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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🚀 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.
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.
$50M A Year Proves Elite Recruiters Don't Chase Clients.
Season 1 · Episode 366
Monday, October 19, 2026 • Duration 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
Season 1 · Episode 365
Thursday, October 15, 2026 • Duration 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
Season 1 · Episode 364
Monday, October 12, 2026 • Duration 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.
Season 1 · Episode 362
Monday, October 5, 2026 • Duration 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
Season 1 · Episode 361
Wednesday, September 30, 2026 • Duration 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.
$1M At 25. What's Possible In Your First Two Years
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.
The $5.3 Million Tax You're Paying Without Knowing It.
Season 1 · Episode 358
Saturday, September 19, 2026 • Duration 58:09
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.
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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.
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
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
