No AI, No CRM — $120K in 6 Weeks on a Spreadsheet

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 recruitment platform built to eliminate admin. The resume never tells the full story, and Atlas captures every candidate conversation automatically so nothing gets buried in your notes. With MagicSearch you can ask things like "who mentioned they're open to relocating next year?" and pull the answer from your entire database instantly. Atlas customers have reported over 40% EBITDA growth and over 80% increase in monthly billings after adopting the platform. Get started and unlock your exclusive listener offer at recruitwithatlas.com. Lauren spent nearly a decade recruiting in healthcare and then accounting and finance before walking away from a comfortable, high-billing seat to start Manta Search. In this episode she's honest about the part nobody posts about: the fear of failing, the costs people underestimate, and the reality that you become marketing, payroll, admin, and AR the day you go out on your own. Her advice is to have the lawyer and accountant in place before you jump — then jump anyway. As she puts it, you build the parachute on the way down. The engine behind the $120K is less glamorous than the number suggests, and that's the point. Lauren treats business development as the circle of life for a desk — two to three hours every single day, calendar blocked, phone off, hitting 50 companies a block through calls, texts, voice notes, and LinkedIn. She walks Benjamin through her actual MPC scripts, why she leads with a candidate instead of begging for a job order, and why texting CFOs outperforms email every time. Spoiler: they text back, because they're people on their phones just like the rest of us. Then there's mushrooming — Lauren's term for turning one filled role into an entire account. She breaks down precisely how she asks a hiring manager for the introduction into legal, engineering, or IT without sounding opportunistic, when to make the ask, and how she follows up on open roles without ever becoming a resume pusher. This is the relationship game that replaced the transactional, burnout-driven headhunter mentality she ran during the pandemic gold rush, and the shift to a white-glove approach — including learning to say no to the wrong searches — is what made the model durable. And on the question every recruiter is wrestling with: Lauren thinks AI isn't good enough to replace the human part yet, and that leaning on it too early is quietly making recruiters lazy. She uses it where it helps on the back end, but the relationships, the follow-up, and the discipline are still hers. If you've been waiting for the perfect moment to go all in, this is the episode. Draw the line in the sand and start your six weeks now — because 2026 is your year. Connect with Lauren Lehman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurentaylorlehman/ 🎓 Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 🤖 AI Recruiting Summit 2026: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ 📬 Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe 🚀 Powered by Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com

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 exactly why 99% of recruiters fail at BD and what the 1% are doing differently going into 2026. Scott Love is one of the most recognized names in the recruiting industry. He runs partner-level legal recruiting for global law firms, hosts The Rainmaking Podcast (a top 2% show globally with 300+ episodes), serves as editor-in-chief of The Rainmaking Magazine, and has coached 4,500 recruiting firms across 36 countries. He's a Naval Academy graduate, a former card-counting blackjack player mentored by alumni of the MIT blackjack team, and one of the sharpest strategic minds in the search business. In this conversation, Scott shares why most recruiters never escape transactional BD, the three traits that define the top 1%, why niching down is non-negotiable, and how to build thought leadership that pulls clients toward you instead of chasing them. He explains why "they need you more than you need them" is the posture shift behind every seven-figure desk, when to stop thanking your clients, how game theory applies to deal management and emotional recovery, and what every recruiter should do in the first hour of the day. This episode is brought to you by Atlas. Atlas is the AI-first recruitment platform built for agency recruiters and search firms who want to source faster, manage pipeline smarter, and bill more without adding headcount. If you're stitching together five tools to run your desk, Atlas was built for you. Try it free at https://recruitwithatlas.com This episode is also brought to you by Millee. Millee analyzes every detail of your live deals and builds the exact strategy you need — powered by a curated knowledge base from elite recruiters. It's encoded intuition, the judgment and gut feel of big billers translated into real-time guidance for every single process. Users save an hour a day on email alone. Try Millee free for 30 days at https://millee.ai Scott also gets into the trends he's tracking for 2026, including his prediction that LinkedIn will lose its grip as the dominant sourcing channel within two years, the dirty-secret play that built his thought leadership in legal, and the journaling discipline he's used since 2017 to track his greatest achievements, his mistakes, and the patterns underneath both. If you want to bill more in 2026, this is the conversation. 🔗 Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 🎟️ AI Recruiting Summit 2026: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ 📬 Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe ⚡ Sponsor — Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com 🎯 Sponsor — Millee (30-day free trial): https://millee.ai 🎙️ The Rainmaking Podcast: https://therainmakingpodcast.com 🔗 Connect with Scott on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scotttlove/ YouTube: https://youtu.be/GyrM_muEqPM

