The Elite Recruiter Podcast

Gary Stauble started his firm in 1998 and almost immediately lost control of his mornings. Circumstances at home meant he could not rely on being at his desk on any given day. He had less time than his competition, and he was not hitting his goals. So he stopped measuring hours and started measuring what the hours produced. He compressed his workday, front-loaded everything that mattered into the...

The AI Recruiting Summit 2026 kicks off July 13th and runs through July 20th, and this episode is your preview of exactly what you will see there. Live sessions are free, so you can pop in and out around your desk. If you want the replays, grab the VIP option or join the Elite Recruiter Community, where every summit replay lives permanently. Register now at https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysum...

In this second part of a two part conversation, Danny Cahill takes Benjamin Mena behind the scenes of how he builds million dollar billers, why AI is quietly turning recruiters into commodities, and the one skill he says you cannot teach. This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the AI first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin and turn every candidate conversation into something you can...

Danny Cahill is one of the biggest names in the history of the recruiting industry, and in this first part of a two part conversation he sits down with Benjamin Mena to unpack forty years of building a firm, surviving every disruption thrown at him, and developing recruiters who last entire careers. This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the AI first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin...

Half the year is gone. That single fact is why Benjamin Mena pulled this talk out of the Elite Recruiter Community and put it in the feed. It is a reset, a line in the sand, and a challenge to decide right now what the rest of the year is going to look like. Brent Orsuga has spent 23 years in recruiting, the last 16 in logistics and supply chain, and 11 of those years running his own firm, Pinnacl...

Most recruiters think AI is coming for their job. Allie Milbrath thinks it's coming for one kind of recruiter — the one whose value was sending LinkedIn messages faster than the person next to them. If that was ever the whole game, she says you should be worried. If it wasn't, this episode is the way out. This is Part 1 of a two-part retained search masterclass. Allie Milbrath of the Quinn Roberts...

Most recruiters think AI is coming for their job. Allie Milbrath thinks it's coming for one kind of recruiter — the one whose value was sending LinkedIn messages faster than the person next to them. If that was ever the whole game, she says you should be worried. If it wasn't, this episode is the way out. This is Part 1 of a two-part retained search masterclass. Allie Milbrath of the Quinn Roberts...

Your best biller is the person bringing in the most money. So how could promoting them be the most expensive mistake your firm ever makes? That is where Benjamin Mena starts with Duncan Taylor, a healthcare staffing veteran who has spent more than 30 years on the executive side of recruiting and built his career around one unusual specialty: recruiting for recruiting companies. Duncan lays out the...

She runs a three-person team. She places 7 to 12 people a month. She charges 18% of annual salary — right in line with the market. And somehow she's the preferred childcare provider for the LA Rams, the LA Chargers, and a meaningful slice of the Forbes 400. There's no SDR. There are no paid ads. She's not on LinkedIn. Every deal is referred or inbound. After 20 years. Rebecca Stewart is the founde...

In Part 1, Tom Kelly walked us through how EVONA scaled from four founders to 80 recruiters in three years, then deliberately cut back to 30 — and per-head revenue doubled. In Part 2, he hands over the framework that explains how he manages the leaner team. And it starts with a number most agency owners have never been forced to confront. If you haven't heard Part 1 yet, listen to that one first —...

Tom Kelly scaled EVONA from four bootstrapped founders in a tiny Bristol office to eighty recruiters in three years. Then he made the call most agency owners never make. He cut the team back to thirty. And in doing it, per-head revenue doubled.   This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation that pulls apart exactly how that happened.   Brought to you by Atlas. The AI-first recruitment platform that c...

Most recruiters think AI is coming for someone else's desk. Riece Keck isn't so sure. Two years ago he said AI wouldn't replace great recruiters, but it would replace the mediocre ones sooner than anyone wanted to admit. He still stands by it, and he thinks we're a lot closer now than we were then. He's also taking the stage at the AI Recruiting Summit 2026 to go even deeper on this, so if today's...

Most recruiters treat their client list like a closed account. You made the perm placement, the fee hit, and now you wait six months until they need you again. Dawson Henis looked at that same client list and saw six figures of recurring revenue nobody was collecting, so he picked up the phone.  In this episode, Dawson, the founder of the Atlanta-based Henis Group, walks Benjamin Mena through what...

