The Resilient Recruiter

Adding more people is how you grow a recruitment firm. Michelle Lownie spent years believing it. Then she watched it go wrong. Michelle is the CEO and co-founder of Eden Scott, one of Scotland's leading recruitment firms. She started in recruitment in 1989, filing documents and making tea at Melville Craig on a six-week summer contract. She stayed 15 years. In 2003, she co-founded Eden Scott along...

Sourcing frustration is usually diagnosed as a volume problem. Not enough candidates in the funnel. Not enough searches. Not enough outreach. Steven Lu thinks it's the opposite problem. Steven is the co-founder and CEO of Pin.com and the founder of Interseller, a recruiting outreach platform that helped place over 40,000 candidates before being acquired by Greenhouse in 2021. After two years insid...

What does it take to build a search process that has a VP of HR saying they've never seen anything like it? Darwin Shurig built a $2.5 million medtech recruiting firm with $1.2 million in personal production. Then in one quarter, eight of his nine top clients stopped using external recruiters. Revenue collapsed. His team disappeared. His 17-year marriage ended in the same period. What he built on...

He nearly quit after 7 months. Zero placements. Nothing working. He packed his things into a cardboard box, walked toward the door, and heard his colleagues talking about him behind his back. What they said stopped him. He turned around, sat back down, and made two placements by the end of that week. That was 1982. He never left. In this episode, Rich breaks down the daily habits behind 44 years o...

Carol Ann Wentworth lost her business, her home, and nearly everything she owned in 2008. Within 10 days of clarifying her next step, three recruiting firms reached out. She had a job offer in two weeks. That same clarity is what built Wentworth Executive Recruiting into a ten-year retained practice with a 94% retention rate. She made 48 placements with one Silicon Valley client and supported thei...

What if your next placement paid $100,000… …but took two years to close? Most recruiters, especially in contingency recruiting or running a recruitment agency, wouldn’t go near that model. Darci Smith built her entire business around it. She specializes in moving financial advisors between firms, often transferring hundreds of millions in assets. These are high-stakes, long-cycle deals where trust...

He built a $4M recruitment firm. Then chose not to scale it. Seb Sharpe grew Inventure to $4 million in seven years. Profitable every quarter. Retained and exclusive from day one. A clear niche in renewable energy. Then he made a move most agency owners avoid. Instead of hiring more recruiters and scaling headcount, he started building a platform for what comes next. In this episode of The Resilie...

From $400K to Zero. Then nothing for six months. Harrison Wright launched his recruitment business and billed nearly $400,000 in his first six months. Then the market turned. Hiring froze. Searches disappeared. He was burning $30,000 a month just to stay afloat. Most recruiters would respond by doing more. More calls. More CVs. More pressure. He did exactly that. It didn’t work. So he rebuilt the...

A 12-month guarantee on every placement. That's almost unheard of in recruitment. Most agencies offer three months. Some stretch to six. Lewis Waitt and Jessica Multhauf guarantee their hires for an entire year, and more than 90% of their placements are still in the role after 12 months. That level of confidence doesn't come from luck. It comes from a recruiting process built very differently from...

One placement can be a transaction. Or it can be the start of a long-term enterprise relationship. Most recruiters treat it like the first. Brendan Thomas built his career on the second. He started recruiting at 36, got fired after his first $60,000 placement, and joined a new agency six months later with two clients. By the end of that year, he had built over $600,000 in billings. Six years later...

I can’t keep making $40,000. That’s what Larissa Gerlach told her manager in year one of recruitment. She was making 200+ calls a week. Hitting the activity metrics. Doing everything she was told to do. And still unsure whether she would make it. Three years later, she was President’s Club. Soon after, the CFO of a private equity-backed recruiting firm emailed her: “What are you doing — and how do...

AI in recruitment was supposed to make hiring faster, smarter, and more efficient. Greg Savage believes it has made recruitment harder. Fraud at scale. Inflated CVs. AI screening tools producing just 14% shortlist overlap. And automation that speeds up broken recruitment processes instead of fixing them. In Episode 300 of _The Resilient Recruiter,_ we break down AI in recruitment, the future of re...