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 the seat. The life came from a decision he made fifteen years ago to reverse-engineer everything and to build a brand, not a search firm.  This conversation is the playbook. Tony walks through the brick wall he hit in year one, the consultants who saved his business, and why he chose an outdoor sporting goods niche his mentors told him was too small. He explains why he switched from contingent to retained in year three, why he refuses contingent work today even with the perfect candidate already in his inbox, and why owning the client relationship is the non-negotiable that separates high-performance firms from everyone else. Then he breaks down the 2024 pivot that added over six figures to his revenue. When his niche got hit, he called every past client to ask how he could improve, and got certified in DISC and Predictive Index. He built behavioral assessments into his proposals with an extended warranty, priced them higher than felt comfortable, and turned them into a recurring revenue line. His framing for clients: two-thirds of hires industry-wide are bad hires, and the assessment moves the customer from a .333 batting average to .500. MILLEE — The judgment that separates big billers the reframe that regains control of a stalling process, the move when a candidate goes quiet — usually takes years on the desk. Millee analyzes every live deal and builds the exact strategy you need, powered by a curated knowledge base from elite recruiters. It's encoded intuition. Before every call you get sharp contextual preparation. In your inbox, high-caliber emails are already drafted. Users save an hour a day on email alone. Try Millee free for 30 days: https://www.millee.ai/ ATLAS — The resume never tells the full story. Candidates share what really matters in conversations: motivations, salary expectations, plans to relocate. Most of that ends up buried in notes. Atlas captures every conversation automatically and turns it into something you can use. With MagicSearch, you can ask "who talked about wanting a four-day week" or "who's open to relocating next year" and pull answers from your entire database instantly. Atlas customers report over 40% EBITDA growth and over 80% increase in monthly billings after adopting the platform. Unlock your exclusive listener offer: https://recruitwithatlas.com  What You'll Learn: Why Tony refuses contingent work, even when the perfect candidate is already in his inboxThe brick wall every new search firm owner hits in year one and the consultants who break itHow he chose a "too small" niche and built a brand recruiters confuse for a sporting goods companyThe 2024 pivot that added six figures: DISC, Predictive Index, and extended warranties built into the proposalWhy two-thirds of hires industry-wide are bad and how to get your client to bat .500Tony's daily operating system: 10am-3:30pm prime selling time, sauna, cold plunge, algorithm starvationThe two books behind the business: Million Dollar Consulting and The Four AgreementsWhy "freedom requires discipline" is the principle every search firm owner has to internalize first   Connect with Tony O'Neill on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/outdoorindustryrecruiter/ 🎯 Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 🚀 Register for the AI Recruiting Summit 2026: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ 📬 Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe ▶️ Watch the full episode on YouTube:

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 actually search. With MagicSearch you can ask Atlas "who talked about relocating?" or "who mentioned a four-day week?" and it pulls the answers instantly across your entire database. Atlas also makes BD easier with opportunity tracking and client relationship tools powered by generative AI, plus smart dashboards that give you full pipeline visibility across the business. Atlas customers report 40%+ EBITDA growth and 80%+ increases in monthly billings after adoption. It's built for agencies that want to grow without adding more manual work. https://recruitwithatlas.com April 24, 2020. Catiana Ibarra Aponte was handing layoff letters to her own team when her own letter came. Her director's parting line: "If we had more recruiting, you'd still be here." She heard what she'd been hearing her whole life. Not good enough. This wasn't her first no. Her father, a second-generation pharmacy owner, told her she couldn't take over the family business — she was a girl, she'd have other roles. Her master's professor told the class on day one they weren't degree material. Now her employer was saying the same thing during a global