The Elite Recruiter Podcast

By Benjamin Mena

The Elite Recruiter Podcast is where top recruiters go to get better.

Hosted by executive recruiter Benjamin Mena, this show dives deep into the stories, strategies, and minds

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The podcast currently has 360 episodes available.

Best of The Elite Recruiter Podcast

The most played episodes among Podcast App listeners.

Number 1: $500 In The Bank. $870,000 Billed One Year Later
Finish The Year Strong 2026 is coming September 28 through October 5, and it is packed with sessions exactly like this one. Register free now: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ The Recruiting Agents Workshop with Seb Sharp runs August 25 and 26. Build an autonomous lead agent, a placement agent, and connect your entire tech stack, with recordings, templates, and a week of Slack access to Seb included: https://the-recruiting-agents-workshop.heysummit.com/ This episode is sponsored by Atlas, the CRM that actually understands context. It captures every call, email, and message automatically, tells you the next action to take, and does the low value work that keeps you from billing. Atlas customers are reporting 50% higher candidate response rates and monthly billings jumping 85%. Learn more at https://recruitwithatlas.com/ He started the year with $500 left in his bank account. Overdrawn statements, credit card roulette, a baby on the way, a house mid build, and a failed financial division that drained everything he had. One year later, as he tells it, he had billed $870,000 as a solo biller. I pulled this session out of the Elite Recruiter Community library because somebody listening needs to hear it right now. Randee Staats, owner of S4 Search Partners, shared this at a previous summit, and it is the most honest talk I have heard about the side of recruiting nobody posts about. The days you have to talk yourself out of bed. The $26,000 deal that falls apart because a candidate cannot pass a drug test. The mental fight that every recruiter, including the successful ones, is fighting every single day. Then he hands you the exact system that pulled him out. The point system he built with coach Mike Anderson: 2 points for a submission, 3 for an interview, 5 for a new signed contract, and zero points for fills, because when the funnel is full the fills take care of themselves. He targets 20 points a week minimum, runs closer to 42, and knows his number is worth about $450 a point. He walks through his two daily non negotiables, business development every day and a minimum of 25 candidate calls, and the client rules that changed his business: no work without a signed contract, a required 15 minute biweekly recruiting call with every hiring manager, and the freedom to walk away from anything under a 20% fee. This is a session about consistency beating talent, relationships beating transactions, and drawing a line in the sand. If you know a recruiter who is struggling right now, send them this episode. It might be the thing that changes their year. Sessions like this are exactly what is coming at Finish The Year Strong 2026. Grab your free spot: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ 🚀 Finish The Year Strong 2026: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ ⚡ The Recruiting Agents Workshop with Seb Sharp: https://the-recruiting-agents-workshop.heysummit.com/ 🤖 Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ 🎧 Randee's original episode: on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6NxWrsc6WHEzBoZhjzXcUh?si=O5GoC4s9Tw29Oysg_UGyyg Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/%24500-left-in-the-bank-and-how-he-turned-it-into/id1547241660?i=1000699791975 👥 Want the summit replays plus a community of recruiters pushing for more? Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 📩 Free newsletter with the best of every episode: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe Connect with Randee Staats: https://www.linkedin.com/in/randee-staats-jr/
August 20, 202652min
Number 2: How To Stop Losing $100K Fees At The Finish Line
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
September 07, 20261h 5min
Number 3: 20 Principles To Become The Recruiter AI Can't Replace
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 📬 Newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe
August 31, 20261h 19min
Number 4: 8X Million-Dollar Biller. Zero Business Development