Steve Anderson was a milkman in South Carolina before he picked up a phone in healthcare recruiting. Twenty-five years later, he got laid off at 48 — part of a 1,500-person RIF — with five daughters, a mortgage, and no plan B.   Three months in, they pitched their first investor. He told them they were idiots and hung up. That call is the reason Optigy exists in its current form   This episode is...

She launched her firm on January 12th. Six weeks later she'd billed $120,000 — working off an Excel spreadsheet, a phone, and zero AI. While most of the industry is convinced the next placement is one shiny tool away, Lauren Lehman quietly proved the opposite, and this conversation breaks down exactly how she did it. Before we get into it — this episode is brought to you by Atlas, the AI-first rec...

What separates the recruiters billing seven figures from the ones who plateau year after year? According to Scott Love, only one out of a hundred recruiters will ever reach their full potential. The other ninety-nine are stuck in the same loop — relying on the most placeable candidate call, avoiding real business development, and confusing activity with progress. In this episode, Scott breaks down...

Tony O'Neill surfs 200 days a year, runs an executive search firm from the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, and lives a life most agency owners assume they have to retire before earning. Here's the part no one talks about: it didn't come from selling the business or stepping back from the desk. He's still billing, still in Pinnacle Society conversations, and still committed to another fifteen years in...

Resumes never tell the full story. The candidate who casually mentioned she's open to relocating, the manager who said he wants a four-day week, the senior dev who's quietly looking — that detail gets buried in notes and forgotten. Atlas changes that. It's the AI-first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin, capturing every conversation automatically and turning it into something you can ac...

$720,000 in one quarter. Zero cold calls. Three tools. He's running 29 active job orders in pharma and biotech recruiting, his business development is 100% inbound from LinkedIn, and he just took over the family agency on January 1st. This is what an AI-powered recruiting desk actually looks like when someone executes it correctly. This episode is sponsored by Atlas — the AI-first recruitment plat...

Two million-dollar billers. A $4 million book. They walked away from all of it — at the peak of their performance — because they believed most recruiters were about to learn the hard way that AI doesn't save careers. It exposes the ones built on shaky ground. 🎁 Try Millee free for 30 days: https://www.millee.ai/ Seb Sharpe is the co-founder of Millee, an AI recruitment intelligence platform power...

Amanda Hendrix helped scale a healthcare staffing firm from $2.2M to $11M in a single year during the COVID boom. Then the market normalized. Bill rates dropped from $145 to $110 in thirty days. Vendors got cut. Recruiter morale cracked. Agencies that hired aggressively into the surge got squeezed out one by one. This episode is the post-mortem you don't usually get from someone who lived both sid...

🚀 THIS IS YOUR YEAR — Recruiter Gworth Summit kicks off TODAY 2026 is your year. The year you stop watching other recruiters hit the numbers you've been chasing and become the one hitting them. We're pulling together the industry's best — Mike Williams, Brianna Rooney, Mark Whitby, and a stacked lineup across the full week — to give you the playbook, the mindset, and the strategies to go elite th...

Diane Prince walked into staffing with zero recruiting experience and one specific intention: build a business she could scale and sell. Six years later, she sold her staffing agency for $28 million. 🚀 Diane is speaking again at the This Is Your Year Recruiter Summit 2026 — which is exactly why this episode is back in rotation. Don't miss her live session. Register free: https://this-is-your-year...

Norm Volsky doesn't just place people at companies. He invests in them. After 14 years in digital health and employee benefits recruiting, Norm has built something almost nobody else in this industry has pulled off: a $6M recruiting practice and a fully operational venture capital firm — running side by side, feeding each other, in the same niche. His first client, Livongo, sold to Teladoc for $18...

The This Is Your Year Recruiter Summit kicks off April 27th — less than 2 weeks away. Free live sessions with the industry's best, including Mike Williams, Brianna Rooney, and Mark Whitby. Register now:  https://this-is-your-year-recruiter-summit.heysummit.com/ Most contingent recruiters think the hardest part of going retained is convincing their clients to pay upfront. Andrea Colabella thought t...