The Elite Recruiter Podcast

How To Build An AI-Native Firm That Beats Firms 4x Its Size.

Firm Leaders Summit, Nov 16 to 18, free live sessions: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/

Atlas, the CRMx built for recruiters: https://recruitwithatlas.com/

Alex Papageorge is back. Since his last appearance the idea he was duct-taping together with n8n, Clay, and OpenAI has become a fully built recruiting firm running on Azure, with three AI agents named Donna, Sunny, and Mina sitting on Mac Minis on his desk.

The argument Alex makes is simple and uncomfortable. If you think you're using AI because you pay for a sourcing tool with AI in it, you're not. You're renting tools. The firms that pull ahead over the next two years won't be the ones with the best tool, they'll be the ones whose tools talk to each other through a real data layer. Ask your firm what its data architecture strategy is. If the answer is "our ATS," that's the pause for concern.

He walks through what that actually looks like for a recruiter. When a candidate replies at 1 AM asking about salary, an agent answers inside a minute, because the information lives in one central source of truth instead of six systems an agent has to go hunting through. Recruiters stay on the calls that need a human. Mina sources, reaches out, qualifies, and books the calendar. Sunny takes candidates who didn't land and finds the companies hiring for exactly that role. Donna runs operations. None of them replace the recruiter, and Alex says on tape that staying human in the process is a principle, not a 2026 answer.

The number that stops you is the cost. Alex says the infrastructure runs about $150 to $160 a month, maybe $1,000 if he added 25 more recruiters. That figure is infrastructure only, excluding sourcing and interview tools. He also explains why most recruiters are burning tokens: they ask AI to figure out what a plain automation should just move from A to B.

Then the conversation turns to clients. Every hiring manager now has the same tools recruiters do, and Alex is hearing it in meetings: the 20% fee is being called a commodity. His answer is not to get cheaper but to be the trusted partner who can explain why a search isn't working and what changing A, B, and C would do, backed by a weekly report. He also shares the email result Benjamin saw on screen in the pregame, 157 candidates with a 62% open rate and a 58% positive reply rate as Alex tells it, and why deliverability, mailbox rotation, and A/B testing are the unglamorous reason behind it.

What You'll Learn

• Why "our ATS" is the wrong answer to the infrastructure question, and what the right one sounds like
• How a central source of truth cuts token costs instead of adding to them
• What Donna, Sunny, and Mina each do, and where the human stays in the loop
• Why clients are calling the 20% fee a commodity and what to sell instead
• The first thing to do Monday morning if you just realized your tool stack isn't a strategy
• The two questions Alex wishes recruiters would ask him

Connect with Alex Papageorge

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-papageorge/

Email: [email protected]

Website: https://superrecruiter.io/

Ask him on LinkedIn for his free infrastructure pack. Super Recruiter is hiring and is starting to partner with solo recruiters who want to run on their infrastructure.

🚀 Firm Leaders Summit, Nov 16 to 18: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/

🤖 Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/

🎙️ Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community

📬 Newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Finish The Year Strong is live this week, September 28 through October 5. It is the final free virtual summit of 2026 and every session is built to help you close Q4 hard. Big billers, AI, automation, mindset, all week. Register here: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/

If you are hearing this after October 5, the Firm Leaders Summit runs November 16 through 18, presented by Crelate. Three days for owners and firm leaders. Register here: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com

This episode is presented by Atlas. Atlas is the CRMx that captures every call, meeting, message, and email you touch, ranks your candidates, builds your BD shortlist, and plugs into your Claude and ChatGPT stack. Customers report 50 percent higher response rates, 35 percent more clients won, 15 hours back a week, and billings up 85 percent. See it at https://recruitwithatlas.com/

Bodie Nowak has been in recruiting for 18 years. He and his partner Daniel run Blackwood Partners, a construction and AEC search firm out of Dallas. Just the two of them and Bodie's niece Zoe. In their best year they billed just under $2 million together. Not a 20-person firm. Not a scaled team. Two people and an admin.

But the story that got them there is the one nobody talks about.

In 2009, less than 18 months into his career, Bodie billed $11,250 for the entire year. Wife at home, kid in kindergarten, on a draw. He interviewed for a Coca-Cola route job at $50,000. He turned it down because the cap would lock his upside forever. Then he spent the rest of the year in a dark makeshift office wondering if he had made the worst decision of his life.

