The Resilient Recruiter

When the NBA shut down due to the Coronavirus on March 11, 2020, Joe Rice knew immediately that his hospitality search firm, Joseph David International, would soon be in serious trouble. He also knew that he wasn’t going down without a fight! In this episode, listen into my conversation with Joe as he describes how they immediately pivoted to a brand new market sector and finished out the year on...

The classic contingency recruitment model is outdated and wide open for disruption.  Not only is the traditional multi-agency approach to recruitment grossly inefficient but it’s often a deeply unsatisfying experience for all parties, including the recruiter, the client and the candidates.   This is especially true for fast-growing technology companies who are scaling rapidly and running into chal...

Do you want to build a recruitment business that operates without your day to day involvement and maybe even sell it someday? If so, you’ll really enjoy my interview with Joel Slenning.   Joel is the President of Innova People, a healthcare and IT staffing agency based in Oregon. Prior to that, Joel was the founder and CEO of Icon Medical Network, a locum tenens provider which he scaled to £16,000...

Recruiters, are you prepared for the threats and opportunities that will affect our industry as we enter the early stages of a fourth industrial revolution, characterized by the rise of robots and Artificial Intelligence?   As the trend towards automation gathers pace, there will be seismic shifts in the global labor market.  Many jobs will disappear completely while entirely new types of jobs wil...

If you’re tired of being treated as a “vendor” and want to forge true partnerships with your clients, this is an episode you won’t want to miss. Many recruiters would like to shift from a transactional business model to a more consultative, value added one.  The challenge is that both the recruiter and the client are constrained by old patterns -- outdated ways of thinking and doing things.  They...

Can you imagine building a salesforce of 100+ staff in 5 months with a team of only 3 recruiters? In the 50th episode of the Resilient Recruiter, my very special guest Jennifer Poloni shares how having a unique approach and consistent planning process lead to the accomplishment of this gargantuan feat.  Jennifer is the owner of the Cascadia Search Group. She started her career as a sales rep and t...

As we begin a new year, are we justified in feeling hopeful and cautiously optimistic about the market?  Where do we go from here as a recruitment industry?  What are the trends, challenges, threats and opportunities?   To answer these questions, I invited Neil Carberry to share his perspective as the CEO of the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC). Neil’s role gives him a unique vantage...

If you had the chance to speak with a highly experienced and successful investor about scaling your recruitment businesses, what questions would you ask?  In this episode of The Resilient Recruiter, I had the opportunity to interview Abid Hamid, the Group CEO of Recruitment Entrepreneur - one of the most successful investors in start-ups and scaling recruitment businesses. Since 2014, they’ve inve...

If you have ambitions to scale your recruiting and staffing business, then developing your company culture needs to be one of your top priorities. On The Resilient Recruiter podcast, I’ve interviewed many founders of fast-growing recruitment companies and they all agree on the importance of creating the right culture.  But what does that really mean and how do we achieve it? “Nine out of ten compa...

Imagine having total freedom to run your recruitment business from anywhere. Instead of postponing your dreams of travel and adventure until retirement, what if you could create the ultimate lifestyle business and live life on your terms? That’s what Jordan Rayboy set out to do in 2006 when he launched his search firm, Rayboy Insider Search. When he went out on his own, Jordan had a non-compete ag...

The only constant in this world is change. This certainly applies to the recruitment business - in order to succeed, you must continually evolve. How have you adapted your recruiting practice to recent changes in the market?  In this episode, you’ll hear how Cameron Boyd and his firm are adapting to this challenging new environment by doing things differently.  They have introduced a flat fee stru...

Imagine this - you’ve worked really hard to deliver talent for your client’s urgent requirement. It was a tough spec but you found the perfect candidate. You managed to contact them, get them interested in the job, conduct a full screening interview, and submit the candidate's CV. Sadly your client changed their mind. They would not be hiring the candidate you’ve introduced, therefore no placement...

When times are tough, many recruiters go into desperation mode. They drop their rates and work on every order they can get.  Even before the pandemic, the norm in our industry has been a transactional, “CV supplier” style service in competition with multiple agencies.  It’s an incredibly frustrating and demoralizing place to be. So how do you change your business model to retained recruitment?  Ho...