Why do some recruiters close retained work in a single meeting while others pitch for weeks and still lose to contingent competitors? In this episode of *The Resilient Recruiter,* Mark Whitby sits down with *James O’Brien,* Managing Director and COO at i-intro, to unpack what really separates recruiters who win retained and exclusive work from those stuck chasing job orders. James has been in recr...

Why do some recruiters get ghosted while others hear: *“I never respond to recruiters, but I had to respond to you”?* In this episode of *The Resilient Recruiter,* Mark Whitby is joined by *Theresa Nordstrom,* founder of Talent Company, to break down what _actually_ makes candidates respond in today’s noisy recruitment market. Before launching her own search firm, Theresa spent nearly 20 years as...

Why do some recruitment agencies collapse when the market turns, while others keep growing? Gerard Koolen has lived through three major crises: the 2008 financial crash, COVID-19, and the war in Ukraine. Each time, his recruitment business didn’t just survive. It grew. In this episode of _The Resilient Recruiter,_ Gerard explains why growth in tough markets has nothing to do with working harder. I...

Why do some recruiters stay stuck on contingent work while others quietly shift a large part of their business to retained without pitching harder or sounding salesy? James Cairns found the answer the hard way. James left a stable corporate finance career to start a boutique search firm with no agency experience, no local network, and just $30,000 in savings. His first year was brutal. Three place...

You’re posting on LinkedIn. You’re showing up consistently. And yet… the meetings aren’t coming. This episode explains why. Mike Mello spent 10 years in staffing sales and built what most recruiters would call a dream run: 1,300 placements, more than $100 million in revenue sold, and nearly 140 contractors on billing as an enterprise salesperson. Then he walked away. Not because staffing stopped w...

Ever find yourself hitting a brick wall when it comes to developing engaging content? Don't despair! Recently, I was invited as a guest speaker on the Retained Recruiter Show, which is a weekly LinkedIn live hosted by our good friends at i-Intro. The topic was How to Get More Clients with Content Marketing. i-Intro told me that this was one of the most popular live streams that they'd ever produce...

Why do some recruiters command premium fees while others compete on speed and price? It's not talent or experience. It's whether they've packaged their service as a product. Andrea Hoffer learned this lesson the hard way. Before launching her consulting business, Andrea spent 10 years running a Massage Envy Spa franchise. She led a team of more than 30 employees. Her therapeutic staff stayed. Her...

There’s a lot of noise around AI in recruitment. Some people are selling it as a silver bullet. Others are predicting a job apocalypse for recruiters. Neither is true. In this episode of The Resilient Recruiter, Mark Whitby sits down with Rebecca Hastings to talk about what’s actually happening inside businesses using AI right now and what recruiters are getting wrong. Rebecca advises CEOs, boards...

This episode brings together the ten most listened-to conversations of 2025. They weren’t popular by accident. These episodes resonated because they spoke directly to the challenges recruiters were dealing with day to day. Planning your time. Building pipeline. Positioning retained search. Recovering from burnout. Staying relevant as the market and LinkedIn both shifted. If you missed any of these...

Tonya Leadman went nine months without a single placement. Seven searches were put on hold. Two offers fell through. Cash flow tightened. And her accountant called to check if she was okay. Tonya is the owner of Leadman & Associates, a national executive search firm serving the food, beverage, and CPG manufacturing industries. After building her career as a top performer in the MRI network and lat...

For years, Matt Rooney did what a lot of capable recruiters do. He stayed busy. Took the work that came in. Said yes more often than he should have. Inside private equity, that turned him into what he later called a "utility recruiter". Useful, but reactive. Some years were strong. Others weren't. And it never quite felt like a real partnership with clients. Two decisions changed the direction of...

AI is accelerating at a rate faster than at any point in recruitment history. New tools are emerging monthly. Employers are experimenting without clear guardrails. And agency owners are left wondering which developments will matter - and which are just noise. In this episode, I sit down with Matt Alder, talent acquisition futurist and host of Recruiting Future, to cut through the hype and focus on...

For 20 years, Maria Sinclair watched other people get promoted while she stayed stuck in her own head. She questioned whether she belonged, worried about how she was perceived, and doubted nearly every decision she made. Then Covid hit, and everything changed. Cobalt furloughed 45 of its 55 UK staff, leaving only ten people working. Maria picked up multiple desks, supported clients across new spec...