So it would be recruiters being aware of what systems can buy them their time. Secondly, they don't really realize like this is a $5 task or a $10 and then grading tasks like that and only focusing on the higher level ones. They know, however, not enough recruiters have taken that step.

Reyhan Khan  [00:12:30]:
And when I was working with marketing agencies, they'd be like, oh, I didn't get a VA for videos. For example, you also have it probably here. I get somebody to do my research, I get this system to kind of attribute Facebook leads, not sit and do it myself. That those transitions I think are, were faster in those spaces, sales and marketing, and in recruiting people are still kind of adapting to these things.

Benjamin Mena [00:12:49]:
Okay, so like not just like things that you see out there, what are some of the best things like that we could steal from other go-to-market companies or like the SaaS side? All the, all the sexy stuff that we see on LinkedIn. What is actually worth stealing and bringing to the recruiter's desk?

Reyhan Khan  [00:13:07]:
That's a really good question. I think you could really take like a short out of this if I answer this well. The biggest one honestly would be intent-based engagements with your prospects on both sides, on the client side as well as the candidate side. So if you imagine, if you reach out to 1,000 people and you're like, hey, I'm Benjamin, I place tech talent. If you need any help, let me know. Okay, now you reached out to 1,000 people. It took you maybe A few days, 2 people replied or 3 people responded and they're like, hey Ben, okay, I'll tell you later. One guy said, let's talk.

Reyhan Khan  [00:13:37]:
And then other one was a maybe, for example. Now, if instead of that, we reach out to only 1,000 decision makers where they're hiring, right? So one, that's a signal. The company is openly hiring, but then you could stack signals, which I'm seeing a lot of companies do. So another one would be companies that are hiring as well as the decision maker posted it on LinkedIn as a post. And then if you want to go further, it could be companies that are hiring and the decision maker that recently moved jobs and posted that I've moved jobs. So now there's 3 intent signals where you're seeing, okay, this person may be, there's a higher probability of them responding as compared to you just spraying and praying. So this sea of, you know, your market that you going towards turns into like a small pond that you can then go and try to fish into. So that would be the biggest thing that I see recruiters not doing enough intent-based engagements and outreach as compared to other industries, only going to people when there is a need instead of, you know, just trying to spray and pray.

Benjamin Mena [00:14:34]:
I mean, is the reason for that is just it's so time heavy if you're not using a system?

Reyhan Khan  [00:14:40]:
True. Yes. You cannot just sit, I imagine you would go manually, check a job on LinkedIn, then find a decision maker, then confirm if that's the decision maker, then check their email. All of this could be done by, you know, a system like Klaviyo in like 5 seconds.

Benjamin Mena [00:14:53]:
Okay, let me, let me take a step back because, uh, you know the recruiting space. I know you because you've done some work with Jay and Julia who have both been on this, uh, podcast and have done really great and said great things about you. But I hate to say this. I feel like there's a, for every really good person that works with recruiting companies, it feels like there's like 9 or 10. I don't want to say scam artists, but people just trying to take advantage of it. How do you vet somebody that's actually real and can help you in the go-to-market space and not just slap some crap together and charge you $10,000 a month?

Reyhan Khan  [00:15:27]:
Yeah, that's a really good question. And that's what I'm trying to do with my community and my business model. And we could go into like my personal journey as well if you have time at the end. But like I told you, I came from being a VA, started setting up these systems. Somebody gave me the responsibility to, hey, you're my head of ops now. I'm like, oh, that's a big title. But it was still doing those things but doing them more reliably and being that right-hand guy in the business, right? And throughout this journey, I was adding value. And I've learned over the last 2 years or so, if you try to put value out there with these systems and in this space, it does eventually come back as revenue or as whatever you call it.

Reyhan Khan  [00:16:03]:
So now in this space, how you vet people, to answer your question, why I gave all that context, is if somebody can actually show you a roadmap or just share their screen and be like, hey, here's the system, here's the dumbed down version, and here's like a summary of the technical version in 5 minutes if you want to see. Because most of these things, honestly, you don't need an engineering degree to do them. It's just if somebody explains it in a layman's term, you can't understand it. So to put it shortly, if somebody can show you a roadmap and give you some value to start for absolutely free, because if there are people are doing it, I am doing it. If anybody joins my core brainstorms with me and they're like, hey, I have these 5 open jobs. How do I fill them? I cannot find candidates, right? We do a brainstorm. Let's say build a clay table. If it's not LinkedIn heavy, I'd even build, go out, build maybe a small ad on LinkedIn.

Reyhan Khan  [00:16:49]:
Pick the strategy, show them the way, and then give them that thing for free. Okay, just go try this on your own. I haven't found a lot of GTM agencies do this, or like, I'm not a GTM agency per se. I set up the system and then place the person that runs the system. So you're not kind of relying on me where you're like, oh, Rayhan has to generate me 4 leads or 5 leads. So I would say if somebody can, one, give you more insights on how they're going to do it instead of like hiding that behind, I don't know, a $10,000, $12,000, $15,000 ticket. I would respect those people more and they be more tilted towards them. And secondly, also see kind of how much they want to educate you on these things, right? Do they want to keep the whole system to themselves? And by educate, I don't mean a recruiter should start running clay tables themselves, but actually tell them that, hey, you pay, let's say $350 for this tool.

Reyhan Khan  [00:17:33]:
This is the outcome that you're going to get. This is how long it is going to take. And then also once the system is set, who is going to take care of it? So mostly with, with those ticket sizes, it's, you get the idea. Of how can you go from being old school way to being this new AI way. But sometimes I don't see practical expectations around it, you know, and a real timeline of how it's going to be implemented. That's how I look at it.

