Amplifying Recruitment - Learn, Grow, Lead

Every recruitment business owner who's ever pulled a freelance role in a new country has done the same thing, jumped straight to the margin calculator and started dreaming. Very few have stopped to ask whether they can actually get the money in and out.In this episode, Jamie Burrows sits down with Carl Chinnapen, co-founder of EWI Global Talent Solutions, to break down the four pillars behind building an international freelance recruitment business. Carl has spent 25 years in recruitment and runs EWI's international freelance operation mobilising staff to over 100 countries across energy, infrastructure, and mission-critical sectors. EWI sits at around 80 people globally, part of the Engage Group, and Carl's built the playbook for how it actually works at scale.He starts with cash, the thing most firms get wrong first. Clients paying in 90 to 150 days, FX exposure eating your margin, banking restrictions you didn't know existed. He's watched recruitment businesses choke because they put out 100 contractors without thinking about who's going to pay them and when. From there he gets into the business plan staying ruthlessly focused on specific clients and markets, hiring for language and local market fit, co-designing business rules with the team rather than dictating them, and keeping recruiters in their lane so they're selling, not chasing purchase orders in Argentina. He talks about EWI's "win, learn, change" mantra and why you can't let a failing desk run for months when the cash exposure is this real. And he makes the case for finding a mentor the industry's shifted, senior operators are more open than ever, and tapping into that network before you enter a new market will save you from mistakes you didn't know were coming.The upside is where it gets interesting. Freelance turnover makes clients stickier, opens the door to cross-selling perm and new locations, and makes your business worth significantly more than a pure-play perm operation where the consultant leaves and the fees leave with them.If international freelance is on your agenda, this is the episode that tells you what most people skip. Follow Amplifying Recruitment wherever you get your podcasts.

Most recruitment businesses are still using the free version of ChatGPT to write job ads and calling it an AI strategy. Meanwhile, their candidates are running automated tools overnight to fire off a thousand applications before breakfast. That gap between what recruiters think AI is and what it's already doing to their market is where the real disruption is happening.In this episode, Jamie Burrows sits down with Tim Bennett, founder of Powerhouse Digital, an AI training and chatbot business that's been working with recruitment firms including parts of the S3 ecosystem to raise AI literacy from board level down. Tim also runs a digital marketing agency that's been operating for over fifteen years, and he's spent the last year deep inside the recruitment industry helping businesses understand what's actually changing and what to do about it.Tim lays out three shifts he sees reshaping recruitment over the next twelve months. The first is the move from transactional recruiter to strategic advisor, AI can now handle the repetitive, process-heavy work, which means the recruiter's value has to come from somewhere else. The second is the hiring funnel getting squeezed from both sides candidates automating applications at scale on one end, recruiters drowning in volume without the workflows to manage it on the other. And the third is the AI literacy gap itself, which Tim sees as the biggest risk of all. Most firms don't have an AI policy, most teams haven't been trained beyond surface-level prompting, and the businesses that close that gap first will pull ahead fast.He walks through the practical side too. His CRAFT prompting framework Context, Role, Action and Attributes, Facts and Figures, Target Outcome is a simple model that dramatically improves output quality from any LLM. He talks about why recruiters should be using paid tools rather than free tiers, how to set up projects and prompt libraries inside platforms like Copilot 365, and why tools like Notebook LM and Perplexity are better starting points than most people realise for market mapping and research. He also flags the risks that nobody's talking about shadow AI inside businesses, bias in CV screening, and the fact that there's been no test case yet under the EU AI Act to force recruitment firms into action on governance.The message is clear: AI isn't a bubble, the investment behind it is too large for that. The firms that treat it as a shiny distraction will get left behind. The ones that build literacy, put policy in place, and start using structured prompts as a daily habit will compound that advantage quickly. Tim suggests starting with just thirty minutes a day across a ten-person team over twelve months, that adds up to something enormous.If AI adoption is on your agenda but you're not sure where to start, this episode gives you the framework. Follow Amplifying Recruitment wherever you get your podcasts.

Scott Ellam didn't fall into recruitment. He chose it, deliberately, after watching recruitment company owners spend money in the bars he worked at during university in Leeds. By 24, he'd started Spencer Riley. By 25, he'd tracked down a business owner through their Portuguese holiday villa, got invited onto a yacht called "Loose Change," and was offered a role with a company plane.But the real story starts in 2020. After four years studying the history of money from Bretton Woods to the Nixon shock to the slow erosion of purchasing power Scott switched his company's balance sheet to Bitcoin. He bought through a 75% drawdown from $61,000 to $16,000, accumulated consistently, and by December 2025 had taken the business public on the Aquis Exchange with 52 Bitcoin on the balance sheet, a $7 million market cap, and a 120% return on holdings.The model solves two problems Scott sees across executive recruitment. First, high-performing consultants earn big commissions but save nothing for the long term inflation eats the cash before it compounds. XCE offers performance-based share options in a publicly listed company where 50% of share value tracks Bitcoin exposure. Second, recruitment business owners have no clean exit. Private equity rarely touches perm exec search, competitors don't buy competitors, and the government just pulled the tax advantages on Employee Ownership Trusts. XCE offers an acquisition vehicle where owners keep their brand, their team, and their ethos but get access to capital markets and long-term equity in a growing group.Scott also breaks down Bitcoin in plain terms: why it's different from crypto, why mathematical scarcity matters, why confiscation resistance is more important than most people realise, and why he believes the 200-week moving average tells you everything you need to know about where the asset is heading.Whether you're a recruiter thinking about long-term wealth, a business owner quietly wondering what your exit looks like, or just someone who's heard about Bitcoin but never understood the actual thesis this one's worth your time.

