She stood in food bank lines to feed her kids. Then she billed $1.4 million in a year. Kimberly Laipple shares exactly how she rebuilt everything.

Finish 2026 stronger than you started it. The Finish The Year Strong 2026 virtual summit runs September 28 through October 5 with the top minds in recruiting, including Pinnacle Society's Michelle Flynn. Register free: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/

This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the CRM that actually understands context. Atlas captures every call, email, and message automatically, then tells you the next action to take. Agencies on Atlas report 50 percent higher candidate response rates and monthly billings jumping 85 percent: https://recruitwithatlas.com/

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

Chapters:
0:00 Cold open and intro
4:01 One of the 80 best recruiters in the world
6:01 Single mom at 18 and the dark years
9:04 Foreclosure and the food bank line
11:58 Why she went all in on recruiting
15:35 Was hitting rock bottom necessary?
18:57 What stuck recruiters get wrong
24:25 Prove yourself, then ask for it
31:25 Fixing what was broken inside
40:19 The Mr. Miyagi rule for new recruiters
43:07 The repeatable process
46:57 Back to back $100K months
50:03 Account penetration masterclass
56:02 The case for staying contingent
58:15 Quickfire round
1:01:27 Becoming president after 18 years
1:06:05 The book that changed her career
1:10:14 The question no recruiter ever asks

Stop losing hours to admin work. Atlas does the low value work that keeps you from billing, from timesheets to pipeline dashboards, so you can focus on placements: https://recruitwithatlas.com/

Links:

Finish The Year Strong 2026 Summit: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/

Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/

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Connect with Kimberly Laipple: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimberlylaipple/

Connect with Benjamin Mena: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminmena/