Your Best Biller Costs You $5 Million.

Benjamin Mena [00:00:00]:
The AI recruiting summit is coming back this year, 2026 and my God, things are starting to get crazy. We are seeing the change that we've been talking about for a few years now. But man, you do not want to miss a summit. Registration is free for all the live sessions. It is going to be kicking off July 13th all the way through the 20th. You do not want to miss as we are going to have tech tools. We we are going to have operators, we are going to have recruiting engineers, we are going to have recruiters that are actually using tools to make a difference in their recruiting desk, talking about what they're doing. The world's changing fast.

Benjamin Mena [00:00:38]:
This is a chance to see what's happening behind the scenes with a lot of recruiters. You don't want to miss this. Get registered today. I'll see you there. Coming up on this episode of the Elite Recruiter Podcast. Is Dialing for dollars dead?

Duncan Taylor [00:00:51]:
Not yet, but I believe it will be. I really believe it will be. For a styling firm, the most expensive mistake is promoting their best biller into a leadership role. I see it so often. Companies go, they're a really good biller, they're really good, therefore let's make them a leader and they'll make everyone else the same. But I don't see that to be the case. A great producer is not necessarily a great leader.

Benjamin Mena [00:01:17]:
Welcome to the Elite Recruiter Podcast with your host Benjamin Mena, where we focus on what it takes to win 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.

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Benjamin Mena [00:02:31]:
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 I'm excited about this episode because our world is changing. It's changing fast. So often, though, it doesn't feel like anything's actually changed. It feels like everything's just a bunch of hype and we're like talking around in circles and AI hasn't done actually anything. I get it.

Benjamin Mena [00:03:08]:
I feel that way too sometimes. But here's the thing. Like, I am watching some of these companies make some moves out there, and these moves are crazy. So think about this like you sitting in this chair right now. How do you prepare for the future? If you're working at an agency and you want to grow to a leadership position, how do you do that? What does that future leader actually look like? What does that career path look like? It used to be smile and dial. Maybe not anymore. How do you prepare yourself? And that's why I'm so excited about this conversation today, because the world is changing fast. So let me just dive right in with our guests.

Benjamin Mena [00:03:48]:
What is the most expensive leadership mistake a staffing firm can make and what does it actually cost them?

Duncan Taylor [00:03:57]:
I actually think for a staffing firm, the most expensive mistake is promoting their best biller into a leadership role. I see it so often. Companies go, they're a really good biller, they're really good. Therefore let's make them a leader and they'll make everyone else the same. But I don't see that to be the case. A great producer is not necessarily a great leader. It's a totally different skill set. And if it doesn't work out, you haven't just lost them as a biller.

Duncan Taylor [00:04:25]:
You may have lost some of your other top billers who decide they don't like working for this person as a leader and leave and take it somewhere else. It can be an incredibly costly mistake. If you don't get the right person into a leadership role, what would that actually cost them?

Benjamin Mena [00:04:41]:
Run the numbers. Run this out.

Duncan Taylor [00:04:42]:
Looking at the sorts of things I've seen, it could easily be if you've got a $1 million biller and they walk and they move into a leadership role immediately, you've probably lost that $1 million because they can't do both at the same level. And then they frustrate or annoy half a dozen of your other top billers. 5 million could walk out of the door very easily. And they could make other mistakes as well because they're focused on billing rather than some of the other technology issues that they've got to have coming through in that as well. It's really easy to focus on one aspect and not look at the bigger component of what do I actually need as a leader? You might be losing money for the right now, but then you're losing huge amounts more if you've not got a technology focused leader who's coming in and bringing in the new technology and knows how to apply it so that you, rather than just growing incrementally, you lose the opportunity to grow exponentially.

Benjamin Mena [00:05:43]:
I got to ask you, true or false? Most conversations in recruiting right now when it comes to AI, it's about costing firms money, not making them money.

Duncan Taylor [00:05:54]:
I would have to say it is both true and false. It totally depends on, on how you're applying your AI. Some companies are doing it right and they are actually bringing in good AI automation and they're doing it right and they will be successful. Others are doing it wrong. There's no governance, there's no process being put in place with it. Everyone's doing their own thing and it's a nightmare. You're really heading to this shadow IT scenario which is such a dangerous thing for any organization.

Benjamin Mena [00:06:27]:
All right, last question before we we dive into your background. Is dialing for dollars dead?

Duncan Taylor [00:06:34]:
Not yet, but I believe it will be. I really believe it will be. Who goes into Costco and buys something on, on the spur of the moment without picking out the phone and having a look, doing the research and looking at the reports and looking at what's going. Nobody does. Everybody does research these days. They don't make spontaneous decisions. And we as recruiting leaders, we have to be seen as a font of wisdom, as people who you go to for information. And you can only do that if you become a thought leader.

Duncan Taylor [00:07:06]:
You've got to be out there. And that doesn't come by dialing for dollars. That comes by very carefully building a presence online. And you really know when the CEO of a billion dollar healthcare staffing company reaches out to you and asks for your opinion because something you wrote on LinkedIn, then you know, dial for dollars is actually fading into the background.

Benjamin Mena [00:07:34]:
All right, so for everybody listening, let me take this back because all this needs to actually make sense. So I just want to introduce my guest, Duncan Taylor. Quick 30 second self introduction.

Duncan Taylor [00:07:43]:
What can I say? I am an executive recruiter, been in the space for over 30 years. I started off as a research scientist and moved into recruiting. My decision moved into recruiting. Have my own executive recruiting firm. I've really wanted to specialize and I love healthcare staffing and I love recruiting for recruiting companies. I love the irony of recruiting for recruiting companies because they don't know how to do it for themselves. So often they make lovely mistakes and so I love it. I'm from the UK originally.

Duncan Taylor [00:08:15]:
Been out in the States since 1999

Benjamin Mena [00:08:19]:
if you want a good laugh. I think it might have been almost, maybe almost 15 years into my recruiting career before I learned that there was recruiters for recruiters. Maybe I just was never good enough. I love it.

Duncan Taylor [00:08:34]:
I just love the irony of it. It's so much fun.

Benjamin Mena [00:08:37]:
All right, so You've got a PhD in medical parasitology.

Duncan Taylor [00:08:41]:
Yep.

Benjamin Mena [00:08:42]:
You were studying tropical diseases. Walk me back to this moment where you decided that the lab is not where you wanted to you where you were supposed to be.