Benjamin Mena [00:17:58]:
I like that. I like that the, hey, try this out or look at this thing. Cause it almost seems like there's so many, it's sexy to go after recruiters because like we, the billings look great on paper. So often it's somebody that doesn't know the space jumping in like, hey, I just got done with a Clay class. Look at how much money I can make in recruiting. And then some of them, I've even seen them bragging about how much money they've made in recruiting and they don't know if you've made them any placements.

Reyhan Khan  [00:18:22]:
Yeah, true. I've seen that. Because there's also margins in there. Some recruiters, for example, do contracting work. I had this one guy, we were at an event and he shows me like his QuickBooks. He's like, hey, I made 5 million. And then I went and I talked with the colleague. He's like, yeah, man, but he probably spent 4.5 million like paying contractor fees and all.

Reyhan Khan  [00:18:40]:
He only made 500K on it. So I, over time, over the last few years, I've learned different ways of recruiting, different business models. And I do understand it is like found considered sexy these days. However, that's why I said like if you give real value, recruiters are super rewarding. It's like Julia, Jay both talked to you about me. Julia came into your event and also kind of gave me a shout out. So I'm seeing these things because there's no real help and handholding for recruiters so far. I'm going to be very honest.

Benjamin Mena [00:19:08]:
You know, if you are getting hit up by somebody, just vet them out. Just, I've seen too many horror stories.

Reyhan Khan  [00:19:12]:
Yeah, just get on a call. Yeah, just be like, hey, show me how you're going to do it, how much you're going to charge, and then what support do I get in the short and long term?

Benjamin Mena [00:19:20]:
If you want a really good laugh, I saw somebody that like didn't want to spend $49 for my community, but then dropped $5,000 on a GTM person that ended up going to complete trash.

Reyhan Khan  [00:19:30]:
I have multiple stories like this. I've had one super nice recruiter based in Iowa who did livestock recruiting, super interesting space. She didn't even know how to use ChatGPT. And when we told her about it, she's like, oh my God, can I just talk to a bot and it responds? And she was like, she was wonderful. However, now I felt like, oh, she just paid like $15K for this clay and all the systems. How is she going to understand those? So there's different types of levels to this, I would say, but obviously Yeah, I see those too. Like there's people that are gonna spend and the ones that you will maybe never able to be convinced.

Benjamin Mena [00:20:06]:
Yeah. All good. Well anyways, so let's just say this, like, you know, if you own a recruiting firm right now and you're looking at this go-to-market world, this GTM world, what is one principle from another industry that they could try this year that would help move the needle faster?

Reyhan Khan  [00:20:26]:
Very good question. I would, and it's not from another industry, I'd say, but okay, for example, I follow, there's a guy named Matt Gray who puts out very good YouTube content, LinkedIn as well. And he talks about personal branding, which I feel like a lot of recruiters, they don't even think about it. And most of them have a personal brand or could have one because it's a relationship-based business. I know recruiters that go to events as well. Like a lot of them that are in industries like construction, manufacturing, where you need to go out and meet people in person. I think all recruiters could use personal branding to an extent where you're solving problems day to day, recruiting problems. And now a modern-day recruiter would also be somewhat solving systems problems.

Reyhan Khan  [00:21:07]:
Like you are seeing recruiters calling themselves talent partners, going to companies and be like, hey, we'll establish this full recruiting system for you on a retainer instead of kind of doing this contingent. But all of that gets easier if you start focusing on personal brand, you know, take out at least a few hours every single week. It does include LinkedIn content. That's kind of where it starts. But then you could do more content. You could kind of try to connect and give out value with that content. Lead magnet, I think sometimes a slightly harsher term, but give value like a value magnet, I would say, instead of just considering them as a lead. So personal branding tied with the value that they can give out.

Reyhan Khan  [00:21:45]:
I see this happening in the coaching space a lot, in the consulting spaces a lot. With Matt Gray. I've had his lead magnets and learned how to build a custom GPT and post on LinkedIn. And then I posted for 2 years using the same kind of method, and now I get enough engagement and a full healthy pipeline. So just trying to show you how the transition happens and how recruiters are like not even thinking about looking at personal branding that way.

Benjamin Mena [00:22:10]:
We hear the personal brand, we see it all the time. What do you think the percentage of people out there that are recruiters out there that actually have spent even a little bit of time building a personal brand?

Reyhan Khan  [00:22:24]:
Less than 5%, man. Julia is a good example. Julia Arpuck. I spoke with her a couple of weeks ago, and I launched my business, and then I went to her a month later. I'm like, hey, Julia, I did it. But she asked me about a year ago, she's like, Rehan, you're really good at this. Maybe you should launch a community. Why? Because I was a follower, and I saw her brand go from, okay, posting about, hey, I filled this role, to being more confident in posting about, okay, It's a story about like my children, even, you know, how her personal life is going, how it's hard, how she's burning out.

Reyhan Khan  [00:22:52]:
But it's about being authentic. A lot of recruiters in this space, when they start doing it, they misunderstand it and they just try to be something they're not. They post a picture of a coffee mug or a dog and feel like, okay, everybody's gonna like that. But no, you could just, just be genuine with those things. And I see some people do it, but it's definitely less than 5%, man, out of all the recruiters.

Benjamin Mena [00:23:13]:
I just, I've been on the brand bandwagon for a long time. Like, I'm all about it. I accidentally do it because I spend half my time just posting about other people.

Reyhan Khan  [00:23:24]:
Yeah. Yeah. No, it's crazy, man. Your LinkedIn is sometimes, I was telling, so when me and Ben first met, I was telling him, hey man, I've heard a lot about you. You've probably heard a lot about me, but I always go to your LinkedIn post and I'm like, okay, what is he posting about? And then it just turns into kind of a goldmine of recruiters. Who are interested in learning about these new things. So yeah, man, kudos to what you're doing. Sorry for cutting you off, but I wanted to say this.