pandemic. She cried for four hours. Then she built a plan. In this episode of The Elite Recruiter Podcast, Catiana — now CEO and Brand Manager of PeopleLift, an HR staffing and AI consulting firm serving clients across Puerto Rico, Latin America, and the United States — walks Benjamin Mena through one of the most resilient career arcs in recruiting. Surviving Hurricane Maria with six months of no electricity while still trying to fill jobs. Bouncing through four contract roles in two years. Driving alone to a hotel during COVID lockdown for a first interview she suspected might be a kidnapping. Getting publicly attacked in a company-wide Slack channel by a teammate who compared her to a dog chasing a bone. Building the trust with clients that eventually moved her from talent acquisition manager to CEO. This is an episode for any agency recruiter, executive search professional, or staffing firm owner who's ever wondered whether they have what it takes to become an operator, a partner, or a CEO. It's also for any recruiter who's been told no — by a client, a candidate, a boss, a family member — and needs to hear from someone who turned every one of those nos into the next chapter. What you'll learn: Why being told "no" is the single most useful career fuel for an agency recruiterHow Catiana rebuilt her career across four contract roles before landing the CEO seatThe after-5pm work that took her from TA manager to operator to CEOHow to spot top billers who can become leaders — and which top billers should stay individual contributorsThe change-management playbook she used to push new processes through resistant teamsWhy one-service staffing firms are at risk and how PeopleLift expanded into fractional HR and AI consultingThe mindset shift that transformed her client retention and BD resultsWhat recruiters who dream of becoming operators or partners need to start doing tomorrow   🎯 Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 🚀 AI Recruiting Summit 2026: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ 📩 Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe 🤝 Connect with Catiana on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/catiana-i-ibarra-aponte-91656642/ ▶️ Watch on YouTube: 

$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 platform built for agencies that want to scale without adding manual work. Atlas captures every candidate conversation automatically across calls, emails, and interviews, then turns it into searchable intelligence. With MagicSearch you can ask Atlas in plain English — "Who mentioned they're open to relocating?" or "Who wants a four-day week?" — and pull answers across your entire database instantly. Atlas customers report 40% EBITDA growth and 80% increases in monthly billings. Unlock your exclusive listener offer at https://recruitwithatlas.com This episode is also sponsored by Millee — try Millee free for 30 days. Millee analyzes every detail of your live deals and builds the exact strategy you need in real time, powered by a curated knowledge base from elite recruiters. It's encoded intuition — the judgment and gut feel of big billers translated into real-time guidance for every process. Sharp prep before every call. High-caliber emails already drafted in your inbox. Users save an hour a day on email alone. Start your 30-day free trial at https://www.millee.ai/ Pin Discount Code and Link: https://www.pin.com/book-a-demo?via=recruiter  Code: JRS02DRI Now back to Nick. He grew up inside the business. His mom Jennifer was a Pinnacle Society member for years, one of the most respected pharma recruiters in the country. She drilled the old-school fundamentals into him: phone above everything, persistence past the point most quit, availability that never sleeps. When Nick took over this January, he didn't throw any of it out. He fused it to AI and rebuilt the desk from the ground up. Nick walks through every layer of the build. The Claude agent that drafts client-ready job descriptions in twenty minutes. The virtual assistant on Slack handling every interview thread so nothing slips. The network scoring system rating every relationship one to ten — highest score gets the call. The pricing move that landed him a no-end-date $20,000-a-month retainer. The text message detail that lifted response rates by 40% — switching from a green RingCentral bubble to a blue iMessage bubble, same exact message. Benjamin pushes him on the controversial calls every recruiter is wrestling with. Why cold calling is finished. Why pure sourcers are about to disappear. Why the gap between recruiters who adopt AI and those who don't will widen so violently that ten-person agencies will hit ten million in revenue. The three traits that project a new recruiter ahead of everyone else. And the one business development principle Nick's mom drilled into him that most modern recruiters skip to their own detriment. If you're an agency recruiter, executive search consultant, staffing firm owner, or solo recruiter trying to figure out what an AI-powered recruiting desk needs to look like in 2026, this is the episode to study. 🎯 Connect with Nick Poloni on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickpoloni/ 🎬 Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/XAS4vpTON_E 🤖 Atlas — AI-first recruitment platform: https://recruitwithatlas.com ⚡ Millee — free 30-day trial: https://www.millee.ai/  Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 🎤 AI Recruiting Summit 2026: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ 📩 Newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

