The Resilient Recruiter

A top biller wants equity in your recruitment firm. Can you offer them a future as an owner? At Integra Partners, recruiters who generate $240,000 in placement revenue over 12 months become eligible for an invitation to buy shares. Eight of the firm’s 16 employees are shareholders. They receive distributions based on profitability, have access to the financials and have a defined arrangement for s...

A contingent agency filling 84.6% of its jobs? I wanted to know how. That was Bilingual Source’s search-assignment fill rate in 2023. Every assignment comes with mandatory exclusivity. And Greg Benadiba has a way of earning that commitment even when the client is already working with other agencies. After taking a detailed brief, he asks how confident the client is that those other agencies really...

Vanessa Raath recently trained a team in Canada who thought they were using AI quite well. They all had the paid version. They just didn’t know what it could do. Vanessa helps recruitment teams put AI to work on their desks. She was already known worldwide for talent sourcing training when ChatGPT launched in November 2022. Within six months, she recognized how much sourcing work it could support...

For the first five to six years of his first recruiting business, Mike Kelly did everything himself. Cold calls, interviews, client meetings, even payroll. He began handing off the work when he asked himself: what's the highest and best use of my time? Mike is the Founder and CEO of Conexus Advisors and has grown and exited three professional services businesses. In this conversation, he shares ho...

A hot market can hide a lot of problems. Josh Volinsky and his partners launched Synergy Search in September 2020, and the accounting and finance recruiting firm has reached as high as $6M in revenue. When the market normalized, recruiters who had learned to work transactionally struggled to adapt, a run of hires didn't work out, and the founders recognized that they weren't tracking the activity...

In 2023, Kim Laipple led a 28-person team at Scientific Search and personally billed $1.4 million. Since then, the biotech market has been volatile. Between the downturn, retirements and other changes, the team dropped to about 16. Kim was also promoted to President after the previous owner retired. Today, Scientific Search is back to around 22 people. Kim is running the business while still spend...

Every December, Charlie Saffro caught up with a friendly competitor at Hirewell to compare notes on the recruiting market. At the end of their 2024 call, after four difficult years, she said something almost as a joke: if you know anyone looking to buy a supply chain recruiting firm, let me know. About a week later, Hirewell's owner called her. Charlie founded CS Recruiting in 2010 and spent 15 ye...

Ross Cohen left his role as managing director at one of Florida's leading search firms to launch Brinc Search Partners with his business partner, Brett Nortman. They gave up an established brand, a built-out book of business and the steady flow that came with a larger firm. Ross also had a non-compete preventing him from approaching his former clients. Brinc launched in March 2025. In its first ye...

What do you do when the recruitment business you've poured everything into starts to fall apart? Gemma Downing Mapp came back from holiday to find Mixxos £100,000 behind budget. Two months later, the company recorded its highest-billing month ever with roughly half the team. Gemma is co-founder and CEO of Mixxos Group, a boutique recruitment consultancy she built with her business partner, Chris....

While much of the recruitment industry was flat last year, Sachin Ruparelia grew billings by 33% and kept hiring. Sachin is the Founder and Managing Director of Camino Partners and Camino Search. Over the last couple of years, his businesses have grown net fee income by 20% and then 33%, while scaling to around 37 people across London and Tampa. A big part of that growth has come from community-le...

There's a belief in recruitment that scaling a firm means scaling headcount. Dave Fox has built a different model. His fully remote technology staffing firm, Focus GTS, generates more than $10 million in annual revenue with a team of just 11 people. Early on, Dave assumed he would need 80 to 100 people to build the business he wanted. He also thought a 360 model and broader market coverage would b...

David Paffenholz never worked as a recruiter. He studied economics at Harvard, led growth at Snap, and built a couple of consumer products with his co-founder, Ishan, before the two of them turned their attention to hiring. What they noticed was that most of the recruiting tech stack is built for candidates who are already in the funnel, while the harder and more valuable problem sits right at the...

What separates recruiters building momentum from those whose desks are quietly drifting? Benjamin Mena has recorded more than 300 episodes of The Elite Recruiter Podcast. Mark Whitby has done the same with The Resilient Recruiter. Between them, they have interviewed hundreds of high-performing recruiters and repeatedly seen the same success patterns. Ben begins this conversation with an honest adm...