“Our mums were best friends...” When Dan Matthews and Justin McGuire played together as children, nobody could have predicted that they would one day build a global recruitment company with offices in Amsterdam, Brisbane, Dubai, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, London, New York, Perth and Singapore. What makes this story even more remarkable is that as they grew up, Dan and Justin lost touch with one anoth...

Why should clients do business with you instead of your competition? What do you offer that is genuinely unique? Couldn’t your competitors make exactly the same claim?  Are your prospects able to discern the difference between what you offer vs your closest competitors? It’s not easy to explain how your service is better in a way that is tangible and believable.  Yet it’s critical that you create...

In this episode, I grill Doug Johnson on the secrets to his extraordinary success in recruitment.  Listen in as I persuade him to reveal the strategies, skills and techniques he’s developed over the years that have enabled him to generate millions of dollars in placement fees. Old-school sales and recruiting techniques are coming back in vogue during the Covid-19 environment.  Out of necessity, re...

From working in a recycling facility to becoming a million-dollar biller, my special guest Tyler Frisbie shares his inspiring story on how hard work, building sincere relationships, and staying humble helped him become a successful recruiter today. Tyler is a Managing Partner of Global Recruiters of McKinney (GRN), based in McKinney, Texas. He specializes in recruiting exceptional leadership talen...

As a recruitment business owner, how do you balance internal operations while strategically generating revenue? In this episode, my special guest Kris Holmes shares fascinating insights and ideas on internal operations - from rewards and compensation, peer to peer evaluations, and culture.  Kris is an executive recruiter and partner at the O’Connell Group, which is a leading search firm in consume...

To thrive in tough times requires us to embrace change and make adjustments - both in terms of our business model and our mindset. In this episode, my special guest, Patricia (Tish) Conlin shares how she was able to future-proof her recruitment business and create multiple revenue streams.  She also shares one of the most difficult times in her life, when she felt like she’d “hit the wall,” and th...

Most people are afraid of failure. Especially in recruitment, we’re very focused on achievement -- making placements and hitting sales targets.  We’re concerned about how we’re perceived by clients, candidates, coworkers, friends, and family.  We naturally want to project an image of being a successful person.  In reality, success is like the tip of an iceberg. Beneath the surface, success is buil...

Why do some recruiters bill $200k while others bill $750k in a single year with similar work ethics? This is a question that my special guest, Jeremy Sisemore will answer in this episode of the Resilient Recruiter.  In Jeremy’s words, “luck has nothing to do with it.” Jeremy is the founder of ASAP Talent Services and has been a leading IT Executive Recruiter for 20 years, achieving $14 million in...

What are the parts of your job you’re best at?  What are the things you don’t enjoy or aren’t very good at?  How much of your time and focus is devoted to just those few things you’re best at, versus all the other tasks that eat into your day? This self-awareness of one’s strengths and limitations, together with a conscious decision to specialize with laser focus, have been key to the success of s...

“This is a unique opportunity. We have a choice here. We can either sit back and wait for this whole thing to blow over. Or we can go on the offensive.  We can have the mindset that there are companies that are going to be hiring, despite the pandemic, and we’re going to find them.” Meet George Atuahene, Founder and Managing Director of the Kofi Group.  George’s parents wanted him to study medicin...

When I ask recruiting and search firm owners, “what is your Vision for your business?” the answer is often a variation on the following theme. They tell me, “Mark, I don’t want to build a large firm with hundreds of employees and huge overheads.  I’d much rather have a small, high-performing team so we can generate 7-figures while keeping overheads low and staff management issues to a minimum.”  ...

Recruitment is a tough job. High pressure and long hours are the norm, combined with extreme emotional highs and lows.  It’s no wonder that burnout has always been a big problem in our industry.  Now the issue is compounded by the coronavirus pandemic, which has brought increased anxiety and feelings of uncertainty.  How do you build a high-performing team while taking care of your employees’ ment...