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 powered by 15 million tokens of what he believes to be the highest-quality data in recruiting. He's also co-founder of Generate, the "business in a box" infrastructure play built for the next generation of agency recruiters. Before any of that, he and his business partner Charlie Rawlings — friends since age 12 — built Inventure into a $4M renewable energy search firm out of Los Angeles. Then they walked away from the desk to build the thing they thought the industry was missing. In this conversation, Seb makes the case most recruiters don't want to hear: the ones betting on AI to save their careers are actually accelerating their own irrelevance. He explains why the contingency hit ratio sits stubbornly at 25%, why "more emails faster" is the wrong problem to solve, and why reputations across the industry are about to be won and lost at speeds nobody's prepared for. He breaks down the math behind a million-dollar desk that almost nobody talks about — the first $400K happens between 8:30 and 5:30, and the remaining $600K happens between 5:30 and 10pm, for months on end. He shares why "only the paranoid survive" is the operating principle of every elite biller he knows, even in their best quarters. And he reveals the mentor advice from Joel Slanning that took Inventure from $1M to $4M with healthy margins. You'll also get an inside look at Millee itself — how it sits inside your inbox like a $3M biller looking over your shoulder, how its health-score dashboard exposes the deals you think are alive but aren't, and why it's just as powerful for entry-level recruiters as it is for top performers. Plus Seb's read on the bifurcation coming for the industry: the recruiters who'll use AI to triple their output, and the ones who'll quietly fall behind. The AI Recruiting Summit returns in July, and Seb is one of the featured speakers. If 2026 is going to be your year, this is the room. Details and registration: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ 🎁 Try Millee free for 30 days: https://www.millee.ai/ 🔗 Connect with Seb on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seb-sharpe-01b89840/ 🚀 Learn about Generate: https://wearegenerate.com/🎯 🎤 AI Recruiting Summit, July 2026: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ 📺 Watch on YouTube: 👥 Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community

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 sides of it. Now Head of Growth at Ember Hiring, an AI SaaS platform built for healthcare staffing, Amanda works with nearly 20 agencies across the industry. What she's seeing inside those firms is the most direct AI warning Benjamin has put on the show. A year ago, the line in AI engineering circles was that staffing agencies who didn't adopt AI would be out of business in five years. The current timeline she's hearing? Eighteen months. That's the operational reality being traded between agency operators while consolidation accelerates underneath them. One of her clients merged five agencies into one then acquired four more. She predicts the 400 to 500 active travel nursing agencies operating today will collapse to roughly fifty within ten years. The conversation moves through what actually scaled the firm in year three, what habits from hyper-growth quietly became liabilities once the market tightened, and the leadership decisions that kept the company alive when bill rates collapsed. Amanda is candid about cutting salaries, choosing not to over-hire during the boom, and the moment she realized her former mentor's "don't throw people at the problem" advice had saved the company. She also walks through what the recruiter desk needs to look like over the next eighteen months: AI-funneled pre-qualified leads in one bucket, an active book of business in another, submitted candidates in the third — with the recruiter's job becoming pure relationship work and oversight of AI agents handling the rest. She explains why managing 40 to 50 candidates is no longer enough, and why 100-plus is the new floor. Amanda drops a stat that should change how every healthcare recruiter thinks about flow: less than ten percent of candidates who apply actually get the role they applied for, because the job is filled before the submission packet reaches the client. Speed is preparation. Consistency beats charisma. The recruiters who treat themselves like entrepreneurs are the ones who'll still be standing in five years. If you run an agency, lead a team, or bill a desk in any vertical of recruiting, this is the episode to forward to anyone on your team who still thinks AI is optional. This episode of The Elite Recruiter Podcast is brought to you by Atlas, the AI-first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin and turn every candidate conversation into pipeline. Atlas captures every conversation automatically, then lets you query your entire database with MagicSearch — ask "who mentioned wanting a four-day week" or "who's open to relocating next year" and get answers instantly. No keyword guessing. No digging through old notes. Atlas customers report over 40% EBITDA growth and over 80% increase in monthly billings after rollout. Unlock your exclusive listener offer at https://recruitwithatlas.com 🎧 Connect with Amanda Hendrix on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amandahendrix/ 🎟️ The AI Recruiting Summit 2026 is now open — the event built for recruiters operating at the front edge of where this industry is heading. Register here: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ 🚀 Join the Elite Recruiter Community for $49/month — biweekly roundtables, the Billers Club, full replays from every past summit, and a tight crew of recruiters serious about growth. Cancel anytime: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community