Duncan Taylor [00:08:50]:
Yeah, I love parasitology. I love the fact when you look down a Microsoft when it wiggled, it was alive and if you did something to stop it from wiggling, you killed it. That's great. That's why I like Paristology. It was good, but I had, we had some personal life changes that restricted where we could be geographically at the time. And when I finished my Ph.D. there were no opportunities for me to stay locally and do parasite parasitology. So I actually moved into medical research.

Duncan Taylor [00:09:17]:
I did osteo and rheumatoid arthritis. That is mind numbing. I mean it really was. I spent five years in a 25 year research program and I would say at the end of five years I don't feel I'd contributed anything. And it was mind blowing. And so I actually go no, I want to do something different. And as a research scientist I then spend a year researching different career paths. I actually used what color is your parachute bowls 10 speed press and you can still buy it today.

Duncan Taylor [00:09:49]:
And I looked at it not long ago, it's been updated but it's still much the same thing. And I spend a year researching career paths. I ended up realizing what I really want to do is research people. I love researching people, I love understanding people and recruiting. Filled that opportunity. And so I then spent six months researching all the different recruiting companies in the UK at the time that might have a presence in pharmaceutical healthcare background that I had. I found half a dozen. I spoke to various executives in those companies, went down to two of them and then focused on two and persuaded one of them that they really needed to employ me as a healthcare recruiter to build out their pharmaceutical recruiting team without any prior recruiting experience at all.

Duncan Taylor [00:10:42]:
And they took me on and I built their healthcare practice for them.

Benjamin Mena [00:10:47]:
I gotta ask you, like, you're one of the few people that I have spoken with that chose recruiting. Like, most people land in this wonderful land of misfit toys with no plan. Like, we just end up here. I gotta say this because this happened, what, 1984.

Duncan Taylor [00:11:03]:
Yeah, 1994. I became a recruiter. Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:11:06]:
Now we have podcasts, we have books, we have this. But, like, back then, like, what did you see that made you say, like, this is the career.

Duncan Taylor [00:11:14]:
I've talked to people. As I said, I spent a year investigating different career paths. It wasn't easy to do the research. There was no Internet. You went to the library, you found books, and then you pick up the phone and you talk to people. I had hundreds of informational interviews with all, all sorts of different people in different careers until I found something that started sparking my interest. And one of those was executive recruiting. And so I spoke as I said.

Duncan Taylor [00:11:40]:
I called up out of the blue 10, 20, 30 different executive recruiters to find out what it was like and realized, nah, that's something that could be fun. I would enjoy that.

Benjamin Mena [00:11:52]:
So you got hired and you locked into healthcare, the healthcare side of things, literally from the start of your career.

Duncan Taylor [00:11:58]:
Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:11:59]:
I gotta ask them, like, I gotta ask you, like, how did you convince them to hire you with no recruiting experience to be like, I am going to go from research to a sales job?

Duncan Taylor [00:12:10]:
I think I must have sold myself pretty well out of the gate for them to give me a chance. It took a few letters, took a few phone calls, took a few faxes in those days to get through them. I kept pestering them until they listened and just gave a good story.

Benjamin Mena [00:12:28]:
And from there you started building out the entire program. Right. Walk me through some of that.

Duncan Taylor [00:12:33]:
So we built out there, the pharmaceutical practice. When I got there, it was just me. They had a tiny presence. Their presence was an advertisement in a book that was used. These are the days before Internet. There was one book that all recruiting companies put their name in for if they wanted to be visible for the healthcare. For pharmaceutical recruiting, there was just one book. And so they were in the book.

Duncan Taylor [00:13:00]:
And I checked out and found out they didn't have any dedicated recruiters in pharmaceutical. And so I said, I'm going to be that person you obviously want to be in this space. You have no one who does it. I'm Going to do it for you. And yeah, just sort of took it from there. Built it up to a reasonable size practice. I think when I left we had three recruiters and a couple of support staff on the pharmaceutical side of the house. They then made.

Duncan Taylor [00:13:28]:
They had a general finance group and one that worked in intellectual property. But I headed up their healthcare and from there.

Benjamin Mena [00:13:36]:
Is that where you ended up in one of the largest healthcare companies in the us?

Duncan Taylor [00:13:40]:
No, I moved a few times since before then. Yes. I then moved from the UK to the US to work with a small boutique staffing firm in Boulder, Colorado. Much better skiing in Colorado than there was in the uk. Decided we'd do that and so moved on from a few more places. Ended up with a large healthcare staffing company. But that's a long story to get there, I have to say.

Benjamin Mena [00:14:04]:
So you're talking about the largest. I think it's. Is it the largest healthcare staffing company in the us?

Duncan Taylor [00:14:11]:
Not anymore. It was for a short period of time. AMN Healthcare, it got to 4 billion and then with COVID but then AYA Healthcare took them over. So they've shrunk back to. I think they're now fourth place. Healthcare staffing company with AYA is by far the largest.

Benjamin Mena [00:14:31]:
Now I gotta ask because you worked there for a while with the time that you were working there, what did you learn from the inside about how these organizations succeed and fail at a leadership level?

Duncan Taylor [00:14:44]:
I think what I learned is that everybody puts their trousers on pants on the same way and really it doesn't matter if it's a big company or a small company, they got the same problems. It's full of people. And the biggest challenge is the larger you are, the harder it is to implement change. And it takes longer to implement change. Some great people and I and it helped me understand and appreciate process. But I'd been in a small staffing company that was one of the most process oriented staffing firms out there. The company was called Decision Toolbox. It started in 2000 and went fully remote in 2002, well before any companies were fully remote.

Duncan Taylor [00:15:26]:
I joined it in 2010. Best education in recruiting I've ever truly in the seven years I was there, I learned more about how to be a good recruiter than anything previously. And that was process. I go to amn, they had good process. It wasn't always right, but they had process. And there's a frustration in the larger companies if the process is wrong because it's so hard to change it, but if it's good process, it really is of value.

Benjamin Mena [00:15:55]:
So you went and started your own firm.

Duncan Taylor [00:15:57]:
Yep.

Benjamin Mena [00:15:59]:
You left. Like, I don't want to say it's a guaranteed paycheck, but I mean, everything set up, you could have like lasted there for years. Like, why did you decide to jump ship and go off on your own?

