A two person recruiting firm billed $404,000 of inbound business. Steve Gipson explains exactly how they became findable.

Right now a hiring manager is typing "accounting recruiter near me" into ChatGPT, and somebody is coming up. Steve Gipson's argument is that the recruiter who gets named is almost never the best one. It is simply the most visible one.

Benjamin sat in a room at the Pinnacle Society conference adding up numbers as top billers casually mentioned inbound work arriving through their websites. Roughly a million dollars in placement fees that nobody chased. That is the conversation that led to this episode.

Steve is Director of Sales and Operations at Recruiters Websites, which enters its fourteenth year this December and has worked with over a thousand recruiting firms. He spent seven years on a direct hire desk before his brother recruited him out of recruiting.

The number anchoring this episode belongs to one of their clients, a two person firm that had billed $404,000 of inbound business as of the recording date, pulling twenty to thirty leads a month from people who have never heard of them. Steve is direct about the caveat. That firm started its SEO work seven or eight years ago, and they still had to vet the client, sell the fee agreement, and do the work.

This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the AI first recruitment platform built for modern agencies. Atlas remembers every email, interview, and conversation, and makes all of it instantly searchable. Atlas customers have reported over 40 percent EBITDA growth and over 80 percent increase in monthly billings. Unlock your listener offer at https://recruitwithatlas.com/

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Chapters

0:00 It is not who is best, it is who is most visible
2:46 The million dollars sitting in a Pinnacle conference room
3:36 Someone is typing "accounting recruiter near me" into ChatGPT
4:16 Why this is the biggest visibility gold rush in a decade
5:54 What actually changed in the last 18 months
7:04 The client sitting at $404,000 of inbound
9:27 From a direct hire desk to the website business
11:14 Getting recruited out of recruiting by his own family
13:22 The moment he realized nobody could find great recruiters
15:17 Why this industry is notoriously backwards on marketing
16:29 The most expensive mistake on a recruiter's website
18:18 What to do yourself if you are not hiring anyone
21:34 Listicles, directories, and the $300 press release
23:13 Reddit and Quora as AI citation sources
24:09 Does publishing your own top 10 list actually work
27:01 What belongs on your homepage
28:53 Why recruiters cannot describe what makes them different
32:12 Can Wix and Squarespace actually rank
34:14 Did Google just kill SEO
34:50 What Google actually changed
36:32 Why the models now reward specificity
38:06 Topical authority and how the $404,000 was built
39:54 The caveat: it took them years
40:46 What top billers do differently with their sites
43:45 The gap over the next two years
45:01 The one thing to do this week
47:02 What separates the recruiters who last
50:12 The book that shaped him
52:28 The question nobody ever asks him
55:54 The five percent who will actually act
59:27 How to connect with Steve

Admin is a massive waste of time. Atlas captures every conversation automatically and turns it into something you can use. With Magic Search you can ask who mentioned relocating next year or who wanted a four day week, and get the answer without digging through notes. https://recruitwithatlas.com/

Thank you also to Recruiters Websites. Mention Elite Recruiter and get 10 percent off any new service at https://recruiterswebsites.com/

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Connect with Steve Gipson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/recruitingwebsitedesign/

Figures shared in this episode are self reported and have not been independently verified.