🚀 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 this year. Every live session is free. This is the recruiter event of the year and it starts today, April 27. Register here: https://this-is-your-year-recruiter-summit.heysummit.com/  Most recruiters never see the full collapse of someone's first dream before they get to their second. Luke Marquardt did. He was 6'9", 320 pounds, a Hall of Fame offensive line coach pouring into him, NFL scouts walking his college sideline, his name on the Senior Bowl list before his senior year — and then he broke his foot. Missed the entire season. Got invited to the NFL Combine anyway. Signed undrafted with the 49ers. Broke his foot again at minicamp. Got released. Two years of surgeries, a fused foot, four-month stints with the Jets and Lions, four preseason games played in shooting pain, and a final-round cut. Then a brutal Seahawks workout sent him to the ER flying home from Seattle. Type 1 diabetes diagnosis. Insulin pump for life. Final nail in the coffin.  What happens after the dream you've poured a decade into ends in a hospital bed? For Luke, it was an offer to start hourly at a small recruiting firm in commercial construction. Around 40 grand his first year. Then he kept going. Two-hundred-something in year two. Three to four hundred in years four and five. A six-hundred-thousand dollar year during COVID off the back of one hydrogen fueling startup client. And last year, after making the jump to a new firm with no clients carried over, he billed over $700K on a fully self-built desk and changed 22 people's lives doing it. This conversation walks the full arc — the broken feet, the ego death after being released, the identity rebuild, and the specific recruiting habits that took him from a $300K biller to a $700K biller. Benjamin pushes Luke on what actually separates the desks at that level: the volume of conversations, the militant focus on revenue-producing activities, the front-end vetting that saves you from wasting weeks on the wrong searches, and the willingness to flip a candidate call into a client by asking the one right question. Luke breaks down how a single ask on a project executive call turned into a $300M general contractor relationship that's now one of his biggest accounts. This episode is brought to you by Atlas — the AI-first recruitment platform rebuilding how agencies operate. Atlas captures every candidate conversation automatically, the motivations and comp expectations and relocation plans that normally die in scattered notes, and turns it into a searchable database you can actually use. With MagicSearch, you ask questions in plain English — who talked about wanting a four-day week, who's open to relocating next year, who mentioned hating their boss — and Atlas pulls answers across your entire database in seconds. No keyword guessing. No digging. Claim your exclusive Elite Recruiter listener offer at https://recruitwithatlas.com 🔗 Connect with Luke Marquardt LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukemarquardt/ 🤝 Join The Elite Recruiter Community The number one growth environment for agency recruiters. Unlimited access to AI Recruiting Summit replays, Finish The Year Strong replays, biweekly roundtables on sourcing, BD, and mindset, plus the Billers Club for accountability and splits. $49/month, cancel anytime. Join here: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community YouTube: https://youtu.be/i3FywSiAh1g

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-recruiter-summit.heysummit.com/ Most recruiting agency owners will never have an exit like Diane's. Not because they aren't good at the work — because they built the wrong kind of business. Only 27% of recruiting agencies have predictable monthly recurring revenue. 63% deal with cash flow interruptions every year. And the agency owners grinding pure direct hire — even the influencers, even the people doing seven figures — are quietly admitting behind closed doors that they don't have a sellable asset. Diane talks to recruiters in their 60s and 70s every week who've finally realized it. They built a job. They never built an equity story. In this episode, Diane breaks down the recurring revenue model that flipped her business from a roller coaster of direct hire goose eggs into a stable, sellable, $28M company. She covers why temp staffing is something your clients legally cannot do for themselves (which is why it's so much stickier than retained or contingent), how to use an EOR to strip the operational headache out of running it, the anchor client strategy that kept her billing through 2008 even when her largest client