Duncan Taylor [00:16:12]:
It really was important. When leadership changes, when you're an executive recruiter, your reputation is key and you've got to be in lockstep with your executive leadership. When leadership changes and you are no longer able to fully get behind the decisions being made in leadership. This was actually after amn, I moved to another company called the Key who still had a huge amount of recruiting. I wasn't able to get in lockstep with the decisions being made by the leadership. We just had different opinions. And I could not, in full honesty encourage executives I knew well or had come across or respected to move into a position that I didn't have, believe had long term opportunity for them. And so you've got to leave.

Duncan Taylor [00:17:03]:
And I wanted to do it different, differently. I had some ideas of what I wanted a recruiting company to look like. I wanted to do it differently. And so I thought the best way of doing that is to step aside and set up my own company.

Benjamin Mena [00:17:17]:
And with that, because, you know, I think that's a lot of people like, have that idea in their head. Like, what did you keep on seeing that was missing the market? You're like, you know what? Me, Duncan, I can fill this gap.

Duncan Taylor [00:17:28]:
Every recruiting company says they do it better. Every recruiting company believes that they provide a quality service. And we do. We're good people, we love, we want to do it. We want to do a good job. Yes, there are some who are a little bit on the shady side, but by and large, we're really good quality people wanting to do a good, quality service. I wanted to do it a little different. We are so dependent as recruiters on our gut feel.

Duncan Taylor [00:18:00]:
We talk to somebody and we go, yes, I know they're right. And you go, yeah, but how do I know they're right? But I do. I've been doing this a long time. I get it, I understand it. I know what my client wants. This is the person for you. I do believe that we have a tendency to recruit people we like or present people we like. And the people we like aren't necessarily the best person for your client because their needs may be different to what you are and what you perceive.

Duncan Taylor [00:18:30]:
Often it's the same. But I do think that there is a value in Having some data behind the gut feel. And I had worked with an industrial psychologist, started working with her in about 2014.

Benjamin Mena [00:18:45]:
15.

Duncan Taylor [00:18:46]:
Dr. Joyce Perdot. And she has built a. Based on the Hogan assessment. She's built a process that really takes Hogan, I think, to the next level. Great, great assessment process. Really looking at the dark side, the derailers and all this that Hogan is so good at. I wanted to put data behind my gut feel so that I didn't rely on just, yeah, this is a good person.

Duncan Taylor [00:19:12]:
Trust me to. This is a good person, and this is why. This is where they're going to be strong. But this is where you're going to have problems, and you've got to be aware of the problems because those problems may be too big for you. I think as recruiters, we have a tendency not to want to present the derailers. We don't want to say, this is a good person, but you need to be aware of xyz, because that might be a problem for you. Not every recruiter is willing to do that. I've always tried to do that.

Duncan Taylor [00:19:42]:
And sometimes I've had clients who would say, well, why are you telling me what's wrong with them? And I go, because no one's perfect. And what I wanted to do with the using Joyce to support the work that I do is to have some data behind. This is a good candidate. This is why they fit. But this is also where we may have issues.

Benjamin Mena [00:20:05]:
So I want to ask you what was probably one of the hardest parts about year one of having your own business? And I don't want to talk about business development. Let's talk about the identity. You went from the big firms and great firms to literally building your own.

Duncan Taylor [00:20:19]:
I think the hardest thing was realizing that I had to go all in on specialization to really focus on a preferred sector for me, healthcare, staffing. It's counterintuitive. You think, I'm a small firm. I've got to take anything that comes to me because I don't know if I'm going to survive unless I take everything. Now, I still have clients outside the sector and I will continue to support them. But that's almost like the friends and family start to a business where anyone you know in any sector, they'll give you the work because they trust you, and you go, I'll do that. But sustainability can't be based on friends and family. Sustainability has to come by becoming a known entity in your marketplace.

Duncan Taylor [00:21:05]:
And I have to say, it was through your seminars, you know that you do Your conference that you do where it's really focused on specialization, I realized, okay, we've got to do it, we have to do it. And so we did. That's when we went all in on specializing in healthcare staffing because I love it. It's a fun industry to be in.

Benjamin Mena [00:21:27]:
So it was one of the speakers at one of the summits.

Duncan Taylor [00:21:30]:
Yes, it was definitely a number of your speakers at the summit that kept on saying, I go, really? But if I focus too much, I might lose business. And I go, yeah, but you're going to gain sustainability by focusing because you've become a known entity.

Benjamin Mena [00:21:46]:
Cheers to those speakers. Cheers. I want to switch gears a little bit because I think there's a big biller trap and I think this is important that we need to talk about. I know we, we talked about this at the very beginning, but we need to go deeper. You talk about what you call the, the product, the producer manager trap. Explain it to me like I'm a staffing firm owner who just promoted they're biggest biller to a branch manager.

Duncan Taylor [00:22:11]:
Yeah, we did touch on it a little bit beforehand. But in staffing, a bad manager breaks culture that drives production. If you're in manufacturing, a bad manager may cause problems, but the machine is likely to keep running. But in staffing, a bad manager will truly break the production chain because they will stop. The recruiters will leave. Staffing recruiters, we're a volatile bunch. We all actually believe very strongly in our own abilities. And we've got egos.

Duncan Taylor [00:22:44]:
I mean we really do. If someone starts treading on our egos, we go, I can go somewhere else. Recruiters follow strong leaders and we flee toxic ones. And if you're new biller, you're someone you bring in who's a big biller or someone you promote within alienates your top 10% of producers. Those producers will go to your competitors and they don't just take the bills. Now you could easily lose your clients as well. So you've lost millions in annual gross profit and potentially client relationships associated with those desks. It is incredibly dangerous.

Duncan Taylor [00:23:22]:
And a top biller isn't necessarily a good leader. So an ineffectual leader in a staffing environment provide invisible friction because they don't know better. They may delay the implementation of a new AI sourcing tool or fail to optimize the VMS workflows because that's not what they had to do before, but now they do. They may even ignore redeployment rates or the fact that referral programs are becoming the top source of candidates. They may not know that because that's not what they've seen in the past.

Benjamin Mena [00:23:55]:
But like, I can see most firm owners sitting there saying something like this, like, but my biggest biller understands the business better than anyone. What would you say to that?

Duncan Taylor [00:24:05]:
I would say, do you want to stay where you are right now, doing the same thing day after day whilst the market moves around you, or do you actually want to be learning what's going on from other industries who are ahead of ours and actually become at the front edge, the cutting edge of staffing, rather than at the trailing edge of staffing?

Benjamin Mena [00:24:29]:
So you've built your business around assessments using industrial psychology, or industrial organized psychology and structured assessments. You're speaking to a world of recruiters that we all live by our gut feeling. I know you mentioned that earlier, but what is some of the things that your assessments is actually showing about the candidates that a gut feeling never would actually have?

Duncan Taylor [00:24:52]:
Candidates, good candidates can interview like rock stars. They really can. And we love those candidates. Don't get me wrong, you go, this person is going to make me look good in front of my client. We love those. We truly do. And they may be hard because they're such rock stars or come across that way, but when the rubber hits the road, you start seeing some. Some of these derailers come out.

Duncan Taylor [00:25:16]:
And it's really hard to assess what those derailers are. You get a feel for it. Someone who is overly bold, you go, oh, that's nothing wrong with being bold. They're strong. You go, yeah, but they can be overly bold. They can be leisurely, they can be mischievous, they can be colorful and manage it diligent, dutiful. These are all potential derailers with Hogan. And they're never good.

Duncan Taylor [00:25:41]:
When someone has them to an excess, we all have them to a level. But when they start getting too strong, then it's a problem. I have been working with Joyce for 10, 15 years now. By and large, I don't get surprises. So I've interviewed somebody, I've worked through them, and I go, I think this person's going to probably flag in these one or two areas. And Joyce may find the same. And we go, okay, it's two derailers it's potentially livable with. But I'm, you know, if she finds five derailers, I will just drop that candidate.

Duncan Taylor [00:26:17]:
I'll tell the client, you really don't want this person. They're too dangerous. Even if we feel that they're a good fit for the role. But I would say, no, I'm sorry, we've got to drop this one out. It's going to cost you too much in the long run. And that hurts. I hate it when Joyce comes around, says, you know those three candidates, two of them have got four derailers each. You really haven't got them.

Duncan Taylor [00:26:40]:
You've got to go and find some new people. And I said, are you absolutely sure? And she goes, yeah. And I go, okay, we've got to go out there and find some better ones. And then you do and there are better people for it. And sometimes the client says, I want to take this person even though they got three, four derailers. And I go, I'm sorry, I'm not going to guarantee them. You've got a one year guarantee if you take someone that we, we say hasn't got these derailers, but I can't give you a guarantee if you don't. And they'll go, oh, really, we want them.

Duncan Taylor [00:27:09]:
Well, you can take them, but you'll only have a six month guarantee, Not a one year guarantee or a three month guarantee if they've got too many derailers. And so you've just got to put your money where your mouth is. And I believe in it. I believe that they're really good assessments and I love the fact that it puts data behind what is my gut feeling? Because I don't do the assessments. But generally Joyce and I agree, but sometimes we don't man.

Benjamin Mena [00:27:36]:
The psychologist you're working with is like, go get more candidates.

Duncan Taylor [00:27:39]:
Ouch.

Benjamin Mena [00:27:40]:
I love that though.

Duncan Taylor [00:27:42]:
If I believe in it, I believe in it. And I do.

Benjamin Mena [00:27:46]:
It also means that your partner is like locked in with our space.

Duncan Taylor [00:27:49]:
Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:27:51]:
So I want to talk about something that I, I feel like most people aren't talking clearly about. Starts with an A and ends in an I. So when you look at staffing companies right now and how they're actually implementing artificial intelligence, what scares you the most? Not the opportunity side, the risk side.

Duncan Taylor [00:28:13]:
Unregulated AI shadow is incredibly dangerous in any industry, but in healthcare staffing, it can be catastrophic. We live under far more governance than many other staffing areas. We have hipaa, we have joint commission. We can be completely undermined by bad mistakes and we can be reprimanded. Yes, we can lose our joint commission. It can be catastrophic and that's where we have to have regulators. You can't have shadow it in healthcare staffing. Maybe you can in other staffing and you can live with the consequences.

Duncan Taylor [00:28:52]:
We Absolutely can't. And what's interesting is AI truly wants to give you what you're looking for. That's how the algorithms are. It wants to find what you're looking for. It wants to make you happy. So if what you're asking it to do is to find the credentials on a nurse, what it wants to do is find credentials that work for a nurse. And so it will go out, your autonomous AI agent, go out and look for a nurse's license for your opening that you have. And if it doesn't find it, it could hallucinate verifications, timestamp a fake screenshot, clear the nurse for a shift that they're not qualified for.

Duncan Taylor [00:29:34]:
You are responsible for this as a company and it can happen. And that's what might happen if you don't have your AI being regulated and governed. Healthcare staffing needs very strict and clear AI governance. And what's scary is what 68% of healthcare staffing firms report they're incorporating AI agents into their workflows. Only 22% have actually named an AI owner to manage it. And perhaps even more concerning, only 27% have established AI governance guardrails. And in travel nursing, which is even more regulated, that number drops to 11%. That, to me is scary.

Duncan Taylor [00:30:13]:
And we've got to change that. The industry has got to start putting the guardrails in for the use of AI.

Benjamin Mena [00:30:18]:
When you say shadow it, what is that? For somebody that doesn't know what that means?

Duncan Taylor [00:30:21]:
Shadow it is essentially your recruiters going out, finding some AI that works for them and using it, or the manager saying, oh, I've got this great, found this great tool that we can use and it's not being fully processed and assessed by the IT group, your chief technical officer or whatever it happens to be. It's, you know, Soc 2 Type 2 certification. You know, you need to have this level of ensuring that the governance is in place. I know when I worked at AMM, we couldn't touch any piece of software that wasn't SOC2 type 2 compliant. And it used to drive me mad because I wanted to play with the new tools and I wasn't allowed to play with the new tools because they weren't SOC2 type 2. But then you found one that was, and it would go, yes, you can use it. Fantastic, because there was governance in place.

Benjamin Mena [00:31:17]:
So I got asked as like a firm owner or a leader, like, how do you balance the no shadow it with also keeping your recruiters, like, up to speed and like, fully functional?

Duncan Taylor [00:31:28]:
I guess I have to kind of act as the AI governance myself. And likewise I would recommend that leaders do that. That the first question I ask any organization software provider is are you SOC 2 type 2 compliant? They don't have to be certified as long as they're compliant because at least it shows that they're aware of what it means to have the guardrails in place. And even if you look at the number of ATSs out there, I spoke to four or five different ATS companies, only one of them said it was SOC2 type 2 compliant. And these are all the small ones. Two or three of them I actually pulled out from your summit. And they're not taking that level of governance seriously at this stage and so I feel very loath to use them and I think we should be cautious of anyone that hasn't decided any tool that isn't taking governance seriously.