What if everything you were taught about growing a desk was optional? Finish The Year Strong 2026 kicks off September 28th through October 5th, and the live sessions are free. This is your line in the sand for the rest of the year: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ This episode is sponsored by Atlas, the CRM that actually understands context. Atlas captures every call, email, and message automatically, then tells you the next action to take. And whether you place permanent or contract, Atlas covers both with its new contract suite, so you never chase a timesheet again and you get live margin visibility on every single placement. Atlas customers are reporting 50% higher candidate response rates, 35% more new clients won, and monthly billings jumping 85%. See it at https://recruitwithatlas.com/ Almost every recruiter got the same day one instruction: business development is the job. Make the marketing calls, chase the ads, win the clients. Dan Lambert did the opposite. He skipped BD entirely, doubled his candidate metrics instead, and as he tells it, went on to post eight million dollar years before taking over ownership of Lambert Nemec Group. His logic was almost uncomfortably simple. Candidates are the inventory, and if you own the best inventory, clients have no choice but to deal with you. So while his colleagues left voicemails chasing ads, Dan interviewed 25 candidates a week against a target of 10, placed his people on his teammates' job orders, and waited. Those candidates became controllers, then CFOs, then the clients calling him with exclusive, hidden job orders no other agency ever saw. Dan walks through exactly how he did it, including the no pressure takeaway call he ran on week one job ads, the follow up cadence that turned cold postings into clients for life, and the story of telling a hiring manager to hire her own free candidate instead of paying him a $20,000 fee, a decision that won him every search she ran afterward. He breaks down his prep ritual too: the week is planned before Friday ends, and he never left the office without two Monday interviews booked, because a Monday without interviews is a day you never get back. You will also hear his honest take on AI and recruiting tech, why LinkedIn is a lookup tool and not a recruiting strategy, the candidate update call he believes is the most ignored moneymaker in every firm's database, and the order of operations behind his firm's low turnover: candidates first, clients next, the organization, then you. If you have ever believed there had to be another way to build a desk besides pounding out marketing calls, this episode is your proof, and your permission. And mark your calendar for the brand new Firm Leaders Summit, November 16th to 18th, with free live sessions: Details soon Finish The Year Strong 2026: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ Connect with Dan Lambert on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-lambert-57bb1110/ Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe
August 27, 20261h 10min
Number 5: Laid Off At 5 Weeks Postpartum. $1.3 Million In 2.5 Years
Sign up for Finish The Year Strong 2026, free for all live sessions, September 28 to October 5: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ This episode is powered by Atlas, the CRM that captures every call, email, and LinkedIn message automatically and tells you the next action to take: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ Join the Recruiting Agents Workshop with Seb Sharp, August 25 and 26, and build your own autonomous lead agent and placement agent live: https://the-recruiting-agents-workshop.heysummit.com/ Julia Arpag was laid off at five weeks postpartum with a newborn, a toddler, and two teenage foster sons at home. Two and a half years later, as she tells it, Aligned Recruitment has closed $1.3 million in revenue and 30 clients while she works 30 hours a week. And she built all of it having never sold a single thing in her life before starting the firm. This talk is pulled straight from the Elite Recruiter Community library as a primer for Finish The Year Strong, where Julia is coming back with a brand new session. It is the rare talk where she steps back from tactics and lays out the ten principles underneath everything: optimizing for time and money instead of money alone, hiring multiple coaches for different gaps, building an audience of 74,000 on LinkedIn, and the DM plus voice note sequence that turns profile views into discovery calls. She walks through the five CRM categories she works for just twenty minutes a day, why warm leads are the closest to the money strategy in the entire business, and how aiming to serve instead of sell keeps the anxiety out of your voice on every call. She also gets honest about the expensive misses, including a $30,000 mastermind that produced zero closed leads, and why she would still rather try and miss than sit frozen waiting for the perfect move. If you are heading into the final quarter wondering whether you can build a real firm without sacrificing your family, your health, or your sanity, this is the mindset reset before the summit. The year is not written yet. Register for Finish The Year Strong 2026 and catch Julia's next talk live. 🎯 Finish The Year Strong 2026: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ 🤖 The Recruiting Agents Workshop: https://the-recruiting-agents-workshop.heysummit.com/ ⚡ Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ 🔗 Julia Arpag LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julia-arpag/ 👥 Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 📩 Newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscrib
August 24, 202646min