Jeremy Snell's Big Ideas

Recruitment has spent the last decade quietly talking itself out of selling. The story goes that recruitment is now a marketing job, that automation and AI can carry the load, that outreach is something you schedule rather than something you do. The result? A generation of consultants who have watched their sales capability erode without noticing it happen, hiding in the noise and calling it strategy.

Meanwhile, the market has gotten harder. Your prospects field over 240 unsolicited emails a day. Half the salespeople on the planet are behind target because, frankly, they can't sell, and they've made peace with being forgettable. If you've ever sent the third email, heard nothing back, and quietly given up, this episode is aimed squarely at you.

In it, Jeremy makes the case for putting human-to-human selling back at the center of how you win business, and hands you three components that decide whether your outreach lands or vanishes into the slop. Get them right, in the right order, and you stop blending in. You start living in your prospect's head. You become the person they think of first when a problem surfaces.

No new skill set required. No clever automation. Just a willingness to do the work most of your competitors have stopped doing, and the difference that makes to relationships that turn into revenue.

Press play if you're ready to be remembered by high-value clients.

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Your People Engine - The People Engine For The Recruitment Industry.

Delivering context-rich learning and development initiatives for all levels of people in recruitment. Live sessions delivered every week and content that focuses on implementation through guided activities.

From new hires through to the top performers there’s an opportunity for everyone to grow and develop. The AI assistant curates relevant content on your behalf based on your questions.

That’s immediate access to what you want, when you want to develop performance.

The Great Abdication in recruitment right now is driven by weak management. Right now, "Treating People Like Adults" Is killing your performance culture.

In this episode, Jeremy Snell confronts one of the most shared, most repeated complaints in modern work: the dislike of being micromanaged. Scroll any feed and the articles are everywhere. Sit in enough interviews and you will hear it again and again, consultants explaining that they are looking for a new role because the last one micromanaged them.

Jeremy gets it. For a genuinely strong performer, micromanagement is suffocating. But he draws a sharp line that most of this conversation misses. When many people say they do not like being micromanaged, what they actually mean is they do not like being managed at all. Those are very different things, and conflating them has consequences across recruitment.

That confusion has rippled into leadership. Managers, terrified of the micromanager label, hold back from the very things that would lift performance. Hesitation breeds tolerance. The moment we tolerate substandard behaviour, activity, or results, we endorse it. Jeremy calls this the great abdication: the quiet letting go of ownership by leaders who can see exactly what their recruitment agency needs, yet watch it slip away.

In this episode, Jeremy explores:

• Why "we treat everyone like adults" often signals an absence of coaching culture, not the presence of maturity
• The critical difference between goals, which we coach to, and standards, which we hold people accountable to
• Why "I know what I'm doing" is frequently a defence mechanism rather than evidence of competence
• What happens to a business when leaders stop holding the line, and the cost of consultants who stay inconsistent
• The simple antidote that turns accountability into something owned by the team, not imposed on it

Listen if you lead a team where: results are inconsistent, standards slip quietly, and "next week will be better" has become the running excuse.

Press play to hear the full method.

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Your People Engine - The People Engine For The Recruitment Industry.

Delivering context-rich learning and development initiatives for all levels of people in recruitment. Live sessions delivered every week and content that focuses on implementation through guided activities.

From new hires through to the top performers there’s an opportunity for everyone to grow and develop. The AI assistant curates relevant content on your behalf based on your questions.

That’s immediate access to what you want, when you want to develop performance.

Talent teams see volume and call it abundance. Hiring managers feel powerless. Candidates are bruised into transactional behaviour. The result is a mirage - a hiring market that looks functional on the surface and breaks down at the point of placement.

In this episode, Jeremy unpacks why direct hiring is failing more often than internal teams admit, and what recruiters need to do about it. Volume has decoupled from quality. AI-enhanced CVs, AI-screened applications, and AI-written job specs are creating a feedback loop that hides real talent and surfaces look-alikes.