He hadn't. In 2010 he pivoted to upstream oil and gas and built the practice from scratch. By 2014 he was billing $800,000 a year. Then OPEC crashed the oil market the day before Thanksgiving and he had to walk away from everything he had built. In 2016 he restarted in construction, in Dallas, from zero. In 2023 he and Daniel bought the business and launched Blackwood Partners.

In this conversation Bodie tells Benjamin what does not make it into a Pinnacle Society speech. The 8 months in jail he chose over 2 years of probation because control mattered more than comfort. The letter he wrote to the warden every day for a month. The wife who trusted him when he could not trust himself. And the reason he refuses to scale even though a 15-person firm would love to hit the numbers his 2-person shop hits.

He also gets tactical. Bodie walks through his contingency BD system, how he lays contracts across an entire market, why he calls the hiring manager the same hour he learns they interviewed a candidate, and the one trait he hires for above everything else.

If you are in your own $11,000 year right now, this episode is for you. If you are grinding yourself trying to scale to 20 people, this episode is for you. And if you have ever wondered whether motivation is a lie, Bodie has your answer.

What You'll Learn:

• Why the long way is actually the shortcut
• How to build $1.9 million a year with a 2-person team
• The contingency BD system Bodie calls "lay paper all over the town"
• How Bodie and Daniel built a 50/50 partnership that survived a market crash and an acquisition
• Why control over comfort is the operating principle behind every hard decision Bodie has made
• The one trait Bodie hires for over every other

Connect with Bodie Nowak on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bodienowak/

🎙️ Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community

📬 Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Finish the Year Strong 2026 kicks off Monday, September 28. It is free, it is virtual, and it runs through October 5. Register here: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/

This episode is brought to you by Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/

To give you a taste of what is coming, we pulled one of the most rewatched sessions from last year's Finish the Year Strong out of the Elite Recruiter Community Library. Dante Nino, co-founder and Managing Partner of Tiello, built his talk around one question: how do you take a recruiter who is stuck at $300K and get them past $500K?

Dante co-founded Tiello in 2019 with his college soccer teammate and roommate. At the time of this talk, Tiello was a fully remote, 25 person recruiting firm focused on architecture, engineering, and construction, with over 400 clients signed and more than 750 placements across 31 states, as Dante tells it. His focus is the recruiter who works hard, does everything right, and still plateaus.

His answer is not "make more calls." Before any system goes in, Tiello diagnoses the problem, and it is usually one of four: too generalist, too transactional, no ideal client profile, or failing to grow wallet share inside the accounts that already pay you. From there he walks through how Tiello fixes it: industry pods, a recruiter deal box every new hire fills out to define their ideal client, a simple weekly scoreboard of 10 discovery calls a day, 5 submissions, 3 interviews, and 1 offer, and quarterly billing tiers running from a $75K minimum to a $250K million dollar pace.

The client strategy section is where it gets sharp. Dante explains why a couple thousand dollars and two days on a client site can turn into a six figure year with that client, why you do not need 100 clients when 3 to 5 six figure accounts can carry a desk, and why Tiello starts at 30% of base plus guaranteed compensation. He shares the VP of Sales placement where $100K in guaranteed first year bonus was billed alongside a $170K base, and how a single job posting turned into a multi six figure client.

He closes with the million dollar mindset: return on effort over busywork, depth over breadth, skill stacking, running your desk like a business, and protecting your energy by saying no to clients who will not pay your fee.

Recorded October 2025, so "this year" on tape means 2025.

What You'll Learn

• The four reasons hard working recruiters stall at $300K
• How Tiello's recruiter deal box defines an ideal client profile
• The weekly activity benchmarks behind every Tiello desk
• How 3 to 5 six figure clients can carry a $500K desk
• Why Dante starts fees at 30% and bills on guaranteed compensation
• How to compare two $100K clients on return on effort, not revenue

If this is the kind of session you want more of, join us for Finish the Year Strong 2026, September 28 to October 5. Take one or two ideas from every talk, implement them, and finish the year strong.

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

⚡ Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/

🏛️ Firm Leaders Summit (Nov 16 to 18): https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com

🤝 Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community

📬 Newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

🔗 Dante Nino on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dante-nino/

Before the episode, two dates. Finish the Year Strong runs September 28 through October 5, and the brand new Firm Leaders Summit runs November 16 through 18. Live sessions for both are free. Register at https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ and https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/. Replays, VIP access, and the Elite Recruiter Community are there if you want to go all in on the rest of 2026.