Benjamin Mena [00:23:50]:
Okay, so jumping back over to the go-to-market, let's say if you're a recruiting firm, you hire your first go-to-market person, what is the first 3 to 5 things that you should have them do within the first 90 days?

Reyhan Khan  [00:24:05]:
Okay, very good question. And this is something that I guess get asked too often. First thing, obviously, and there's two different flavors to this. Sometimes I place people and they have more of an ops angle, and I'll talk about that too in a bit. But now since GTM is kind of this growing industry, I think it has like a $10 billion market cap predicted in the next couple of years. The first 5 things to answer your question that I would have a GTM engineer working for a recruiter do, first would be build a system obviously that identifies high intent. Like I said, so companies that are posting open jobs, ZeeMaker moves, career pages where there's more than X amount of jobs, stuff like that. Second would be mapping the whole market for them.

Reyhan Khan  [00:24:45]:
What does that mean? That means if I am a recruiter that places manufacturing talent in Texas and Arizona, how many companies are there? Then how many jobs do those companies have for the positions that I fill? Then how many people or candidates are there in the market? Let's say there's 1,000 jobs and 10,000 candidates. Okay. I've also seen industries where there's 500 or 1,000 jobs and when you go on LinkedIn, you try to find candidates, there may be like a couple thousand. For example, healthcare, nursing practitioners, some certified doctors even, because these people don't hang out on LinkedIn. It's a different story and different conversation, but mapping the market with Is it even viable for us to go, you know, will this be the most lucrative option out of our niche or out of the sub-niches within our niche? So mapping that whole market, I call this building a TAM, a total addressable market table. You could do it in a sheet, you could do it in Clay, but this would be the second thing that I would get them to do. Another important one would be the system side, like connecting your ATS system, right? Whatever you use, Atlas, Recruiterflow, HubSpot even for the sales side, But connecting those now with the systems where you're reaching out to people, right? You're messaging them on LinkedIn or you're dialing them and somebody says, or emailing, somebody says, hey, I'm interested. Now are you going to sit, pick up that reply, manually go update in your HubSpot and be like, hey, this person responded? No, all of this, the pipes need to be connected is what I mean.

Reyhan Khan  [00:26:10]:
4, I would launch high-intent playbooks for the outreach. So it could be companies that have the jobs I mentioned. If you have an open job, find the decision maker, write a custom message using AI, So it sounds like you're not spammy. You actually want to offer value. You could even connect a candidate with that job if you want to go a level further. Another playbook would be, I mentioned leadership changes, people stepping into a job. You could do it based off of the last 100 days. You just say, hey, congratulations.

Reyhan Khan  [00:26:36]:
I want to be of support. You could use my network as your warm bench. Just FYI, this line works really well. Use my network as your warm bench. And then lastly, I would do one which I recently started doing is called the HR ratio. So if a company has less than 1% people that are talent acquisition or HR, or sometimes there's nobody in, let's say, a startup or an e-com company of 200 people, right? They're scaling, no HR person. You can check these things again with these systems, especially Clay, and reach out and say, hey, I saw you have 2 open positions, but I don't see anybody listed in the talent acquisition department internally. So would you want someone to come in as a fractional or whatever, as an outsourced person? So launching these playbook.

Reyhan Khan  [00:27:16]:
So the message goes in front of these people and you're saying a different thing based on the intent that they had. And then obviously the last one, the fifth one, would be working towards building an owned audience, like owning an audience that you could then nurture over a longer period of time. Most recruiters I speak with, more than 90%, have a system like Bullhorn, whatever, Recruiterflow, Atlas, but they don't nurture the people in there. They may be 15, I spoke with someone yesterday, 15,000 candidates. And he's like, I don't even know which one of those is ready for a job. You know, what are the salary expectations now? Where do they live now? Same for the client side. Hey, last year I probably talked with 300 people who maybe give me jobs, but since we didn't sign terms, I can never go, like there's no system nurturing them. So lastly, it would be building this audience in one place so we could eventually then nurture them.

Reyhan Khan  [00:28:07]:
So these would be my top 5 if I was a recruiter and I hired a GTM engineer today.

Benjamin Mena [00:28:11]:
All right, jumping into a few of those. Market mapping.

Reyhan Khan  [00:28:15]:
Yes.

Benjamin Mena [00:28:15]:
What, like, is it like when you're sitting there market mapping, what about these like hard market, like these small niches? Like, can you do all that with the technology?

Reyhan Khan  [00:28:26]:
Very good question. Yes, in most cases. I'll give you an example. Healthcare is a hard market. Another one, maybe I was working with someone in Australia in construction, but they place tradespeople. So like a plumber, like a carpenter, or someone specializing in a certain type of architecture. And those people are not hanging out on LinkedIn. There's different ways to kind of gather this data for the market map.

Reyhan Khan  [00:28:49]:
However, for the client side, that's what I'm referring to, that's still easier. Like you would find X amount of construction companies and the decision maker at those companies. It may get harder when you try to go and fill those roles and find those decision makers. However, doctors, operations departments of hospitals, you can find them either on LinkedIn or the website or a local directory as well. So there's like different places you tap, try to get maximum information. And then obviously kind of a last resort these days for a lot of recruiters is they go and run a paid ad on Google or on Facebook and then try to get those people to come to them.

Benjamin Mena [00:29:24]:
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Benjamin Mena [00:29:50]:
You were born to be the greatest. And I'm pulling together some of the industry's the best speakers to help you get there. Gonna 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. 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.

Benjamin Mena [00:30:15]:
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. And you also mentioned about the, that HR playbook and you're running a percentages of people versus HR. And like, that's actually kind of genius because once you hit like, what is it, 1% or maybe 2%, those HR people are overwhelmed.