Countrywide collapsed into the financial crisis, the easiest BD question to add to every existing client conversation to surface hidden contract revenue, and why the US temp staffing market is $218 billion — meaning you only need a tiny slice to change your business. She also addresses the question every direct-hire recruiter secretly has: can you build recurring revenue without going full staffing? Yes. She walks through the RPO and per-role retainer models that get you partway there. If your agency resets to zero every January, this episode is the answer. The model exists. Diane built it. She sold it. And she's coming back to teach more of it at the next summit. This episode is brought to you by Atlas — the AI-first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin. Atlas captures every candidate conversation automatically and turns it into insight you can actually use. With MagicSearch, you can ask your entire database questions like "who mentioned they're open to relocating next year" and get answers instantly. Atlas customers have reported 40%+ EBITDA growth and 80%+ increases in monthly billings. Get your exclusive listener offer at https://recruitwithatlas.com 🚀 This Is Your Year — Recruiter Summit 2026 (Diane is speaking again — don't miss it) https://this-is-your-year-recruiter-summit.heysummit.com/ 💼 Join the Elite Recruiter Community — summit replays, biweekly roundtables, Billers Club, split space — $49/month, cancel anytime https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 📬 Subscribe to the newsletter → https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe 📺 YouTube → 🔗 Follow Diane Prince on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/dianeprincejohnston/ 🌐 Benjamin Mena → http://www.selectsourcesolutions.com/ 🔗 Benjamin on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminmena/ 📸 Benjamin on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/benlmena/

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 $18.5 billion. His second, Hinge Health, just IPO'd for $3 billion. He placed three dozen people at Hinge alone. And somewhere along the way, he realized the smartest investors in the room already trusted him more than any VC — because he knew every founder, every pricing model, every hiring trend before they did. So he stopped just taking fees. He started taking equity. 🚀 This Is Your Year Recruiter Summit — April 27th through May 4th Free live sessions with the industry's best, including Mike Williams, Brianna Rooney, and Mark Whitby. The event you don't want to miss heading into Q2. Register free: https://this-is-your-year-recruiter-summit.heysummit.com/ This episode is the blueprint for how Norm did it — and how you can do the same thing in your niche. He walks through meeting the Hinge Health founders when they were 15 people in a garage, and the exact conversation that turned a recruiting client into an equity stake. He explains why this model only works in B2B software. He breaks down how he raised $850K from 80+ industry insiders for a single SPV, bought 4.7% of an $18M company, and grew that investor list into 500+ potential LPs across the benefits world. The lesson underneath all of it is universal: niche domination unlocks things fees alone never will. Norm didn't stumble into venture capital. He earned the right to be asked — by being the most knowledgeable, most helpful, most persistent recruiter in his space for a decade before anyone saw the investment firm coming. You'll also hear how he scaled his team to $6M in billings with roughly 10 people, why building an ops function was his biggest unlock, and the word-choice mistake he caught his younger recruiters making that sounds unprofessional to every hiring manager on the call. What you'll learn: How to dominate a niche so thoroughly your clients become your investorsThe exact pitch that turns a recruiting engagement into an equity stakeWhy B2B software is the only space this playbook works inHow Norm raised $850K from 80+ investors for a single dealWhy hiring an ops function was the unlock that doubled his ceilingThe pattern recognition that separates great investors from lucky onesHow to build 500+ high-trust investor relationships starting from zero Sponsored by Atlas Atlas is the AI-first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin. It captures every candidate conversation automatically, surfaces insights through natural language search, and gives you a clear view of your entire pipeline. Atlas customers have reported 40%+ EBITDA growth and 80%+ increase in monthly billings. Get your exclusive listener offer: https://recruitwithatlas.com 🔗 Links & Resources 💼 Join the Elite Recruiter Community — biweekly roundtables, Billers Club, split space, full summit replays. $49/month, cancel anytime. https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 🔗 Connect with Norm Volsky on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/normanvolsky/ 🎙️ Norm's podcast — Digital Health Heavyweights: https://open.spotify.com/show/3JeFFZqvVC1lmVXCvv3D7y?si=aa28a49e63ba413f 📬 Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe 📺 YouTube: https://youtu.be/yn-7_7cQsZs 🌐 Benjamin Mena: http://www.selectsourcesolutions.com/ 🔗 Benjamin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminmena/ 📸 Benjamin on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/benlmena/