This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the CRMx that captures every call, email, and message automatically and tells you the next action to take: https://recruitwithatlas.com/

Mary Huminski was 22, fresh out of Bentley, and everyone told her the same thing: go to a big firm first, learn the trade, then think about boutique. Her uncle, a career headhunter, said it. Her future boss said it. She had a Michael Page offer in hand. Twenty minutes after congratulating her on that offer, Annie Colabella called back with a better one, and Mary took the boutique path everyone warned her against. Year one, as Mary tells it, she billed $713K. Year two she crossed $1 million. She's 25.

This episode deconstructs how. Not the highlight reel, the operating system. Mary walks through inheriting two desks from recruiters with 10 and 20 years on her within months of starting, and the mindset shift that turned a terrifying phone list into a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. She breaks down the training method she and Annie built around her learning style: a Zoom window open all day for months, mute and unmute, Annie typing the next question in the chat while Mary drove the call. She explains 9 Before 9, the rule that no coffee happens until nine business development calls are made, and why she plans every single call the night before.

The numbers get honest treatment. Mary breaks down where the million-dollar year actually came from: roughly 70 percent referrals and inherited relationships, about 20 percent cold reactivation of dormant clients, and one client from an MPC. She shares her original MPC voicemail script word for word, then the evolved version that leads with market intel instead of the candidate. She walks through a counteroffer she saw coming from the first call, and the client who lit her up for 15 minutes over a follow-up email, the calendar reminder Annie made her set, and what happened when she called back three months later.

There's a Gen Z conversation in here that goes somewhere unexpected. Mary doesn't think she's an exception. She thinks there are a lot of Marys out there who never had someone say I'm invested in you.

What You'll Learn:

• The 9 Before 9 rule and the night-before prep that makes it fit
• How to build a rookie's training plan around how they actually learn
• Mary's original MPC voicemail script and the advisor version it became
• Where a million-dollar year actually comes from, by percentage
• The difference between busy and productive on a full desk
• Why the client who yelled at you won't remember it in three months

🔗 Connect with Mary: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mary-huminski-b030901a2/

📅 Finish the Year Strong Summit, Sept 28 to Oct 5: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/

🏢 Firm Leaders Summit, Nov 16 to 18: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/

⚡ Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ 🤝 Elite

Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community

📬 Newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Jay Veniard was the very first guest on the Elite Recruiter Podcast, back when the whole thing was one recorded conversation during COVID thrown on the internet to see what happened. This session is his first ever summit talk, pulled from the Elite Recruiter Community Library ahead of Finish the Year Strong, and it was the one that hit the audience hardest.

Finish the Year Strong 2026 is a free virtual summit for recruiters running September 28 to October 5. Firm owners, coaches, and top billers on how to close out the year and set up 2027. Register free: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com

This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the CRMx that captures every call, email and message automatically and tells you the next action to take. See it at https://recruitwithatlas.com

Jay ran the numbers on his own career. One missed deal a month at his firm's average fee comes to $360,000 a year in lost billings. Over ten years that is $3.6 million. Reinvested at 7%, it becomes $5.3 million. His number, his math, and as he tells it, the moment that changed how he runs his desk. He calls it the tax you never signed up for, and most recruiters are paying it in silence because nothing in this business ever forces you to stop.

Jay pitched eight years of pro baseball before recruiting and he draws the line hard. In the minors, if you negotiate with your training, you get cut in front of your teammates. At a recruiting desk, if you negotiate with your dials, nobody takes your jersey. You don't get fired. You just get mediocre. You don't lose your job, you lose your legacy.

From there he lays out the two kinds of recruiter he sees everywhere. The negotiator runs on feelings, hits snooze, justifies research to avoid dialing, and hides behind email because they're afraid of no. The operator runs on standards that never move: the day is planned the night before, a two hour phone block is protected first thing in the morning, research is after hours work, and there is a hard cap on digital back and forth before someone picks up the phone. He also has a blunt warning for anyone trying to run a desk on email, LinkedIn DMs and text. If you are not willing to get on the phone, you are going to be replaced.

Jay owns Ventec Search Group, a search firm placing sales talent in industrial automation, still works an active desk, and runs a coaching program for recruiters.