Reyhan Khan  [00:30:43]:
Yes. So it's crazy. I built a clay table just to see a test out of 100 companies. And I was testing SaaS products. So SaaS companies with even 100, 120 people, and if you know SaaS or how fast they grow, if it's 120 people, they're probably like 70 in tech, they're building a product, focusing on the data engineering side of it, then there would be sales. They like HR and recruiting comes last or, you know, probably a third, fourth priority. And I've been in some of these agencies too. So I was working in, like I said, 20, 30, 40 person company.

Reyhan Khan  [00:31:14]:
There was no HR. Like, I was HR recruiting because I was the operations guy. So that's how I initially got the idea. I ran the playbook. I say 1% because out of 100, if it's 1, it's less. If even if it's 2, they may be overwhelmed. But then I kept a slightly strict criteria. But now imagine if a company had like 500 people, they have 10 open roles, 1%, which is like 5 people, you still have a good excuse to reach out and say, hey, I see you have a smaller team, and a lot of open jobs and there's always opportunities.

Reyhan Khan  [00:31:43]:
You've recruited, you know, even if there's an internal team, there's still a chance that there, if the job is open, let's say for the last 3 months, you could still say, hey man, I see you have these 3 guys named person ABC, but I bet they're not doing a good job because there's still these jobs I see open for the last 90 days.

Benjamin Mena [00:32:00]:
When you're looking at GTM people, when does it make sense to hire an ops person versus a GTM person?

Reyhan Khan  [00:32:07]:
Way good question. I think it kind of go hand in hand and I initially called this ops and more focused on operations because that's where they can buy back a bigger chunk of their time. People don't initially realize it. They ask me, oh, what is this person going to do all day? Right? Are they just going to launch campaign, find new leads? Like, no. What do you do all day? Right? You just, by the end of the day, a recruiter who's running solo and let's say does half a billion, they can't even tell. What they did all day because it goes so fast. Taking calls, taking interviews, then taking a client call, documentation around it. I would say the operation, you have to look at both go hand in hand.

Reyhan Khan  [00:32:45]:
It just depends on how much need do you have? Like where do you have more of a need? If you need the, let's say you feel lead gen is weak and you need more clients. I get all types of recruiters. The other type is we have too many open roles. I have one recruiter right now who has 83 roles. And she needs a GTM engineer to come in and she has 8 recruiters who are manually messaging candidates on LinkedIn. Nothing is linking with her ATS system back there, and she has no idea if 2 recruiters are messaging the same person, for example. So to save that wasting time and effort, she needs a GTM engineer to step in as soon as possible and focus more on the systems. But let's say somebody has to, it needs an ops person to jump on calls with them and then extract all that information and update in the ATS.

Reyhan Khan  [00:33:29]:
It will be more operations or somebody that needs to do something. They're in a super manual niche. AI, let's say, cannot do it and they manually go, let's say, check a resume, then check a certification, and they are slightly repellent to new tech. I've seen all these cases. That's why I'm mentioning them. And they want someone to just repeat that work that they're doing. That's more operations. Somebody will come in, they'll sit there, they spend those 2 hours instead of the CEO spending.

Reyhan Khan  [00:33:53]:
So different angles to it. However, I think they go hand in hand.

Benjamin Mena [00:33:58]:
When should you— if you're looking at hiring, yeah, what makes sense as a contractor versus hiring somebody in-house?

Reyhan Khan  [00:34:06]:
Okay, let me explain it this way. So most of the people that I have placed— I've placed over more than 200 probably, and I've been doing this officially for the last 2 years. Even before that, whenever I was the ops guy in any agency, they would ask me like, hey, okay, you live in— back then I was living in Pakistan— like, speak good English, you could learn anything, you know, pretty fast and help us. Do you know more people like you? And I was working in a corporate, there's 1,300 people just in that one office space. And we would all do the night shift. It was S&P, the index, the fund. It's a Fortune 500 company. And all those people, the beauty of it is they were already kind of crème de la crème of the market in my country.

Reyhan Khan  [00:34:43]:
Right? So if you go pick up a person like this, they already speak good English. They've already worked there a couple of years. They don't like the corporate, that is it for them. But for, uh, the question was when is the right time to hire the person?

Benjamin Mena [00:34:54]:
Just to, I mean, like if you're looking at doing a contractor versus in-house, like contractor or in-house.

Reyhan Khan  [00:34:59]:
Yeah. So if you hire in-house, I've also done those. Some people, let's say one recruiter in the US, he does military contracts. So he uses a few portals and platforms that offshore people cannot access. So I went and did a search and we did place someone. However, I think it works better if there's someone offshore and I'll explain why. Local contractors, one, are not ramped up on the GTM side of things. Like, cause I feel like this, this GTM engineering boom is going farther in the offshore space.

Reyhan Khan  [00:35:31]:
For example, the Clay Cup was won by a girl from Pakistan. Her name's Juwairia, shout out. Next one, I know 3 people that are ready to go. One is trained by me. So. The space is booming. However, if you go and hire a contractor offshore, it would be like less than half of what you're going to pay someone locally. They've— and again, like nothing against the local talent.

Reyhan Khan  [00:35:51]:
I've seen some phenomenal people, you know, grow in the space, but I just see them being more hungry because of opportunities like not coming along that easy. And then another thing would be the how many things they can juggle between. So I see mostly a contractor that has had different types of experiences, some freelance, some full-time, they'd be more open to just going and experimenting and, you know, taking a go at any problem you throw at them as compared to if you hire someone in-house and let's say they're slightly experienced in recruiting, they may still lack the system side. So I'd say in-house works better for recruiting roles. However, for systems and for BTM, I see offshore contractors work a lot more than, you know, local people.

Benjamin Mena [00:36:31]:
I'm kind of curious because if you get to see all the tech, you get to see how behind the tech many of us recruiters are.

Reyhan Khan  [00:36:37]:
Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:36:38]:
Like, what do you— with AI and the advancements of AI and what the hell's doing with Claude and Claude Code and the Claude Bot and whatever, Claude Book or whatever it is now, I don't even know what it's called now. Yeah. What do you actually in reality see over the next 3 to 5 years of the impact of technology within our space?

