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 mindsets of the most successful people in the industry — from $1M solo producers to 8+-figure agency founders.
Each episode delivers real, tactical insights for high-performance recruiting:
How elite recruiters build and scale
Tools, tech stacks, and sourcing strategies
Daily habits and workflows that drive million-dollar desks
Lessons from failure, breakthrough wins, and mindset shifts
What the best are doing next — and how they’re changing the game
If you’re in agency recruiting, staffing, or executive search — this is your new secret weapon.
No fluff. No recycled advice. Just the unfiltered playbook of the top 1%.
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Part 2 of 2. Part 1 gave you the first three steps of the offshore playbook: function, region, and compensation. This is where it gets real. Steps four and five, finding the person and supporting them, which Greg Fischer says is where most of the 7 out of 10 failures actually happen.
Greg says the quiet part out loud early: you do not need a firm like his to do this. Then he shows you how. The best offshore talent does not apply to job ads, the same thing you tell your own clients. Skip Upwork and onlinejobs.ph entirely. Headhunt on LinkedIn with Boolean searches, and learn the local titles first, because a great recruiter in Mexico might show up as headhunter or reclutador. Greg interviewed 32 candidates before making his own first hire, and he walks through the 3-step interview process he recommends, including why a true solo should bring in an outside advisor for round two, and the practical assessment that exposes a weak candidate before you pay them.
Then the step everybody treats as an afterthought. Support. The 30, 90, and 180-day milestones you map before you hire, including the quantitative floor Greg uses, like 12 submissions from a sourcer by day 90. Weekly meetings built around roadblocks. Why your international hires belong in the all-hands, the engagement survey, and the quarterly roadmap. Plus the question I could not stop thinking about afterward: what your offshore team figures out about you in their first week that you do not know about yourself. Greg's answer involves the biases they quietly spot, and the lifeline exercise he uses to build real connection with every hire. Steal that one even if you never hire internationally.
And the case study. A solo biller doing $650K, completely burnt out, no time to work on the business. His first offshore recruiter billed $120K in placements within 4 months, as Greg tells it. The second billed $60K in her first 60 days. He is now on hire number four, on pace to more than double his best year, and went from solo operator to running an actual firm.
What You'll Learn:
Where to actually find top offshore recruiters and the job boards to avoid
The 3-step interview process and the practical assessment that filters out the bottom half
The one interview question that reveals how a candidate thinks about performance
Resume red flags a US owner will not recognize
The 30-90-180 day milestone map to build before you ever make an offer
Why BD and client-facing work usually stays onshore, and the $800K exception
The lifeline exercise that builds loyalty with any hire, offshore or not
Missed Part 1? Go back for the first three steps and the real 2026 salary numbers.
Part 1 of 2. I lost thousands trying to offshore. Did every single thing wrong, swore it off, and avoided this topic for two years. Then I sat down with Greg Fischer, who built an 18-person international team inside his own firm while scaling it from $1 million to $4.2 million, and recorded the conversation I wish I had before I spent a dollar.
Greg says 7 out of 10 firms that try offshoring end up worse off than if they had never started. Not because the talent is not there. Because they skip the playbook. This is the first half of that playbook, and it covers the first three steps: function, region, and compensation.
We get into why "I want a cheap recruiter" is already the failure, and what to hire for instead. Greg breaks down the full menu, sourcers, researchers, 180s, 360s, and SDRs, and why a dedicated sourcer behind a solo biller doing $400K to $600K has produced a 30 to 50 percent revenue lift within a year, as Greg tells it. He also shares why a sourcer hire works about 8 out of 10 times while the admin assistant hire most owners start with works about 3 out of 10.
Then the part nobody says out loud: the big firms are already doing this. Greg estimates 80 to 90 percent of the major players have international practices, and about half of boutique firms in the $1M to $3M range have at least one international team member. You just do not see it on LinkedIn.
The compensation section alone is worth the download. Real 2026 numbers, not vendor markup numbers. What a sourcer in the Philippines actually earns. What a LATAM associate recruiter costs. What a true A player who closes $500K a year expects in base and commission. Plus the PTO mistake that insults candidates before they start, and the payment platforms Greg recommends and the two he would avoid.
🚀 This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the CRMx that captures every conversation and tells you the next action to take: https://recruitwithatlas.com/
We recorded this conversation with Tom Kosnik in 2024, during one of the longest down stretches the recruiting and staffing industry has seen. We're bringing it back because Tom is joining us at the Firm Leaders Summit, and the questions he raised then are the same ones firm owners are working through right now.
Tom is the founder and president of the Visus Group, a growth strategy and organizational development firm that works only with staffing and recruiting companies. As he tells it, close to 100 C-suite executives sit in his peer roundtables, which means he hears every few months what's working and what isn't inside firms from startup size to billions in revenue. He also got into the industry by an unusual route. He was studying for the Catholic priesthood, realized it wasn't his calling, and ended up building roundtables for staffing executives because it was the only industry left on the table.