Benjamin Mena [00:32:22]:
So I'm not going to ask a question this but I wasn't even thinking about the hallucinations around the healthcare world. I see like the hallucinations around govcon like chat gbt this week I had to literally prompt the exact same thing and three times before it actually was like, oh, I'll follow what you're doing. It gave me completely wild things that I'm like in the back of my head I'm like the Pentagon is using this for missions targeting.

Duncan Taylor [00:32:48]:
Yes.

Benjamin Mena [00:32:49]:
But like when it comes to healthcare, like I mean that's as detrimental for somebody but I want to switch gears just for the sake of time. One of the things that I think when in our pre game that really stuck with me and it's something that I'm starting to see more and more of. As you said that AI is going to replace the entry level recruiting activity and that's also like how we've trained the next generation of recruiters and workers in our space. If the bullpen disappears, where do future leaders come from?

Duncan Taylor [00:33:18]:
A huge question and one I've tried to I'm talking with some clients about and it's I've called it the junior talent cliff we will have. If the ball pen is where recruiters learn how to be recruiters and they learn the gut instinct of understanding a clinician's hesitation when you're talking to them or how to talk somebody off the cliff when they've had a horrendous shift, that's what they learn through the reps going over and over. If they've lost that because that's being done by AI, you've got to move from that sink or swim model that we have at the moment where you put 50 recruiters in 612 months time, the top 20 will survive. The rest would have left and done something different. That's got to change. So you need to have your HR function or if you have one, but you've got to pivot from high volume acquisition of these entry level recruiters to more of talent architecture, of building a corporate university, of teaching the skills through a corporate university structure to bridge the gap between theory and practice. Because they're no longer learning in practice. They've got to learn somehow so that they will become the leaders we need them to be.

Duncan Taylor [00:34:33]:
But it'll also mean that some of the bad things that are being brought up through will go away as well. So we can actually teach them better how to be leaders.

Benjamin Mena [00:34:44]:
So if somebody's listening to this podcast right now and they want to grow into a leader at a firm in the future, pay me this picture. What does that leader actually look like? So that way they can start preparing

Duncan Taylor [00:34:53]:
for that old school. Activity managers. That's really what recruiting leaders were, activity managers. They rose to the top because they were excellent individual contributors in the boiler room era. They excel at driving volume, but they often lack some of the strategic vision to sell complex multi year workforce solutions, et cetera. Not always, but it's more likely. What I think our leaders need to do is be tech fluent. They need to be able to articulate how a tech stack implements a client's bottom line.

Duncan Taylor [00:35:28]:
They've got to be at the forefront of technology. They've got to have that consultative approach. I've got, you know, have they sold RPO, MSP, SaaS solutions? That's what I'm looking for is somebody who knows how to build relationship. Not sell a transaction, but sell a relationship. I also want someone who has got that architectural thinking. Do they build systems for growth or do they just demand more activity? And that's where it's changed. It's gone from activity to growth to systems. The architecture of growth is important.

Benjamin Mena [00:36:07]:
Ooh. Well, I want to get practical. You've said this a few times online. You said this in the pre game and it's something that feels like you believe. You say boutique can beat the big. How?

Duncan Taylor [00:36:19]:
It's tough, but you can be nimble. It's the big companies like oil tankers. It takes them 3, 4 miles to stop or change course. We can be much quicker if you specialize, you can know your space better than any of the big players and you can own that space. You can offer tailored experiences that they cannot match because you know the space. And you can become the person that, that the CEOs, the CEOs or whoever actually come to for an opinion about it. Because you can be nimble. You can spend the time really focused on knowing that space.

Benjamin Mena [00:37:00]:
But you know, break it down. Give me the playbook. Like how can a boutique firm under we'll say $20 million or maybe even $10 million start really competing against these big boys, the AMN Cross Country Medical Staffing Network. What are some of these things that a small firm can have that these big guys can never truly duplicate?

Duncan Taylor [00:37:19]:
It's really difficult and I don't know if I have the answer. I'll be honest, I don't know if I have the answer. I would like to think that it's the fact that we can be nimble and we can go out there, we can build those relationships more effectively and we can keep on the front edge and trying to. But it's really hard. It's not going to be easy and I don't really have the answer. I wish I did, but I don't have the answer. It's tough. I think we can do it by playing to our strengths, but it's not going to be easy.

Benjamin Mena [00:37:49]:
You said something I had to do some research on in our pre game and it just, it started making sense after I did the research because of the space that I'm in. But it's just something I just couldn't wrap my head around when it comes to staffing and or recruiting. And you're laughing about this, but you said that like staffing has the potential in the future to be a race to the bottom.

Duncan Taylor [00:38:11]:
We're heading now we're heading towards a

Benjamin Mena [00:38:13]:
race to the bottom where the margins suck, profit's gone. But you were talking about firms starting to move into a bit of a different model. Can you paint that picture and then explain it?

Duncan Taylor [00:38:26]:
Yeah. We're currently a lot of staffing firms work with the arbitrage model. Bill rate is pay rate. Bill rate minus pay rate is gross profit arbitrage. And there is a linear function, the spread, negotiating a higher rate or suppressing delivery costs through sheer volume. So that's where we're at, arbitrage. However, AI agents are reducing manual processes by up to 40% or more within the next three years. So we got to move from bill rates.

Duncan Taylor [00:38:58]:
That's time and materials. Arbitrage, time and materials. We've got to move. Statement of work. The IT area has, is ahead of us on this one. They have moved from time and materials to statement of work. They no longer are selling coders. They are selling a piece of work, a completed piece of work.

Duncan Taylor [00:39:20]:
And we've got to do the same as AI agents. Reduce the manual processes. It becomes the companies. You know, in our case, hospitals are saying it costs you nothing. You can. If you can find my answer in 300 milliseconds, then what am I paying you for? I could do that myself. And so we've got to move from that staff augmentation, filling immediate vacancies to really becoming strategic workforce partners. We must leverage the predictive power of AI to sell reliability rather than headcount.

Duncan Taylor [00:39:58]:
Instead of billing by the hour, you want to sign contracts guaranteeing a higher fill rate. So if you look at a hospital, 47% of shifts filled, that is a headache for your CFO. But as a recruiting company, if you say, and they used to just say, help me fill these spare slots. And if you turn around and say, I'm going to guarantee you a 97% fill rate of all your things, and the CFO will pay a price, a big price, to take that off their shoulders and put it on your shoulders. And so you've got to use AI to do the forecasting, to keep a warm bench of talent so that you are selling operational continuity, a conversation. Moving from lowering bill rates to lowering the cost of overtime and clinician burnout. That's what's important, is that you are saying, I'm going to guarantee that your 97% of your shifts are full, rather than, I'm going to fill every slot that I can, but still the risk is going to be on the CFO of the health system.