Reyhan Khan  [00:37:02]:
That's probably the best question so far, man. One, I would say, and yes, my, it's my job to stay up to date with all these tools, and that's what I try to do. I almost follow every single guru, see what others are doing, but I can't keep up. I cannot keep up. I think I need a full-time person actually to just sit and extract these insights, or a full-time AI employee or something like that. I'm thinking about it, but I just have to be sure that it's safe. Now, That's another issue with the recruiting space right now. When you mentioned those high-ticket programs, they won't give you a realistic view of what AI can actually do, right? If you set up an AI system, which a lot of recruiters are trying to do, that sources candidates for you and handles the top-of-funnel work, right? There's a job from getting a job and deciding on a JD to sourcing the top 100 candidates and grading them against that JD And then finding their contact information can be done by AI and systems.

Reyhan Khan  [00:37:59]:
However, reaching out to them, closing them on the position, convincing them on the position, adding them to your ADS and getting their buy-in cannot be done with AI. So these boundaries need to be defined really clearly. However, once you set up the system, can you now go and pitch to your clients and say, hey, I am an AI recruiting System now, give me a retainer or hire me for $10K a month. Would they just do it because you have an AI system? No, they will not. And I've seen this, I wouldn't say fail, but I've seen people get a reality check with this day in, day out. I'm seeing this happen. However, you need to be very, like we mentioned authenticity and there's a bit of honesty here as well. Like when you jump on a call as a recruiter or somebody like me who pitches these systems to recruiters, I always try to be honest with, hey, This is what, this is the AI support, this is the human element, and this is AI-assisted, right? As compared to just completely owned by AI.

Reyhan Khan  [00:38:54]:
So I think these lines are still blurry. However, it's if you spend some more time in identifying what part is done by the system, then where does the AI come in? And the CEOs, business owners can understand these things if you just, you know, I think you try to, you don't really have to go into the full details of how the technicalities work around that. Realistic expectations. I see AI replacing talent sourcers, to be honest, manual sourcing on the candidate side, even within the next 6 months to a year. There's a tool called Pen, there's another one called Juicebox. And most of these tools on the backend, now that I have some friends that run SaaS products, I try to understand how they work. It's mostly a same dataset of data. Another, some of these competitors may have a bigger dataset, some may be getting LinkedIn data.

Reyhan Khan  [00:39:39]:
As well as data from APIs or other people platforms, maybe even Facebook or something if somebody mentioned there in their personal information. But at the end of the day, it's like a nice looking UI powered by AI trying to match those people with the job that you put in. So the one that does it faster and the one does that is with a cleaner UI, which I like Pen these days. I'm testing it still. It solves the sourcing problem. Now, the only thing you need to look at, will it be able to source Nursing practitioners that are not that active on platforms like LinkedIn. And once it starts solving those problems, these tools can go global. Sourcing, I think, definitely will be solved.

Reyhan Khan  [00:40:14]:
However, some other things on the GTM side, on the sales side, it will be still a longer curve. And this human element of a GTM engineer being in there will be needed.

Benjamin Mena [00:40:25]:
It's kind of crazy. I remember like years ago going to like SourceCon. Important, how important sourcing is going to be. And now I don't want to say like great tech has wiped it, almost wiped it out, but it's just, yeah, it should be.

Reyhan Khan  [00:40:40]:
Another type of offshore person we place is a talent sourcer, right? And I see that role kind of being obsolete very soon. But what we're doing now is trying to train junior recruiters instead, because if a human who is capable and can even, let's say, speak English really well and have conversations, if you were just getting this person to go find a profile, match against the GD and put it in a sheet, I think you're not even utilizing their full potential. They could just dial the person, speak with them, qualify them for them, and be a junior recruiter, and then eventually be your right-hand recruiter. I've seen people doing this already with offshore, but yeah, the sourcing element systems are doing really well. Content also, LinkedIn content, YouTube content, the scripting, the ideation. I personally have a bot built on N8N which follows I got it to follow 10 people, 10 influencers I follow for content, Matt Gray being one of them, Dan Martell being another. Every single Monday morning, it checks everything they posted last week, checks the engagement of YouTube only just for this, how many YouTube videos they posted, how many likes and comments they got, the full transcript of the video because YouTube API allows you to do that. And then which, based on the top ones, it then the system prompt is I need to post this content for recruiters.

Reyhan Khan  [00:41:53]:
So it would tell me, here, Aihan, here's 10 topics for your week, and here's the outline of how, let's say Dan Martell taught something about how to buy back your time with GPT for founders. I just need to give it a recruiting flavor. So just to give you an example, real life example of something I'm using, it would say it's saving me hours on ideation just for my content. Love that.

Benjamin Mena [00:42:13]:
I want to talk numbers or percentages. So let's just say that you are a firm owner, you have a 5-person team. If you're looking at hiring a good go-to-market specialist, like, what do you see like financially, like topside, the percentage benefit of the potential if you hire a good person, the increase at the end of a year?

Reyhan Khan  [00:42:33]:
Depends. For a 5-person team, let's say they're doing— I have recruiters, somebody's doing $800K, $1 million, maybe even more. But let's say they do $1 million. And right now they do mostly manual work. Is referrals, is their network. Can they double it by having a good GTM engineer? May sound ambitious, but I have seen people do this and I will record detailed testimonials once I confirm all the numbers. But I already see this happening. You have no systems right now, you have a manual process.

Reyhan Khan  [00:43:05]:
It's way easier once you have a process already. It just needs to be systemized and put systems around it and support that process, right? You get referrals. Okay, do you go to them to get referrals? No. What happens if you start going to them? You'll obviously get more, right? Do you post content? No. Once you start posting content, you'll be going in front of more people. So to leverage that audience, one, to go to new, like a market map. You're doing it without the market map right now. You don't even know what are the possibilities because you start seeing patterns.