The heart of this episode is Tom's stage-by-stage breakdown of what it takes to grow a firm, and how the owner's job changes at every step. From $1M to $5M, the stakes are your next few hires and running out of cash. From $5M to $10M, you need a real sales plan, a recruiting manager who frees you to work on the business, and an owner who keeps selling. From $10M to $25M, it's an operating system, quarterly initiatives, weekly business KPIs, and getting off factoring. Past $25M, your job becomes building and running a management team.
He also makes the case that hiring more salespeople and making more dials no longer grows a firm. Recruiting in places a client can't reach is now table stakes. The firms that are winning bring their clients market data and talk with them about human capital strategy, and that conversation positions them as advisors instead of a source of bodies. He explains why offshore sourcing is about to be automated away, why technology spend that doesn't raise gross profit per person is wasted, and why marketing and personal brands now carry most of the sales load.
$50M A Year Proves Elite Recruiters Don't Chase Clients.
Saison 1 · Épisode 366
lundi 19 octobre 2026 • Durée 56:19
Registration is open for the Firm Leaders Summit, three days built for recruiting firm owners and leaders, November 16 to 18. Hiring and training recruiters, growth, BD, and becoming the rainmaker for your firm: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.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: https://recruitwithatlas.com/
Most agency owners chase clients every single month. Matthieu "Matt" Beaurain built a $50M a year search group by doing the opposite.
Matt has led Lincoln for 26 years, taking over the firm when it was four people and growing it to roughly 230 people across more than 10 countries and four brands, with about €50M in annual revenue, as he tells it. His model is simple and radical: every consultant is a talent agent. Lincoln follows people, not companies, and the business follows the talent.
In this conversation, Matt breaks news he held back from our pregame. In 2020, Lincoln sold 55% of the firm to join a larger European talent representation project. At the end of July, they bought it all back. Lincoln is 100% independently owned again, and Matt explains what that means for the next chapter.
He also introduces a metric most firm owners have never heard of: Talent Lifetime Value. Lincoln measures each consultant's portfolio of talent over five years, the way a SaaS company measures customer lifetime value. Build it well and you stop starting every month from zero.
Matt shares how he started in recruiting part-time at Robert Half while running a bar with his wife, why he moved his family to Shanghai after visiting a struggling office, and how he built trust in China for six years without speaking Mandarin. He walks through Lincoln's international expansion, from a small acquisition in Belgium right before the 2008 crash to Cooper Fitch in the Middle East, and why one rebrand after an acquisition probably destroyed value. He also explains why he brought in an outside CEO so he could keep doing the work he loves, how Lincoln holds fees at 25 to 28% on a fully retained model, and why the US may finally be on the map.
$500K For Years. 1 Hire Put Him On Pace For $1M
Saison 1 · Épisode 365
jeudi 15 octobre 2026 • Durée 56:35
David Dickey was a consistent $500K biller for years. This year he is on pace to break $1 million. When asked what changed, his answer was not a new sales script or a bigger client list. It was one hire.
The Firm Leaders Summit is November 16, 17, and 18. Three days built for recruiting firm owners and leaders: hiring and training recruiters, growth, BD, and becoming the rainmaker for your firm. Register here: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com
This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the CRMx that captures every call, email, and LinkedIn message automatically and tells you the next action to take. Learn more at https://recruitwithatlas.com/
David is the founder of The Patriot Group, an executive and technical search firm focused on aerospace and defense, with deep work in the unmanned and drone space. Before recruiting, he was a Marine officer who went on to build government contracting companies. When the VP offers started coming in, it was his then girlfriend, now wife, who asked why he did not just go out on his own again. That question started The Patriot Group, which turns 15 this January.
In this conversation, David walks through every pivot. From government consulting to running veteran career fairs, 25 events in four years, to going all in on recruiting. He explains why contract-funded GovCon roles are a race to the bottom on margins, and why he only works headquarters roles that are not tied to a single contract.
Then the big one. David recruited for about 12 years before making his first CEO placement. The fear that held him back is the same one most recruiters carry: if I call myself an executive recruiter, I lose everything else. He shares the referral that opened the door, what he would tell himself five years ago, and why owning your positioning on LinkedIn matters more than waiting for credibility to catch up.
We also get into the hire that changed the year. In the summer of 2024, David brought his youngest stepson into the business from a sales background. He took over the processes, the forms, and training the firm's AI on Claude, which freed David to focus on better clients and sharpen the firm's message.
Why Your Recruiting Desk Is Quiet Right Now
Saison 1 · Épisode 364
lundi 12 octobre 2026 • Durée 01:09:26
Your desk goes quiet. The calls slow down, the interviews dry up, and you start wondering what changed. John Ruffini has an answer, and it usually starts with what is sitting in your pipeline.
This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the CRMx that captures every interview, call, and message automatically, then tells you the next action to take, now with a contract suite and live margin visibility on every placement: https://recruitwithatlas.com/
John has spent 30 years in recruiting, starting on a direct hire desk and spending the last 10 to 15 years training, mentoring, and developing recruiters across accounting, IT, and healthcare. Ten years after his first book, he sat down with Benjamin Mena for the release of Money Makers 2.0, a full rewrite of the original for the way recruiters work today.