Benjamin Mena [00:41:06]:
When you first told it to me in the pregame, I was like, wait, what is this? And then I had to think about what I see in the government contracting space and what you mentioned in the IT space and how the business models sometimes start evolving.

Duncan Taylor [00:41:21]:
Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:41:22]:
You know, you're actively deep in AI. Who knows where AI is going to be at when this actually goes live? Because at the speed it is. But you're like heads down in cloud. You're working with agents, you're exploring agents, and all that stuff based on what you're seeing. Paint me a picture. Let's go five years out. What does staffing look like?

Duncan Taylor [00:41:42]:
Do you mean the leadership or staffing as a whole? I mean two different questions.

Benjamin Mena [00:41:47]:
Let's play both real quick.

Duncan Taylor [00:41:49]:
Okay. I think staffing as a whole will be no longer filling vacancies. It will be guaranteeing a Level of employment. It's not going to be fill me this, fill me that, fill me this, fill that. That's going to, that's going to change. It's. I want you to guarantee the level of which I have all the people that I need to do my job, to do our business. I think that's where we've got to go.

Duncan Taylor [00:42:13]:
There will always be some fill me this, fill me that. But I'd say that's, that's probably less. On the executive leadership team, I think the titles will be the same but I do believe the roles will be quite different. I think the CEO of a 100 million plus staffing company, they must have experience in tech enabled services where margin is driven by efficiency, not volume. We're moving away from the volume game. It's got to have efficiency. The CFO is likely to have an actuarial background so they can fully understand the pricing of risk. Risk is where it's all at.

Duncan Taylor [00:42:50]:
What is the price and how much does risk cost? My father and my brother, my father was an actuary, my brother is an actuary. I just happen to love the actuarial mindset for better or worse. But it's pricing risk really important. The chief growth officer, head of sales. They must be an architect rather than an operator capable of mapping workflows between human value and agent speed. It's a balance now between what? The speed of an agent and the value that a human will bring. The chro. They have to have a deep background in learning and talent development.

Duncan Taylor [00:43:24]:
They must be capable of managing a hybrid workforce, retaining human employees to collaborate with digital counterparts. It's a different environment. Not everyone's going to be working the same way. And the CTO must also be overseeing AI governance. Must have a strong legal mindset to understand the risks associated with a technological failure.

Benjamin Mena [00:43:47]:
So the head of sales isn't going to be like head of sales anymore. You think it's going to be the chief growth Officer?

Duncan Taylor [00:43:52]:
I think so. That's what I would call it. But who am I to say?

Benjamin Mena [00:43:56]:
I mean we are typically like five, 10 years behind the rest of the world when it comes to stuff. Generally speaking, in a high performing staffing organization, high performing recruiting organization, what position in this org chart of leadership exists now that won't exist in the future?

Duncan Taylor [00:44:14]:
They may have the same titles but they'll be very different. I mean the head of recruiting, the person who was driving the ball, Peter, that's going to be a different role. It's going to be a totally different role. It May be still called head of recruiting. I've no idea. But it's going to be a very different type of position because it's not driving the metrics in the way the dials, the. You know, there's not going to be the bell ringing every time there's a thing. The boards are the whiteboards up with the numbers on it.

Duncan Taylor [00:44:43]:
It's going to be different because it's going to be much more that the recruiters are going to be spending more time on building relationships and less time on the dialing and less time on finding the candidates because we've got a lot of the grunt stuff has been done by AI.

Benjamin Mena [00:44:58]:
I want to switch gears a little bit and I know some of the listeners are going to cringe. But you said future recruiter is not a dialer. And I know there are dialers that are always going to win. But we are looking at these big firms. You said that they're going to be a talent agent or maybe even a talent manager. What does the day in the life of this person look like? And that role, that recruiter DNA, like, how can somebody listen to this right now, looking at the future, grow into that? Or can you grow those people? Or do you have to hire differently?

Duncan Taylor [00:45:32]:
I actually think how many recruiters prefer the dialing to having the conversations with the candidates?

Benjamin Mena [00:45:40]:
Or if we did a poll right now, I think that like, percentage wise, I think that might be like 95%.

Duncan Taylor [00:45:50]:
I kind of think so. And so what I'm thinking is that the recruiters are going to be able to do what they love doing more, which is being career counselors, spending time talking with the candidates, building those relationships, making sure that they're not just seen as a number, they are seen as a person that you've got their best interests at heart. That's what we do. We didn't become recruiters because we wanted to pick up the phone and call people who didn't want to talk to us. We actually did it because we love relationships and that's what it's going to be about. So your recruiters are going to become your career counselors. Your account managers are going to become your crisis consultants. The people that are there moving, no longer just order takers, but they are in relationship with the client so that they can help talk through the crises as they come and the solutions they can provide to those crises when they happen.

Benjamin Mena [00:46:41]:
And, you know, also looking at the future, or let me take a step back to that question, like as a leader, do you start trying to hire for that or should you grow internally?

Duncan Taylor [00:46:52]:
I think you probably have the team in place already. You may be hiring slightly different when you hire, but I think a lot of what you need is already there now. Dialing for dollars, is it still there right now? Yes, absolutely. Just look at so many companies and that's what we meant to do. And we're being told on emails every day we can do more dialing for you or dialing for dollars. You need to do this. It's not a popular idea that I have is that it's changing, but I think it will change. And I think the ones that embrace it faster will do better of building that.

Duncan Taylor [00:47:26]:
Being the subject matter expertise. I actually think most of the people in place would love to take that role. And so I don't think you need to necessarily hire new people for it. You need to empower them to allow them to do it. They still got to make the money. They still got to do it. And so it's going to be an evolution. But you've got to.

Duncan Taylor [00:47:44]:
As they move away from the dining for dollars, you can only do that when you have something that's already in place underneath it to take its place. If you're not doing, you can't just say, okay, no more. You don't have to dial anymore. That's going to fail. You've got to be investing in becoming that subject matter expert as an organization and individuals within the organization, empowering them to have a voice, to actually learn their industry and to speak to their industry so that people then come to them. Only when you've done that will you find that the dialing drops because it becomes more inbound and less outbound.