Reyhan Khan  [00:43:32]:
So when we run these playbooks, if we nurture the audience and the things, the 5 things that I mentioned for a GTM, Just by doing those and holding the GTM engineer accountable to the goals that you set, because there's also a part of a CEO or a business owner, recruiting business owner, how to get most out of a GTM engineer, right? Don't just like allow them to, hey, go do this on your own. There has to be accountability. You will still be the visionary. They act on that vision. I think it could be like, you know, you could double the business within 12 months if you do this right.

Benjamin Mena [00:44:03]:
Okay, let me take a step back. You're believing that a lot of recruiting companies actually have systems and standard operating procedures set up. What, like, is it worth even, like, hiring a person if, like, behind the scenes everything is actually chaos?

Reyhan Khan  [00:44:23]:
Yes, that's when it's worth it, I think. I— because are you just gonna operate with chaos? Because chaos to clarity is the kind of the transition, and this person is one important part of that transition, of that journey. It's obviously you need, I'd say there's an element of coaching and accountability as well. That's why I've launched a community now instead of just building an agency. And I do annual accesses only, so anybody can join in. And then they would say, hey, Rehan, okay, I saw your course, I like this, can you do this done-for-you system? That's when I charge slightly more. Community is like price really low. Then I would, let's say, go and set up their recruiting system that sources candidates.

Reyhan Khan  [00:45:01]:
Okay. Now since they have annual access and they jump on a weekly call with me or one of my coaches, we can hold them accountable to, hey, are you still running this? You know, okay, you're, let's say, whining about the same problem every single week. What are you doing to solve it? So chaos will be there, but you need somebody to come in and start cleaning up that mess for you so you don't have to. And that's literally the investment with a UTM engineer. Time and money goes into kind of getting clarity out of it.

Benjamin Mena [00:45:26]:
I've seen so many businesses that it's just chaos behind the scenes. It looks pretty on LinkedIn. I mean, LinkedIn is always the highlight reel. It's like Instagram, but behind the scenes it's chaos.

Reyhan Khan  [00:45:34]:
If you do this long enough, you can see through it sometimes.

Benjamin Mena [00:45:38]:
Well, anyways, we covered a lot before we jump over to the quickfire questions. Is there any question that I should have asked you or something that you want to go deeper on?

Reyhan Khan  [00:45:47]:
Um, I think we touched about it even before this. I was thinking about this personal branding element that helps build authority. I just want to touch on this before we jump into the quickfire. I believe that all recruiters, if you are doing this, if you're in the recruiting space, you're running a business for even a year, or I have people that are running this for 28, 30 years now, and still they're not confident enough going out there and kind of educating people about what they do. That's all your personal brand should be about to start with. You don't need to sound like a Clay expert or systems expert or a recruiter that fills 10 positions. You just have to tell your authentic story. And the earlier you start doing that, you'd reap the fruits and the benefits really soon.

Reyhan Khan  [00:46:28]:
Because I just want to mention one thing here. 2023, when GPT came out, word of the year was authentic by Merriam-Webster. So there is a pattern there. Then, you know, there will be less, more and more content, but less and less authenticity. Yeah, that's one thing I wanted to, you know, touch and go deeper into that we've already done. So I'm ready for the quickfire.

Benjamin Mena [00:46:46]:
All right. And they don't need to be quick questions or quick answers. From what you've seen with working with different recruiting organizations, recruiting teams, firm owners, and the conversations that you've been having, what is the best piece of advice that you can give to somebody that wants to go from good to elite?

Reyhan Khan  [00:47:07]:
Good question. The biggest thing would be a kind of— recruiters take a lot of pride in doing everything themselves, honestly, to start with. And then they will think that nobody else— and I do understand because now I'm a business owner and I felt this a little bit as well. You feel like the other person maybe cannot do this as well as I can do. If you just put in a little time in finding the person as well as training them, it does happen. Biggest thing would be being the architect of the business rather than just being that labor worker yourself every day and understanding what are the higher priority tasks. Removing yourself from the lower priority ones, only focusing on the revenue generation while a system as well as a person, depends on your situation, handles the rest. So that would be my biggest piece of advice, that they start realizing this.

Benjamin Mena [00:47:57]:
What is a book that's had a huge impact on you personally and your career?

Reyhan Khan  [00:48:03]:
There's a book called— obviously it's Gino Wickman. A few of the books, but one is called Perfect Week Formula also was a really good one because over the last 2 years I have like I've built my routine kind of around what I learned from this book. And I initially thought, okay, you have a calendar and then you plan everything there. And you know, what am I going to put my gym hours on the calendar? But then I realized that this goes further than that. It is actually a Bible to make yourself more productive. So I would say it would be the Perfectly Formula. Yeah. Also another one was Talent Maker's Playbook.

Reyhan Khan  [00:48:41]:
It's called the Who Playbook. I am forgetting who was, because there was 2 or 3 authors. I can look that up for you. But that taught me how to recruit better when I was an operations person. And I could just cut through the BS like more easily because there were scorecards involved for each stage. And then it involved a method of interviewing where you would hire the same set of questions about all of their previous jobs. So you would say, hey, what was your biggest achievement with position 1? Okay, what would your boss say about you if I asked him today? Okay, how much did you make? Okay, what was the most tricky problem you solved? And then you would ask these 5, 6 questions. Then you go to the second job and someone would have to be really, really good at kind of bullshitting if they get through this.

Reyhan Khan  [00:49:23]:
But that rarely happened. It helped me identify talent really fast. So Talent Maker's Playbook would be another one.

Benjamin Mena [00:49:28]:
Do you have a favorite tech tool?

