The Resilient Recruiter

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...

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...