The Resilient Recruiter

The most successful recruiters and recruitment business owners are constantly learning and evolving. While average performers often think they know it all, the top 10% are never satisfied in their quest for continuous improvement. Someone who has reinvented himself multiple times over his 30-year recruitment career is my special guest, Fernando Espinosa.  I hope you enjoy this interview as much as...

Sales is the lifeblood of every business. It’s almost impossible to scale your recruitment company without a consistent flow of new business. Yet many recruitment agencies are lacking an effective and repeatable sales process.   My next guest, Alex Elliott, has designed an effective client acquisition system that yields consistent, predictable results. It enables him and his team to focus their ef...

Is it possible to exit a small, boutique search practice where the owner is one of the primary billers? My special guest, Stephan Aschenbrenner, has found a way of making it possible.    Stephan is the CEO of EO Executives, a franchise network with offices throughout Europe. In 2011, he joined EO executives to build out their German territory. And after four years, they became one of Germany's top...

Billing $6M+ in 2022 is no small feat, and my special guest, Norman Volsky revealed how his team of 10 was able to achieve a phenomenal per-desk average. Norman shared valuable insights on building your team and attracting high-potential recruiters, using an internship program to establish a talent pipeline, and how to approach the challenging role of a billing manager.   Norman is a managing part...

Top billers typically have one or more “cornerstone clients.”    These key accounts are ones you can build your business on because they use you exclusively and give you lots of repeat business. My special guest, Katherine Jerald, is someone who’s mastered the art of client development.    Katherine is the founder of Elray Search, a firm that is committed to solving the biggest talent needs of mid...

Starting a recruitment agency is hard. Being a great recruiter is no guarantee you’ll be a successful business owner. There are thousands of competent, hard working recruiters who struggle when they go out on their own.   That’s why my next guest, Mike Williams, is so remarkable. In his first 12 months, he billed $900,000. He’s now up to $1,200,000 since he started the business 15 months ago.    M...

What are the factors that drive short-term results while ensuring the long term success of your recruitment business?   If you have ambitions to grow your recruitment agency, you’ll enjoy my conversation with Kevin Burch the CEO and co-founder of Questpro Consultants. Since they opened in 1996, Questpro has grown to a team of 35 people providing four service offerings: temp, retained/contingency,...

Imagine growing your revenue by €100,000,000 in less than 3 years! How is this possible? In this interview, my special guest Gerard Koolen explains how he and his business partners at Lugera were able to increase revenue from €130M in 2020 to €234M by 2022. You’ll discover the critical success factors, which include: leveraging technology - and even developing their own software, constant improvem...

Meaningful relationships are foundational to success in recruitment. The challenge is that building a network and earning trust takes time. For many recruiters, it can take years to become established in their market niche.    What if there was a way to speed up this process and achieve faster results?    My special guest, Steven Li, has discovered a way to build relationships at scale by organizi...

What are the biggest trends that affect the future of agency recruitment? Are you positioned for success in the rapidly evolving world of work?    With advances in Open AI and the growing popularity of remote work and the gig economy, the recruitment industry is set for a major transformation in the next 5-10 years. This shift might cause fear and uncertainty among recruiters, however if you’re aw...

Do you want to attract new clients and grow your recruitment practice, regardless of market conditions?    In this episode, you’ll hear me being interviewed by Tom Burkinshaw, the Group Marketing Director at Recruitment Entrepreneur, the world’s leading investor in recruitment start-ups and scale-ups. James Caan’s team invited me to London to record an in-person interview for The Recruitment Entre...

When you run your own business, you wear many hats and need to be competent across a number of areas. But which skills make the biggest difference to your success?   In this episode, my special guest Chris Dinaso and I discuss the top 4 skills that are absolutely fundamental to building a profitable recruitment business. We also delve into Chris’s philosophy of “always doing the right thing” which...

In this episode, we uncover the keys to G&E Partners' rapid growth from $1 million to $6 million in just 2.5 years. Discover the business development strategies, hiring processes, tools, and technology that fueled this spectacular success.   My guest, Callum Collins, joined G&E Partners straight after university as a graduate trainee and within 3 years he had progressed to Managing Director. Durin...

We all have the same number of hours in a day. How do top recruiters, like Kimberley Laipple, bill five times more than average performers in the same amount of time?   For Kim’s entire career, she’s sought out ways to increase her income without working longer hours. Her focus on productivity has paid off. Last year, Kim personally billed over $1,400,000 while managing a team of 28 recruiters.   ...

Do you wish you had more influence with your clients and candidates?    The last time Michael Goldman joined our podcast, he shared the secrets of enjoying a long-term career in recruiting. In this interview, he reveals how we as recruiters and business owners can create more value and enjoy greater influence with our clients and candidates.   Michael started his recruiting career in 1980 and foun...

What does it take to level up your billings from six figures per year to seven figures?    To answer this question, I asked my friend Andrea Colabella of the Cardea Group, to share her journey and the key changes she made to increase her billings from $550-750k per year to over $1.2m.   Andrea shared relatable insights and learnings from running a successful search firm including both her wins and...

Running a desk while growing and managing a team can be extremely challenging. Someone who has managed to pull it off is Allan Fisher, founder of Premier Financial Search.    Allan’s got an amazing track record of personally billing over a million dollars for ten years straight. Then during Covid, Allan decided to turn a threat into an opportunity and grow his practice from a small, office-based t...

If you’re building a recruitment business, you might want to consider replacing the 360 degree “full desk” model with a 120-120-120 model.   In this fascinating interview, Pree Sarkar shares why he believes it’s easier to scale a recruitment business with a 120 degree model. You’ll hear how it gives his firm a competitive advantage in the market. Plus, Pree reveals their entire end-to-end recruitm...

Is fear and self-doubt preventing you from building your personal brand and growing your recruitment business?   In this episode, you’ll discover how my guest Mike O’Riordan overcomes his tendency to be a perfectionist, pushes outside his comfort zone and gets things done.  Mike is the founder of Blackwater Search & Advisory, a global executive search and advisory firm focused on the ETF and Digit...

In the 7th installment of our Recruiter Mistakes series, we delve into the benefits of specializing in a niche market and how it can lead to shorter recruitment cycles, clearer messaging, and increased profits.     By focusing on a specific niche, you can tailor your message, build a strong candidate pool, and become the go-to expert in your field. However, choosing a niche can be challenging. Som...

No one is immune from challenging economic downturns and it is certainly the case for my special guest, Michael Pietrack. Making his second appearance on the show, Michael humbly shares his experience of dealing with a severe slump in his market.   Michael’s shares his strategy for surviving tough times and emerging as a market leader. In this inspiring interview, Michael explains how he navigated...

Recruiters might need to work a little harder to achieve the same revenue as last year.   “It is not gloom and doom but it is also bringing a little dose of reality that we may need to get our business development hats on, and we may have to ramp up our energy and activity levels a little bit more to generate the same revenues or more.”   These are the words of my special guest, Jeremy Sisemore, w...

Beyond the Transaction: How to Achieve Growth in an Uncertain Economy The key factor that ensures successful recruitment business growth while navigating an uncertain economic climate is having sticky client relationships.  My special guest, Greg Hollis, newly appointed Group CEO of Recruitment Entrepreneur, shares how focusing on the 3 Cs (customer, candidate, consultants)  and developing a stron...

Imagine starting your own recruitment agency with no recruiting experience and growing it to almost a million dollars in the first year. Sounds unbelievable, right?  Yet that’s exactly what my special guest, Ben Cross, has accomplished in his first year in recruitment. In this interview, we break down exactly how he achieved those remarkable results. Ben is the founder and CEO of GLOMO based in Da...

If you’ve ever tried to grow a recruitment firm, you understand the crazy balancing act of being an effective billing manager. It’s extremely challenging to hire, train and manage a team while at the same time maintaining your personal production.   That’s why I’m especially excited to share this interview with Darwin Shurig.    In addition to building a team of 11 people, Darwin is personally res...