Reyhan Khan  [00:49:32]:
It may sound cliché, but it has to be Clay. And because Clay has also helped me build a better brand online, to be very honest. And I actually met the CEO Varun here in Lisbon. There was this conference and my friend introduced me to him and I just told the guy, I'm like, hey, okay, it's the CEO of a But no, built a few billion company and everybody's trying to talk to him. And I just met the guy and I'm like, look, man, because of your tool, I've placed a lot of people offshore just because they were good at Clay and this GTM engineering angle. And it's changing lives. Also, I've met some very good people just because of Clay community events. Some friends now that are pretty close.

Reyhan Khan  [00:50:13]:
And he goes on stage, he takes the mic, he's like, oh, where's Reyhan? This is what he just told me. And everybody starts looking at me and I'm like, okay. I was not expecting this, but it would have to be Clay because of the problems they're trying to solve. They could just, you could turn anything into an intent signal. Like I showed you a few examples, we talked about a few examples, but also the community element of it. I go on LinkedIn and I know I see people posting content and interacting with each other that I've met in person as well. Doesn't happen a lot of tools that don't support this.

Benjamin Mena [00:50:44]:
My God, their Slack community has like 31,000 people in there.

Reyhan Khan  [00:50:48]:
I'm like, probably.

Benjamin Mena [00:50:49]:
They've become a genius on community builders. It's really turned into like— and this is something else.

Reyhan Khan  [00:50:54]:
So this event in, for example, I'm going to Pakistan actually, uh, for Ramadan next month, and they're doing an event in, uh, the capital in Islamabad. And I didn't actually know how big the GTM space is. Obviously I hired GTMs from there and I have a network and I know some by name, but I've realized they have a very good relationship with the team at Clay. They organized an event, uh, like 6 months ago 4 speakers on stage. Out of those, 3 were trained by me and I didn't even know. And then they go and they're like, oh, okay, thanks, Reyhan. And people started messaging me and now I'm going to speak at the next one. But it's bringing, for example, it is allowing me to take this opportunity to the talent in Pakistan or eventually will be in South Africa and other places too.

Reyhan Khan  [00:51:36]:
So yeah, community is everything I think now for a tool like that.

Benjamin Mena [00:51:41]:
I think, and I love building the Elite Recruiter community, which is just awesome. You should jump in there for sure. But I think the next recruiting tech tool out there needs to play the Clay playbook.

Reyhan Khan  [00:51:55]:
Yeah, yeah, it has to be. It has to be. And I am eventually— I have seen people try at, you know, they get an idea and then they go try and build the tool and fail so many times. So I don't want to be that guy really quick. However, This is one of my goals with the community that once I have about 35 members there, I just started on January 1st. Let's say by end of the year I have 100 people. And now building tech isn't as hard as it was. I won't say it's easy.

Reyhan Khan  [00:52:19]:
It's not like I built my website in like 30 minutes with Loveable and it's way better than the freelancer that tried to do it for 20 days. But point is, it's— you could test custom products and custom playbooks. Obviously do it in Clay. But eventually I maybe want to build something where you could source. Recruiters need the client side, the sourcing and candidate side, as well as the tracking and nurturing. And then content maybe in there. So I'm thinking if there's one place where you could do all these things, that would be my eventual long-term goal to build it myself.

Benjamin Mena [00:52:51]:
You know what we should do just for shits and giggles? Do a recruiter hackathon with like Loveable.

Reyhan Khan  [00:52:57]:
Could be done. Could totally be done.

Benjamin Mena [00:53:00]:
Or Replit or one of those tools or Cloud Code.

Reyhan Khan  [00:53:02]:
Yeah, yeah. Because man, a lot of people are just sitting like they are not focusing enough on recruiters because there's, I focus on this industry because mostly there's smaller companies that are doing bigger ticket sizes and, you know, making good money, you know, bless all you guys, but there's less red tape. If you show them the value, they would invest into it. If you show them this would be the outcomes after investing X amount of money, again, they would invest into you. Yeah, I think there should be more events and more focus on, you know, what systems can realistically add value for recruiters. And that's like, I plan to do more of those as well.

Benjamin Mena [00:53:38]:
Jumping back to the questions.

Reyhan Khan  [00:53:40]:
Sure, sure, sure.

Benjamin Mena [00:53:41]:
What is a piece of advice that you would give yourself if you went back to the earlier days, a few years ago when you first started working with recruiters, looking at everything that you've learned now, what would you go back and tell yourself?

Reyhan Khan  [00:53:53]:
Don't just be that systems and support guy, also dive into the strategy because it's not that hard. For the first couple of years when I was taking coaching calls, okay, you're launching campaigns, this is going well, it's not going well. This is how you do LinkedIn automations. This is how you do content automations. But I almost never ask them questions on, okay, you're doing contingent and you don't even have any exclusivity. Why are you doing this and not testing, let's say, a retain fee? A fractional model. And now over the last year or so, I've started having more of these conversations and I'm more involved. I think I can impact like the revenue directly in a way if they work with me, not just with the systems.

Reyhan Khan  [00:54:31]:
And I'm like, hey, now that you've set up this system, it allows you to actually go and even pitch the system. If they don't come in, they're like, hey, we have the job, but we're gonna have 10 jobs this year, so we cannot pay you $25K for every role you fill. So what can you do? Now I'm allowing, like, I'm working with some recruiters where they're setting up a system and they're saying, hey, we could set up this system for you for a fee and then you just pay us $10K a month. You save, let's say annually, like $200K. I get predictability that you will be a retained customer. You know, happy days for both of us. It's easier now because I'm having these strategic conversations instead of just being the systems guy.

Benjamin Mena [00:55:08]:
So out of curiosity, you've spoken with a lot of recruiters, you've seen the backends, you've seen the shit, you've seen the good stuff. You've seen what's working and you've had a lot of conversations with recruiters over the years. And I'm sure it's like all the questions that you get are about how do you increase revenue? How do you do XYZ? How do you actually get Clay to work? Cause Clay's crazy. Like what XYZ tool should I be using? In all those questions that you get, do you ever like just wonder like, hey, I wish you would just ask me this question, but they never do.

Reyhan Khan  [00:55:41]:
Yes, yes. And I thought about this. If I had to pick one, it would be, hey, Rayhan, this is what I do in my day-to-day. These are the systems and the tasks, for example, and the projects. What do you think, like which ones are $10, $20, $30, which were like $100 and above that I should do? So recruiters don't come, don't brainstorm about what they can get off their plate. They don't even realize like there's so much that could be either done by a system or done by another person and they don't have to be involved in this and quality would still be, you know, what they expect, maybe even better than what they were doing. If you tell a recruiter, hey, I can source better candidates than you in your niche or this system can source better, right? They'll be like, oh no, you cannot. But once you start asking questions and once I show them the vision, it just gets easier.

Reyhan Khan  [00:56:29]:
So I would say this, this will be the biggest question like, because it ties directly into them removing themselves from like this day-to-day grind.

Benjamin Mena [00:56:37]:
That's good. All right. Two last questions before we let you go. If somebody wants to connect with you or follow you, how do they go about doing that?

Reyhan Khan  [00:56:46]:
They need to just go put my name on Reyhan Khan, Reyhan with a Y, because in Arabic it doesn't have a Y. I always have to explain it. And also I am putting out my first YouTube video tomorrow. And it will also go by my name. My business is called Recruiter GTM. It's recruitergtm.com. I had a long think about this before I came to, you know, I concluded that this will be my name. It's just everything that we talked about.

Reyhan Khan  [00:57:11]:
Nobody is focusing on GTM systems for recruiters. It's not just sales. It's not just outbound. It's the overall strategy on how you can productize your business and how you can then go out on multiple platforms. How to market it as well as hire offshore people. All of that I cover on Recruiter GTM. I have a school community also. So either you go to recruitergtm.com or check out my LinkedIn and you will just follow my content.

Reyhan Khan  [00:57:33]:
And I have a newsletter as well. And eventually I will educate you to a point that someday if you are a recruiter, you know, you can just jump on and talk with me. One last thing, I also have a 3-hour slot every Friday, which I just have open. It's 3 hours, so it can be 6 30-minute slots. Anybody can jump on. Brainstorm with me if you are looking for GTM, becoming a GTM, or if you're a recruiter looking for these systems. So easiest way would be LinkedIn or my website.

Benjamin Mena [00:57:59]:
Awesome. And anything else before I let you go?

Reyhan Khan  [00:58:03]:
Yeah, I would just say for all recruiters out there, before you invest into a program or before you invest into a system, just talk with somebody to see realistic roadmap of is this even a good fit for you or not, right? Because there's a lot of programs out there that are one size fits all. And I think with recruiters, it does not work like that. That's why you see very few agencies that do outbound or lead gen for recruiters because it's the hardest space to get replies in. If you do emails or if you do LinkedIn, which is for context, send 1,000 emails and obviously email is, the cold email is like almost dead. It's very hard to crack now. but if I sent 1,000 emails last year, any time of the year to SaaS people, I would get, if I do well and use Clay and all my playbooks, I can get maybe even 50 replies out of that. But for recruiters, if you, even if you get 5 out of 1,000, I would consider it a massive win. So that's how different it is.

Reyhan Khan  [00:59:04]:
So before just paying your money to someone, consult with someone. Anybody can actually jump on a call with me and say, hey, Hey, somebody pitched me $25K for this full funnel. Should I go ahead? And if there's value, I would definitely say yes, go and do that. But I'd also show you like a realistic roadmap of this should be your KPIs or expectations around it. So talk to someone if you feel like you don't know the market before you are investing in all these systems.

Benjamin Mena [00:59:29]:
So I just want to say thank you for coming on because like, we just— if you spend any time on LinkedIn, like you're seeing like GDM here, GDM there. Some of the fastest recruiting sectors I'm seeing growing right now of companies just like winning is in the, the GDM space. But it's also like, how do you use what is working in other places? How do you bring that into your recruiting desk or your recruiting company? So thank you for breaking it down. The 5 bullet points is something that I'm going to definitely go back to. And for the recruiters out there, like, this is your year. Crush it. But at the same time, is there something that you could take off your desk, which is something I'm probably going to do soon too? Like, what is something that you could take off your desk so you could focus on what is the zone of genius that helps really move the needle for your recruiting desk? 2026 is your year. I believe in you.

Benjamin Mena [01:00:12]:
Go get it.

Reyhan Khan  [01:00:14]:
Cheers, Ben. Thank you so much, man. Thank you for having me.

Benjamin Mena [01:00:17]:
You know, the resume never tells the full story. Candidates share what really matters during conversations, on calls and interviews, over email. Their motivations, salary expectations, plans to relocate. Most of that detail ends up buried in notes and forgotten. Atlas changes that. It's the AI-first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin. It captures every conversation automatically and turns it into something you can use. With Magic Search, you can ask Atlas questions like, who talked about wanting a 4-day week? Or, who mentioned they're open to relocating next year? It searches across your entire database and pulls the answers instantly.

Benjamin Mena [01:00:51]:
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, wait, smart dashboards give you a clear view of the pipeline across your business. And that's not theory. Atlas customers have reported over 40% EBITDA growth and over 80% increase in monthly billings after adopting the platform. It's built for agencies that want to grow.

Benjamin Mena [01:01:23]:
Without adding more manual work. Don't miss the future of recruitment. Get started with Atlas today and unlock your exclusive listener offer at recruitwithatlas.com.

Reyhan Khan  [01:01:34]:
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Elite Recruiter Podcast with Benjamin Mena. If you enjoyed, hit subscribe and leave a rating.