What You'll Learn

• The missed deal math and how to run it on your own last twelve months
• The difference between a negotiator and an operator
• Why BD has to be the first block of the day
• The three digital touches rule before the fourth becomes a phone call
• Why productive procrastination is the most expensive habit on your desk
• Where the AI replacement line actually falls in recruiting

Connect with Jay Veniard: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayveniard/

🎯 Finish the Year Strong 2026, free, September 28 to October 5: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com

🏢 Firm Leaders Summit presented by Crelate, November 16 to 18, live sessions free: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/

🚀 Want the replays? Elite Recruiter Community members get every Finish the Year Strong session on demand, plus replays from all past summits: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community

📩 Weekly recruiting insights from the Elite Recruiter newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Benjamin Mena LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminmena/

James Homer left a regional director job in Singapore with two young kids, a third on the way, and not enough savings to cover the risk. Eighteen months later his firm has billed just over a million dollars and takes retained searches off Korn Ferry, Egon Zehnder and Michael Page with a team of four.

The number is not what makes this worth your time. The way he got there is.

Before any of it worked, James spent ten thousand dollars on an AI outreach system that booked him exactly zero meetings in three months. He sat in cafes for sixty or seventy hours feeding in his ICP and his lists, and none of it returned a single conversation. Worse, the emails went out under his own name to people who had known him for a decade. One prospect wrote back to say he knew James had never been to Yale and had never had a beer at the bar the email invented. When James complained, the vendor told him the fake detail was the hyper specialization, and that a reply is still a reply.

Then came four months with no cash coming in at all. One member of staff to pay, a mortgage, three kids, and nothing landing. That was the stretch where his mantra stopped being a quote on a wall and became the actual situation. Nobody was coming to save him.

What pulled him out was going back to month one, which was him at night, after the kids were in bed, chasing job adverts and writing every email himself. In his first year that approach ran a twenty percent response rate and converted roughly eighty percent of meetings into job orders. It also produced his biggest client that year, six or seven placements from one cold email to a COO.

He is not anti technology. He was an early Atlas user, builds tools with Claude, and pays eighty dollars a month for inbox warming he calls the best return in the business. His distinction is simple. AI is a tool that helps you, not a machine that replaces you, and nothing goes out without human eyes on it.

The rest is the stuff nobody tells you. For his first two months, ninety nine percent of his emails went to spam because he had never heard of DKIM or DMARC. He set his entity up in the wrong country. He spent a hundred hours on a website he should have paid six hundred dollars for.

And then the part that reframes everything. James could have hired fifty people. He decided not to. His clients told him plainly that what they pay for is him on the search, not a polished pitch from a big firm followed by a junior they never met. He calls this the decade of the boutique, and after this episode you may agree with him.

Revenue figures in this episode are James's own.

What You'll Learn

Why his network did not follow him in year one, and what brought it back in year two The cold outreach routine that built his first ten clients from zero What ten thousand dollars of AI outreach actually bought him, in his own words How a four person firm wins retained searches against Korn Ferry and Egon Zehnder The email setup mistake that silently killed his first two months of business development Why he reset his ego about headcount, and what his clients told him they actually want The four quotes he runs his business and his life on

Finish The Year Strong 2026, September 28 to October 5. All live sessions are free. https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/

This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the CRM that captures your calls, emails, LinkedIn messages and WhatsApp automatically so you can stop doing admin and get back to billing. https://recruitwithatlas.com/

Firm Leaders Summit, November 16 to 18. Live sessions are free. https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com

Connect with James Homer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jahomer/

Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community

Get the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Sign up for the Finish The Year Strong 2026 Summit (Sept 28 to Oct 5): https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/

Check out Atlas, the AI-native CRM and ATS built for recruiters: https://recruitwithatlas.com/

What does the person who has sat across from some of the top billers in this industry actually see when he looks at them?

In his first podcast appearance ever, Kevin Parker sits down with Benjamin Mena for a conversation that goes where recruiting content almost never goes. Kevin is a licensed clinical social worker and licensed clinical addiction specialist with 20 years in the psychotherapy world, and he has spent years in what he calls sacred spaces with high performers, usually as the one asking the questions. He has no website, no socials, and no digital footprint. On purpose. This time, he answers the questions.

Kevin opens with what he sees in those rooms: brilliant, entrepreneurial people whose minds run ten steps ahead of everyone else, and who often have nowhere to take the wins, the losses, or the weight of it all. Recruiting is relational all day long, and it can still be one of the loneliest careers there is. The way through, he argues, starts with saying it out loud. Name it to tame it. From there the conversation moves through the four buckets of life, why work-life balance is a myth he abandoned in favor of tension, the real difference between success and significance, and why imposter syndrome is not a flaw to eliminate but a part of you that sometimes needs to be thanked and told to take a seat. He also speaks directly to working moms in recruiting, and closes with a challenge for anyone who is not feeling lonely right now: pick up the phone.

