We took Carrot & Stick on the road to the Recruitment Agency Expo 2026. We grabbed the mics, and asked 10 of the industry's sharpest leaders the same 5 questions — on top-biller habits, AI, the human touch, and how they'd start an agency today.

Rapid-fire, honest answers, with Derry's take after each. The one thing they all came back to? Relationships.

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🎙️ Hosted by Derry Holt, CEO & Co-Founder of OneUp Sales.

👉 Enjoyed it? Follow the show and leave us a rating — it helps more recruiters find us.

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OneUp Sales helps recruitment and sales teams make performance visible, motivating and repeatable — live leaderboards, competitions, dashboards and reporting in one place.

Book a demo: https://oneupsales.com/request-a-demo

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Timestamps:

00:00 — Intro: why we did this

01:06 — What habit would you take from a top biller and give to a rookie?

05:55 — What's one thing about recruitment you hope NEVER changes?

08:34 — What's one thing you hope DOES change?

12:22 — What's the biggest challenge facing recruitment over the next 12 months?

18:15 — What advice would you give someone starting an agency today?2

0:41 — Final thoughts

#Recruitment #RecruitmentAgency #Sales #SalesLeadership

Recruitment has always rewarded specialists — but how do you stay niche when you're scaling across multiple markets? On this episode of Carrot & Stick, host Derry Holt sits down with Chris Atiyah, CEO and Co-founder of Engtal — a Chicago-based firm that has scaled to 50 people across three specialist brands with zero attrition in over eight months.

Chris shares his journey from Portsmouth to the Midwest and how a relentless focus on the right people, the right markets, and the right technology has built one of recruitment's most quietly impressive businesses.

If you want to know what a successful, AI-enabled recruitment business looks like in practice, this episode is for you.

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