Benjamin Mena [00:48:23]:
Think about this. Everybody's been having the AI agents working. The model might be changing a little bit or a lot. Looking at the future, what percentage of staffing companies operating today will still be around? And, you know, let's talk about the numbers of what you see anyways in attrition and failure rates. But do you see that accelerating as we look like 10 years out?

Duncan Taylor [00:48:45]:
I really don't know because it's. Staffing is a really tough business. It's very cyclical. We know recruiters are the first people to let go when the industry takes a downturn. It's been like that for years and it's tough. So will there be more staffing firms that don't make it? Yeah. Will mine make it? I have no idea. I hope so.

Duncan Taylor [00:49:06]:
But you don't know. You just do the best that you can. Staffing is A tough business. I think it's more interesting though that recent studies have shown that, what, 61% of candidates are exaggerating their expertise in specific skills, 59 inflate the scope of their responsibilities in previous roles. 61% of candidates use AI scripts to become impressive in interview answers. 27% of candidates utilize AI to generate real time responses during live interviews. And even 25% of candidates actually use AI generated avatars to conduct virtual meetings. So with what, 11,000 baby boomers retiring every day and AI tools making it harder for companies to find their own workers, there will always be a need for well managed recruiting companies who know how to navigate their sector well and provide real value to their clients.

Benjamin Mena [00:50:01]:
We've gone deep on like the future, what you need to do or the challenges you have. Like, you know, especially when you're moving your top biller to a manager role, which I've seen happen so many times and I've seen it blow up too. We've talked about a lot. Is there anything before we jump over to the quickfire questions that you want to go deeper on or a question that I should have asked you?

Duncan Taylor [00:50:23]:
You seem to have covered a lot of stuff, so no, I think you've done pretty well. Otherwise we will end up in some rabbit hole that we'll never get out of.

Benjamin Mena [00:50:32]:
We can go Joe Rogan style. I think like a Joe Rogan like recruiting podcast has to be like an in person thing. It can't be digitally. So the quick fire questions, they don't need to be quick answers. You've been around the recruiting industry for a bit. You've seen a lot of recruiters, you've built out teams. You're an executive recruiter helping place some of the most successful people and the most important people within the organizational charts of these large companies. If somebody hit you up and they asked you with all that you've seen, how can I go from average to elite, what would you tell them?

Duncan Taylor [00:51:12]:
It's relationships, it's trustworthy, it's your reputation is the most important thing. Never do anything that impacts your reputation. I had the advantage, the disadvantage of coming to America with an English accent. It's an advantage because you're remembered every time you make a phone call. The disadvantages, you're remembered every time you make a phone call. So if you say the wrong thing or if you come across in the wrong way, you'll be remembered as that person. Because you can't call into the same company three times and expect to not be remembered each time. You will be.

Duncan Taylor [00:51:53]:
And so it's reputation, it's honesty. It is just being above board and ensuring that you're perceived in the way you want to be perceived and you stick with it. I had the advantage, disadvantage of an English accent. I think everyone, if they always live by the rule that you will be remembered. So make sure what you do is good. The other thing is recruiting is a black hole. So many people, so many candidates hate the fact that they never hear from their recruiter and they have to chase the recruiter or. And these days they get emails with the EM dash in there all the time.

Duncan Taylor [00:52:35]:
Oh, it's AI generated. You just know it's AI generated because it's got an EM dash in there or in this dynamic environment that we live today. How are you doing? Whatever it happens to be, There are certain AI things that we all know. Take the AI out of the relationship by making sure it doesn't rizz it. But also keep in touch with your candidates and simple thing that I've always taught my candidate, my recruiters, and I do myself, I contact every single one of my candidates that's still in play on a Friday, every Friday and tell them what's going on. Even if my update is there is no update, they will always have a communication with me on a Friday. That is the single thing that I've had people mention more often than it's just always. They say, I always knew I'd get a call from you or a text or an email from you on a Friday to let me know what was going on.

Duncan Taylor [00:53:29]:
Nobody else did that. That is how you go from being average to extremely good is just by communicating and keeping everybody informed.

Benjamin Mena [00:53:40]:
I gotta ask, how much business have you gotten from those Friday follow ups?

Duncan Taylor [00:53:43]:
Two of my main clients are candidates that I never placed because they liked the way I handled them because they said I always knew. I loved your honesty, I loved your approach. I loved the fact that I knew what was going on. I never placed them. They were also Rams. They may have been the silver medalist. I didn't place them. But because of how I handled them as a candidate, they became clients.

Benjamin Mena [00:54:08]:
All right, guys, listening Friday follow ups. Let's do it.

Duncan Taylor [00:54:11]:
Gotta do it.

Benjamin Mena [00:54:13]:
What is a book that's had a huge impact on your career?

Duncan Taylor [00:54:16]:
It depends if you mean the book itself or the so if only I could remember the name of it. Now you've got me on it. So it really is anti fragility. So Nassim, I think it was terrible book. Great concepts. Just don't read the book. Read the Cliff Notes. I mean truly do.

Duncan Taylor [00:54:38]:
Because it's not worth reading the book. But it's fantastic concepts in there. I really like it. I've learned a lot from it of the whole concept of anti fragility. People learning and getting better because of what they've done. In every industry you have your Damocles people, the people that things go wrong for them and they collapse and you never see them again. You have a lot of phoenixes, people where things happen to them, they get knocked down and they come back exactly the same as they were before. They haven't learned.

Duncan Taylor [00:55:08]:
But what you really want are the hydras. The people that are knocked down, they lose a head, they come back with two heads. They're better, they get better. Love it. But don't read the book. The other one is Donald Miller's book, which is the Brand Script, the story Brand book. I think that's a book that every small business should read. It's how to brand yourself as an organization in a way that that will be listened to by other people.

Duncan Taylor [00:55:35]:
It's the brand script style Story brand. Great book by Don Miller. I probably got the name Building a Story Brand. I had to write it down because I knew I'd forget. Building a Story Brand by Donald Miller. Well worth reading. Little book, but great.

Benjamin Mena [00:55:50]:
What's your favorite tech tool at the moment?

Duncan Taylor [00:55:52]:
I love Bright Hire for my interviewing. Great tech tool. Every interview that I do, as I do, it comes up with great AI notes. It also gives you the opportunity of making sure your other interviewers are doing it right. So if you have a number of recruiters, it will actually flag if your recruiters are asking inappropriate questions and will tell you this recruiter is doing this. They need to be trained in this and they need to learn how to do this. And it deletes any from the transcripts. It will.