What You'll Learn:

• What elite recruiters actually talk about when nobody else is in the room
• Why entrepreneurs and recruiters carry so much alone, and why naming it is the catalyst
• The three rules for deciding who deserves to hear what you are carrying
• The four buckets of life and what happens when work is the only thing in yours
• Why work-life balance is baloney, and the tension model that replaces it
• The difference between success and significance, and why one is steps and the other is hard
• How to handle imposter syndrome without destroying the drive that got you here
• Why the candidate you placed will remember you forever, even if you forget the deal

Whether you are grinding through your first year or twenty years in, this episode will find you where you are. Remember that you are significant.

LINKS:

🚀 Finish The Year Strong 2026 Summit (Sept 28 to Oct 5): https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/

🤖 Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/

🏆 Firm Leaders Summit (Nov 16 to 18): https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com

💬 Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community

📧 Newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

90% of her business comes from referrals. She has never made a cold call, never sent a cold email, and never pitched herself at a networking event. And she built the whole thing in four years, starting with zero recruiting background.

April Ben-Sabat became a recruiter by accident. She spent six years as the right hand at a transport company, told them in her first interview she would own a business within five years, and when they could not find a transport recruiter to backfill her, her own boss said the words that changed everything: why don't you start a recruiting agency? A year later the company went bankrupt and she was all in, whether she was ready or not.

What she built next is the playbook this episode unpacks. April went from searching "business networking" on Eventbrite and showing up to anything free, to becoming the recruiter an entire city refers. She walks through exactly how she works a room she has never been in: standing at the door, finding the person who is alone, opening with "what brings you here," and shimmying into conversations without an ounce of pitch. She explains why she goes to every event alone, why bringing a wingman makes you less approachable, and the solo restaurant challenge she gave herself, one Friday night, no phone allowed, that trained her to be comfortable in any room.

Then she goes deeper: why following up with "great meeting you last night" is the same as handing out a business card, what to reference instead, and how posting on LinkedIn keeps her in the feed of everyone she has ever met so the referral arrives eight months later. When the events around her felt empty, she built her own, with a curated guest list, a word-match game on the back of every name tag, and a room engineered for people who are scared of networking.

And because standing still was never the plan, April is now tearing up her own playbook, taking her agency into the US market and a brand new niche while building her own AI sourcing agent with Claude Code. Job order in, vetted shortlist out, outreach in her voice, and an ATS she never opens anymore. As April tells it, the shortlists are finding people a human sourcer could not surface in two weeks of full-time searching. She also draws her hard line: the first message can be automated, but the moment a real conversation starts, the human takes over.

Whether you are grinding without direction, sitting behind the screen wondering why BD feels broken, or curious what one non-developer recruiter can build in a weekend, this conversation is the push to get in the room.

What You'll Learn:

• The exact first 90 seconds of walking into a room where you know nobody
• Why April never sells at networking events and how referrals arrive months later anyway
• The follow-up message that actually gets remembered, and the one that gets ignored
• How to host your own networking event that people beg to return to
• How she built an AI sourcing agent on Claude Code that searches her ATS and beyond
• The one thing she refuses to automate, and why candidates thank her for it

Finish The Year Strong 2026 (Sept 28 - Oct 5). April is speaking, and her session currently has the most RSVPs of the entire summit. All live sessions are free: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/

Atlas, the CRM that actually understands context: https://recruitwithatlas.com/

Firm Leaders Summit (Nov 16-18): https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com

🚀 Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 📩 Newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

🔗 Connect with April: https://www.linkedin.com/in/april-ben-sabat/

Ryan Sheppard mapped an entire market for a senior pharma search, tracked down the exact molecule types, built the shortlist, and then got one line back: sorry, we're on a hiring freeze. The fee that vanished was somewhere between eighty and a hundred thousand dollars, and it was not the first time. That was the moment he decided he could not keep working for free.

Before we get into it, Finish The Year Strong kicks off September 28 through October 5. All live sessions are free, and if you want the replays or VIP access, this is your line in the sand for the rest of 2026. Register here: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/

This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the CRM that actually understands context. It captures every call, interview, email, and LinkedIn message automatically, then tells you the next action to take. Atlas customers are reporting 50% higher candidate response rates, 15 hours saved every week, and monthly billings up 85%. See it for yourself at https://recruitwithatlas.com/

Ryan is an executive search consultant in Tokyo placing country managers and senior commercial leaders for US and European healthcare companies. After sixteen years in contingency he made the switch to retained, and as he tells it, he went from barely hitting his number in 2024 to hitting his annual target by Valentine's Day 2025 and finishing the year at 280% of goal. The advice that changed everything came from a retained recruiter he admired: stop selling CVs, sell the process.