Most recruiters know they should be using AI more. What they don't know is where to start, what to connect, and what it costs. Reyhan Khan makes all of that concrete. Reyhan runs RecruiterGTM and has spent the last 60 days setting up Claude for 35 recruitment agencies. He's based in Lisbon, originally from Pakistan, and spent years running operations for US agencies before launching his own busine...

What are the top 1% of recruiters doing differently to win new business in 2026? That's exactly what Mark Whitby wanted to find out. So instead of interviewing one guest, he brought together three Pinnacle Society members for a live panel discussion in front of more than 100 recruiters. Jen Meyer is Chief Revenue Officer at Govig and Associates, a firm doing $12 to $15 million a year. Mike William...

LinkedIn has changed how it decides who sees your content, and many recruiters are feeling the impact. Reach is down for most creators, engagement is changing, and tactics that worked a year ago are becoming less effective. Richard van der Blom has spent years studying those changes. His annual LinkedIn Algorithm Insights Report is now in its seventh edition, built from the analysis of 1.3 million...

Recruiters don't need AI to replace conversations with candidates or clients. They need AI to give them more time for those conversations. That's the philosophy Jordan Shlosberg has built his entire business around. Jordan is the founder of Atlas, an AI-first CRMx built for recruitment agencies. Before Atlas, he built proSapient, an expert network platform, scaling it to $40 million in revenue and...

Emily Audibert billed $1.29 million in 2025. She did it while eight and a half months pregnant with her third child, living in a 750-square-foot cottage for six months during a home renovation with her husband, two young boys, and a 70-pound dog. Emily is the founder of EA Associates, a search firm specializing in go-to-market roles. The year before, she'd billed $800K. She knew she was capable of...

How many search assignments have you turned down because they were outside your niche, outside your geography, or you simply didn't have the capacity? In this special sponsored panel episode, Mark Whitby is joined by Heather Gardner, Jeff McGraw, and Jen Anderson from NPA Worldwide to discuss how split-fee partnerships help independent recruiters make more placements without taking on more clients...

Michael Chambers didn't come into recruitment through the usual route. Before becoming a recruiter, he spent eight years running a bakery with his mother in Charlotte, North Carolina. Then his father passed away from cancer, leaving behind a recruiting business that had barely gotten started. Michael decided to take it over despite having no recruiting experience. A few years later, after navigati...

David Jenyns had 15 people on his team when he realized his business still couldn't function without him. Every client wanted him personally. Every escalation came back to him. He was working long hours and couldn't switch off. When he thought about taking time off to be present for the birth of his first child, it filled him with anxiety rather than excitement. "It was a little bit scary when I r...

Dubai attracts recruiters from all over the world. Louise Vine has spent the last 18 years learning how the market really works. Louise is the founder of Inspire Selection, a specialist finance and accounting recruitment firm based in Dubai. Over the last 13 years, she has built a fully remote business operating on a commission-only model while navigating a market where fee pressure is intense, cu...

Rich Rosen is having a strong year. But he's quick to point out that it hasn't come easily. In his words, he's working twice as hard for those results. Rich has completed more than 1,200 placements, been recognized by Forbes as one of America's Top 50 Recruiters for seven consecutive years, and continues to bill over $1 million annually. He also spends more time testing recruiting technology than...

Sam Johnstone has never worked for a recruitment agency. He spent three and a half years selling video technology to agency owners. Then he decided to go and do it himself. Four years in, he has a portfolio of repeat clients and inbound leads from LinkedIn. All built from a cabin on the Scottish coast with a few thousand pounds in the bank. Sam is the founder of Real Recruit, a specialist sales re...

Recruitment business owners are being pitched new tools every single day. Most of it gets bought based on fear of missing out, not because there is a real problem that needs solving. Nitin Sharma is the founder of Rectools IO, an independent directory of recruitment technology, and the host of Rectalk, the most followed recruitment podcast on YouTube with over 100,000 subscribers. He speaks to mor...