Duncan Taylor [00:56:24]:
Unless you're an admin. It deletes any inappropriate answers. You know, if you're talking about a discrimination of some description, no one will be able to see the question or the answer unless you're the admin and things like that. Bright Hire, fantastic recruiting tool. I think every recruiting company should have it. I try to get my clients to use it, but yeah, some of them have, but it's good. And then I have to say I just open claw and claw is great. So I use, I use that to build AI agents with firecrawl and things like that to go out and keep me up to date with what's going on out there.

Benjamin Mena [00:56:58]:
Great tools You've been recruiting for a little while. What has been one of the hardest challenges that you've had to go through?

Duncan Taylor [00:57:06]:
That's an interesting hardest challenge is always clients not listening to what you're trying to tell them and making bad decisions. Sometimes you can persuade them to do it right, but not always. It's the way that the. The market impacts you. I think it's a. If the market crashes around you, it's really hard to be successful and you get impacted. I know everybody else does, but somehow recruiting is the first thing to go. I remember in post 9 11, the industry, recruiting industry crashed at that point.

Duncan Taylor [00:57:39]:
It was really hard to survive. 2008 banking crisis. Recruiting crashed really hard to survive that one. And it's a volatile market. We chose a volatile market. It's not something that everybody needs all the time. They probably should, but they don't always think they do.

Benjamin Mena [00:57:58]:
So you've got the chance to work with a lot of recruiters. You got the chance to hire a lot of recruiters. I'm sure you've gotten questions on, like, you know, how does this work? Or what's the BD strategy? Right? What do I do to grow? How do I get more business? All these years of talking with recruiters and recruiters asking you questions, you ever just wonder, hey, man, I wish they would ask me this question, but I never do. What would that question be?

Duncan Taylor [00:58:22]:
Almost, what is it you need to be to be a good recruiter? Which to me is build that relationship and be communicative. I wish they had asked that, how do I be a good recruiter? And so often it's actually listen to what they're saying and respond and don't let people go into a black hole.

Benjamin Mena [00:58:40]:
I love that. Duncan. I know we were talking, like, offline, and I was just, like. We started going back and forth on a conversation. I was like, oh, my God. Like, I feel like nobody's talking about what the future leader looks like. We talk about what the future might look like, but we are not talking about, like, what the leaders look like. So the people listening right now, like, if they want to grow in an agency, what does that career path look like? How do.

Benjamin Mena [00:59:05]:
Like, as the world changes? And I just. I got. I got excited. I was like, okay, Duncan, you got to come on the podcast. You're like, ah. I'm like, no, no, no. We're gonna have some fun. So I am so glad that you came on, because I.

Benjamin Mena [00:59:18]:
I've seen it time and time again. And, Doug, you brought this up in the pregame. The biggest biller becomes a manager. But not all the time. The biggest biller is the best manager.

Duncan Taylor [00:59:29]:
No? So true. And why does it have to be somebody out of staffing to manage your staffing team? It doesn't have to be. You can have really good leaders from other industries who can. It's not rocket science. As much as we like to think it is, it's not. A really good leader from a different industry can manage this. A really good leader out of telecommunications, almost. Who's done a call center.

Duncan Taylor [00:59:58]:
They know how to manage a call center. They know how to manage recruiters. Yes, some of the KPIs are going to be different, but they'll know how to do it. And they may have learned the hard way as well. Just don't make the assumption that your top biller is going to be your best leader. It may not even be your top biller, but someone who has really good leadership skills, who really has great relationship with that candidate, with their clients, but doesn't close the deals quite so much. But they may understand the KPIs better than your best top biller and may have better relationships with the rest of the team. Make the assessments, understand what you really need, not what you think you need, and then look for that person.

Benjamin Mena [01:00:44]:
Two things before I let you go. If somebody wants to follow or connect with you, how do they do that?

Duncan Taylor [01:00:50]:
They can connect on LinkedIn. More than happy to connect there. Have a weekly newsletter on Substack. They're welcome to sign up for that and subscribe for that. Be good to see you. That goes out to about 4,000 people a week. We're running about 25% open rate, which we're pretty pleased with. Could be better, but 25 is pretty good.

Duncan Taylor [01:01:10]:
So, yeah, either way is the easiest way. LinkedIn. I'm always on LinkedIn. It's the best way to connect.

Benjamin Mena [01:01:16]:
Well, before I let you go, is there anything else that you want to leave with the listeners?

Duncan Taylor [01:01:21]:
No, other than it's the black hole of recruiting. I've said it three times now. Just don't leave your candidates hanging. They hate it and they will remember you if you don't leave them hanging. Well, they'll probably remember you if you do leave them hanging. But make sure that they remember you for the right reasons.

Benjamin Mena [01:01:42]:
Friday follow up. Put that on your schedule this week, guys. And 2026. I'm glad we had this conversation because, like, the world is actively changing. Things are changing, but what does the future look like? How can you be excited? How can you work for the future? 2026 is your year. Make it happen guys. You know the resume never tells the full story. Candidates share what really matters during conversations, on calls and interviews, over email.

Benjamin Mena [01:02:07]:
Their motivations, salary expectations, plans to relocate. Most of that detail ends up buried in notes and forgotten. Atlas changes that. It's the AI first recruitment platform. Built to eliminate admin, it captures every conversation automatically and turns it into something you can use with MagicSearch. You can ask Atlas questions like who talked about wanting a four day week? Or who mentioned they're open to relocating next year? It searches across your entire database and pulls the answers instantly. No keyword guessing and no digging through old notes. You get insight from real conversations, not limited resume fields.

Benjamin Mena [01:02:40]:
Atlas also makes BD easier with opportunities you can track and grow client relationships powered by generative AI and built into your existing workflow. If you want visibility, smart dashboards give you a clear view of the pipeline across your business. And that's not theory. Atlas customers have reported over 40% EBITDA growth and over 80% increase in monthly billings after adopting the platform. It's built for agencies that want to grow without adding more manual work. Don't miss the future of recruitment. Get started with Atlas today and unlock your exclusive Listener offer@reruitwithatlas.com thanks for listening to this episode of the Elite Recruiter

Duncan Taylor [01:03:20]:
Podcast with Benjamin Mena.

Benjamin Mena [01:03:22]:
If you enjoyed hit, subscribe and leave a rating.