He opens with the question he uses when a passive candidate tries to shut the call down, and its twin for the hiring manager who says they just posted the job. Then he walks through his forecasting rule. By his math, only about 30% of an active pipeline closes, and a resume submission does not count until the client agrees to interview. A recruiter who wants to bill $30K a month, as he tells it, needs roughly $100K of interview-stage deals in motion. He is clear that seasoned billers who know their clients can close far more, but for a quiet or growing desk, the math is the wake-up call.
From there it gets practical. Why he calls active candidates every week even when he cannot place them, what one active and one passive interview a day does for a desk, how he tracks the companies where competitors are placing and he is not, and why he never blocks more than 45 minutes of calls at a time. He shares the story of a recruiter who trusted the plan through six slow months and went on to have 80 nurses working for her, and a friend who left voicemails for a niche clinician for six months until she called back because he was the only one who kept calling.
Training Our Competition Grew Our Recruiting Firm.
This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the CRMx that actually understands context. It captures every interview, client call, LinkedIn message, email, and WhatsApp automatically, then tells you the next action to take. Learn more at https://recruitwithatlas.com/
Brooke Weinert and her husband Tommy had a plan: one of them would keep the paycheck while the other built a recruiting firm. Then their entire team at a 2,000-person government contractor was let go, and both of them were out at once. Within 48 hours they were at the dining room table with a spiral notebook, writing the business plan for what became Mount Indie, a cleared recruiting firm built for government contracting.
Eight years later, Brooke is founder and CEO, and the firm runs a second line of business most owners would be afraid to touch. Shadow Labs, their cleared recruiter training platform, trains in-house recruiting teams, often at the same companies Mount Indie recruits for. A mentor warned them it would cannibalize the firm. As Brooke tells it, the opposite happened: training clients keep coming back for surge support and their hardest-to-fill roles.
Brooke and Benjamin get into how a discounted favor for people they knew turned into a product, why she built a Client Readiness Framework after reading The Pumpkin Plan, and how a dashboard tracking every step from first submittal to offer tells her team which clients deserve their time. She breaks down Evergreen, the retainer model they built by listening to GovCon clients, including the client who went in-house, came back, and grew from 50 to 150 employees with Mount Indie embedded in their hiring. They also cover why Mount Indie has never hired an in-house salesperson, how a quarterly newsletter and LinkedIn content turn into clients over years, what EOS forced them to start doing, and why they earned a facility clearance but have no interest in becoming a prime.
If you have ever wondered what else your firm could sell without putting your recruiting business at risk, this one is for you.
How To Build An AI-Native Firm That Beats Firms 4x Its Size.
Saison 1 · Épisode 362
lundi 5 octobre 2026 • Durée 01:02:51
How To Build An AI-Native Firm That Beats Firms 4x Its Size.
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.
How To Build A $1.9M Firm With Just 2 People
Saison 1 · Épisode 361
mercredi 30 septembre 2026 • Durée 01:14:42
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/
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.
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.
What You'll Learn:
Why 7 out of 10 firms fail at offshoring and the one word that separates the 3 that succeed
The five-role menu and which role a first-timer should never start with
The rainmaker math: what a dedicated sourcer does to a solo biller's revenue
Greg's region cheat sheet: Philippines, LATAM, and South Africa, and which jobs go where
The 50 percent overlap rule for time zones and why 4 hours is the floor
Real 2026 salary bands for offshore sourcers and recruiters, base and commission
How to structure commission, PTO, and payment setup without getting burned
Part 2 drops right after this one: headhunting the person, interviewing them, managing them, and the case study of a burnt out $650K solo biller whose offshore hires changed his firm.
Tom also covers the personality traits that predict great recruiters, how to keep A-players from leaving to start their own firms, and the story of an operator with no staffing background who took a firm from $1M to $3.5M in EBITDA in three years, as Tom tells it.
What You'll Learn
What changes at $1M, $5M, $10M, and $25M
Why your sales plan matters more than your business plan below $10M
Why "more dials" is the wrong answer to a slow market
The traits that separate top billers from friendly extroverts
How to keep your best producers from going out on their own
Why every firm owner needs a peer group that tells them what they don't want to hear
Books mentioned: First, Break All the Rules and The Power to See Ourselves.
David also breaks down why he moved away from contingency to an engagement fee model, why the first move for a recruiter stuck at a low average fee is to raise it, and how years of building his LinkedIn network turned simple connection messages into searches.
What You'll Learn:
Why David only works headquarters roles in GovCon, not contract-funded seats
The fear that kept him from executive search for 12 years, and what finally tipped it
How one hire freed up his time and put him on pace for $1M
How his stepson uses Claude and Loxo to automate submissions and curated resumes
Why he dropped contingency for an engagement fee model
How his LinkedIn DM game turns connections into executive searches
The Marine Corps principle he still applies when a placement does not work out
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.
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
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.
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