What you'll take away:

• The difference between an applicant and a candidate, and how to use it in client conversations
• Why hiring managers feel toothless even when they are senior
• The data that proves direct hiring is breaking down
• A reframe of agency value: candidate control and deal creation are now premium skills, not commodity admin

The numbers that matter:

• 57% of applicants abandon a process that feels like it's going nowhere
• 44% of candidates hold multiple offers in play
• 34% of Gen Z accept a job and don't turn up on day one
• 35% of accepted offers are reneged on (Gartner)
• 60% know the job is a bad fit at the point of acceptance

The finish line is the start date, not the signed contract. Human recruitment has now gone up to a premium - and this episode shows you how to prove it.

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Your People Engine - The People Engine For The Recruitment Industry.

Delivering context-rich learning and development initiatives for all levels of people in recruitment. Live sessions delivered every week and content that focuses on implementation through guided activities.

From new hires through to the top performers there’s an opportunity for everyone to grow and develop. The AI assistant curates relevant content on your behalf based on your questions.

That’s immediate access to what you want, when you want to develop performance.

Why most "headhunting" today isn't headhunting at all  and what to do instead.

Jeremy Snell unpacks the difference between true headhunting and the icky, mass-produced LinkedIn outreach that's come to wear the same name. Drawing on his executive search experience from the mid-90s (when headhunting was a telephone contact sport and being on the receiving end actually felt flattering), he makes the case that the craft hasn't died. It's just been buried under bad messaging, low response rates, and an over-reliance on people who've already decided to become candidates.

If you're a recruiter relying on organic replies to in-mail blasts and reporting "low candidate interest" back to clients, this one's for you.

What you'll hear

• Why the word "headhunter" has been diluted, and how that hurts both recruiters and the people they're trying to engage
• The difference between sourcing candidates and engaging individuals who haven't yet decided to become candidates
• The "icky message" problem: why generic outreach trains the market to ignore you
• Why response rates aren't a reflection of the market. They're a reflection of your messaging
• The job-hugging epidemic and why perceived risk has roughly doubled in the last 12 months
• Why the phone still beats asynchronous channels for genuine engagement, and why most recruiters avoid it
• A real example of a phone-led approach turning a non-candidate into a candidate mid-call

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Your People Engine - The People Engine For The Recruitment Industry.

Delivering context-rich learning and development initiatives for all levels of people in recruitment. Live sessions delivered every week and content that focuses on implementation through guided activities.

From new hires through to the top performers there’s an opportunity for everyone to grow and develop. The AI assistant curates relevant content on your behalf based on your questions.

That’s immediate access to what you want, when you want to develop performance.

Counter-Offers Are Rising. Here's Why You're Losing Candidates at Two Minutes to Midnight.

Counter-offer loss is climbing again - and it's not a money problem. It's an emotional one, dressed up as logic.

In this episode, I unpack why recruiters are bleeding placements at offer stage, and why the fix sits at the start of the process, not the end. We cover the three forces driving the spike: a volatile market making candidates anxious, employers fighting harder to retain productive people, and compromised processes creating buyer remorse before day one.

You'll learn:

• Why counter-offers are an endorsement, not a failure — and what that changes
• The five-stage candidate confidence journey from first call to first day
• Three power tools to run before any CV leaves your desk: the Values Deep Dive, the Motivation Grid, and the Ecology Check
• The Tension Ladder — a weekly health check that tells you who will actually resign
• The two-number scoring system that kills false-positive pipelines
• Why "when they counter-offer you" beats "if" every time

If you've ever heard "I just need to think about it" and felt the deal slipping, this one's for you.

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Your People Engine - The People Engine For The Recruitment Industry.

Delivering context-rich learning and development initiatives for all levels of people in recruitment. Live sessions delivered every week and content that focuses on implementation through guided activities.

From new hires through to the top performers there’s an opportunity for everyone to grow and develop. The AI assistant curates relevant content on your behalf based on your questions.

That’s immediate access to what you want, when you want to develop performance.

Are Your Consultants Doing the Job - or Just Completing It?

There's a crisis running through recruitment businesses right now. Consultants are drifting. Not because they're lazy, but because the conversations around their work have become binary. Did you call? Did you advertise? Have you done the database?

Done doesn't mean done well.

In this episode, Jeremy explores the difference between executing a task and mastering it, and why that distinction is costing agencies some of their best people. When consultants can't see a pathway to genuine improvement, the striving stops. Billings plateau. People leave.

The fix isn't more pressure. It's better questions. How well did you search LinkedIn? How well did you qualify that job? How well did you leave that voicemail?

Jeremy introduces the concept of levels of capability, why most experienced consultants are operating at a fraction of what's possible, and the three maturity stages every recruiter moves through: infant, teenager, and adult.

If your one-to-ones sound like a checklist, this episode is for you.

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Your People Engine - The People Engine For The Recruitment Industry.

Delivering context-rich learning and development initiatives for all levels of people in recruitment. Live sessions delivered every week and content that focuses on implementation through guided activities.

From new hires through to the top performers there’s an opportunity for everyone to grow and develop. The AI assistant curates relevant content on your behalf based on your questions.

That’s immediate access to what you want, when you want to develop performance.

Recruiters are told the job is about relationships. Nobody explains what that means or how to build one with intent. In this episode, Jeremy Snell breaks down the difference between being liked and being trusted, and gives you a five-level roadmap for moving clients from casual contact to genuine partnership.

The Five Levels of Trust

• Level 1: Entry Trust. Access without influence. Small talk and common ground. Most "good relationships" sit here.
• Level 2: Functional Trust. Execution permission. You get jobs with conditions attached and compete against two or three others.
• Level 3: Diagnostic Trust. They seek your judgment. Exclusivity and retained work start here.
• Level 4: Inner Circle Trust. Full influence. You frame decisions and challenge thinking before the brief is written.
• Level 5: Partnership Trust. Shared ownership of outcomes. Extreme loyalty and long-term value.

The Diagnostic Test

Write down your ten strongest client relationships. Then ask each of them for theirs. If you are not on their list, you have work to do.

Subscribe for weekly episodes on recruitment performance and building agencies that compound.

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Your People Engine - The People Engine For The Recruitment Industry.

Delivering context-rich learning and development initiatives for all levels of people in recruitment. Live sessions delivered every week and content that focuses on implementation through guided activities.

From new hires through to the top performers there’s an opportunity for everyone to grow and develop. The AI assistant curates relevant content on your behalf based on your questions.

That’s immediate access to what you want, when you want to develop performance.

Recruitment can be thankless at times. What feels like hard work and effort doesn’t always translate into results. But are we doing the right things? Are we being distracted by other work and slowly losing sight of the things that matter?

When you are responsible for your own results it’s important you have clarity on three things - the standards you choose to adopt, the goals you set for yourself and the data you track to help keep you on the right path. This episode is all about self accountability, self awareness and how to find those who can hold you in check with the promises you make out loud.

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Your People Engine

Delivering context-rich learning and development initiatives for all levels of people in recruitment. Live sessions delivered every week and content that focuses on implementation through guided activities.

From new hires through to the top performers there’s an opportunity for everyone to grow and develop. The AI assistant curates relevant content on your behalf based on your questions.

That’s immediate access to what you want, when you want to develop performance.

BD is a hot topic right now. Many are hoping AI is going to save them and they can automate their way out of the hole. The reality is if you want to win more clients, secure better business and grow your recruitment agency you must be able to answer these three questions. 

Simple questions that make the entire process of building a sales strategy and set of executable tactics easier. 

And if you want to automate your outreach, you still have to be able to answer these questions to build any form of meaningful messaging. Otherwise you’re simply contributing to the noise.

AI is everywhere. And we’re getting AI fatigue. Because of this, recruitment agencies are missing the power of AI at a desk level.

In this episode Jeremy shares how you can use AI to enhance your skillset and the dangers of letting ChatGPT drive the bus and decide what good looks like on your behalf. You are the wizard. AI is the apprentice.

Teach it to enhance what you do. You’ll discover in this episode how you can take control and use AI to increase sales performance. Not simply replace the admin in your job.

NOTE: As mentioned in the episode, Jeremy is running a series of live sessions on Linkedin. How to build your own portfolio of AI assistants using ChatGPT. All will help you make more money. He's building in public, sharing every prompt at a grand total cost of zero.

Join, follow along prompt by prompt and build your own - https://www.linkedin.com/events/5musthavegptsforrecruiters7392105724358844417/theater/