He walks through exactly what that looks like. How he priced his very first retainer at 40% having never gone above standard, how the local decision maker signed without blinking while global TA asked who this guy thought he was, and what he said to get it across the line. Why he can now tell a client he cannot guarantee the perfect person but can guarantee the steps, and why that is what clients actually pay for.

Then the book. Ryan wrote Sell Yourself Like a CEO during the six to nine month lull while his first retainers were slowly coming in, and he ran the launch like a search. He wrote down 180 names, scorecarded every one of them, worked the math backwards from twenty launch-day reviews, and ended up with thirty reviews and six endorsements, including one from Marshall Goldsmith. The book has since become his calling card with presidents, with executives' kids, and with people he has never met who show up at events having already read it.

He also shares two things he wishes recruiters would ask him about. First, why reference checks are the most underrated practice in recruitment, and how a 25 minute call that goes well beyond did they work there turns into a business development conversation with a decision maker who would never otherwise take your call. Second, President's Drinks, the no-banner, no-pitch gathering he has hosted for a decade that puts him in a room with the people who actually make hiring decisions.

Along the way he explains why fees in Japan run 35 to 40%, where AI actually makes him more valuable on a search, and what a case study looks like when you build it from a STAR story in under an hour.

If you are still selling the output when you should be selling the process, this one is for you.

🎯 Finish The Year Strong, September 28 to October 5: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ 🚀 Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ 📘

Sell Yourself Like a CEO by Ryan Sheppard, available on Amazon 🔗 https://amzn.to/4gS3lxo

Connect with Ryan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-sheppard-search-advisory/

🏛️ Firm Leaders Summit, November 16 to 18: Details Soon

🤝 Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 📬 Newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Greg Benadiba has been a recruiter for 21 years, and he opened his new book with the most expensive phone call of his career: the one he didn't make. In this return episode of The Elite Recruiter Podcast, Greg sits down with Benjamin Mena to put the principles from Recruitment Principles: Timeless Truths in the Age of AI to work, starting with the three he would keep if a recruiter could only live by three.

Before we get into it, Finish The Year Strong 2026 kicks off September 28 through October 5. It is a free virtual summit built to help you close out 2026 with momentum and set the foundation for 2027. All live sessions are free. Register here: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/

 This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the AI first CRM that captures every call, email, LinkedIn message and interview automatically, then tells you the next action to take. Atlas customers report 50 percent higher candidate response rates, 15 hours saved every week and monthly billings up 85 percent. Learn more at https://recruitwithatlas.com/

 Then the episode gets tactical. Benjamin plays a candidate who just accepted a 15 percent counteroffer and Greg runs the conversation live, showing why counteroffers are won or lost in the very first call, not the last one. Greg walks through the roughly 25 touchpoints his team has mapped across the candidate journey, the post placement survey system he built for about $20,000 that flags a struggling placement inside the first two weeks, and the story of Nancy, a placement whose 5 out of 10 survey score triggered the call that kept her in the job. He shares the exact referral ask that leads a placed candidate back to the people they mentioned in their very first conversation, and why more than half of his firm's business now arrives that way.

Greg is one of the most AI forward leaders in the industry, which makes his list of things he will never automate more interesting: the prescreen, the reference call and the offer call. He explains why he passed on voice agents, how his team runs a Notion knowledge base tethered to a custom GPT that he estimates has saved around 5 percent of the firm's business, and what he means when he says AI will reveal who was never really recruiting.

For the first time on the show, Greg tells the full story of how a 24 year old applicant who was rejected as too junior came back a month later, got the job, and years later became the owner of that same firm. As Greg tells it, it started with a small gift of shares from the founder, continued with a decade of buying more, and ended on the day his boss handed him a resignation letter. He closes with the question nobody ever asks him, and the answer is a plan of 100 mapped calls every single day.

 Coming up in November, the first ever Firm Leaders Summit runs November 16 through 18. Live sessions are free. Registration link: Details soon

📘 Recruitment Principles: Timeless Truths in the Age of AI: https://amzn.to/4gGUdf4

🤖 Free Recruitment Principles GPT: https://gregbenadiba.com/gpt

🔗 Greg Benadiba on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gbenadiba/

🌐 Greg's website: https://gregbenadiba.com/

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

🚀 Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/

👥 Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community

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