Most recruitment business owners know they should be creating content. Very few actually do it and even fewer stick with it long enough to see results. In this episode, Jamie sits down with Will Colthup, videographer and content consultant who works almost exclusively with recruitment businesses, to cut through the noise on what it actually takes to build a content presence that wins you clients.Will breaks down the four real barriers that hold recruitment leaders back time, creativity, production skills, and fear of the camera and explains why the first three are largely excuses. The real issue is mindset: content is a long-term investment, and in an industry wired for instant gratification, that's a genuinely hard sell.The conversation gets into the practical detail of where to start. Will's view is that most recruiters are already sitting on a goldmine of content candidate stories, client wins, sector commentary they just haven't been shown how to extract and frame it. You don't need to be the industry expert. You can be the aggregator, the commentator, the person who shows up every Friday and tells their network what's happening. That consistency is what builds trust at scale.They also get into the "three circles" framework, message, delivery, production quality and why skipping straight to expensive kit before you've nailed your message is one of the most common mistakes Will sees. Start scrappy. Get your message right. Then level up the production.Later in the episode, they discuss the growing trend of founders hiring dedicated content creators or personal brand managers, why a marketing hire who only produces bottom-of-funnel PDFs is a wasted resource, and the uncomfortable truth about measuring ROI on content spoiler: you probably can't, and that's okay.Key takeaways:Consistency beats virality you need to be famous among 300–500 people, not 300,000Your recruiters' daily stories are ready-made content. Stop overthinking it.Content is a 1–2 year investment. If you need quick wins, Google Ads might be the better fit right nowThe "Trojan horse" effect: the best recruitment content brands make people forget you're a recruiter until you need them to rememberStart on your phone. Get the message right first. Production quality comes later.

John Gaughan built Finlay James into an 80-person recruitment business with offices in Manchester, London, Chicago and San Francisco. Then he had to close it.In this episode, Jamie Burrows sits down with John to hear the full, unfiltered story of what went wrong and more importantly, what he's learned from it. John doesn't dodge any of it. He walks through how the business went from billing half a million a month to losing between £125k and £150k a month for eighteen months straight. He talks about the decision not to make mass redundancies, the moment LinkedIn shut off all 66 recruiter licenses, and why having £1.5 million in the bank still wasn't enough when the market turned and the bank refused to help.What makes this conversation valuable isn't the failure story it's what John's doing with it. He now advises fourteen recruitment companies, from solos to twenty-five-person firms, and he's seeing the same blind spots everywhere. Owners who don't know their average order value. Consultants who are exhausted from six hours a day loading cadences but haven't pulled a job in six months. Businesses setting entry-level hires up as 360 billers with no support, no structure and targets that haven't moved in fifteen years despite costs doubling.John breaks down his approach to the fundamentals three numbers he wants on day one: average order value, jobs-on-to-deal ratio, and first interviews to deal. He explains why he'd rather someone worked eight hours and spent fifteen minutes understanding what they achieved than ground through twelve hours of undirected activity. He makes a sharp case for moving up the food chain, sharing how one client is shifting their average fee from £10k to £17.5k by targeting roles two or three levels higher and the data shows they're actually more efficient at that level.There's a brilliant thread running through this episode about the gap between activity and intention. John's argument is that recruitment has become full of busy people doing stuff, and the businesses that are winning are the ones that have stripped it back to specific inputs, specific outputs and a clear destination. He's blunt about the over-reliance on tech, the death of phone culture, and why human-to-human interaction isn't just a nice-to-have anymore it's becoming the only competitive advantage left.If you run a recruitment business and you've been telling yourself you just need to do more of everything, this episode will challenge that thinking. Follow Amplifying Recruitment wherever you get your podcasts.

Most recruitment companies have a marketing problem. But it's not the one they think it is.It's not that the content isn't good enough. It's not that they're on the wrong platform. It's that marketing and sales are operating as two completely separate functions and nobody's bridging the gap.In this episode, Jamie Burrows sits down with Sam Rasdall, founder of Potent, to unpack why marketing in recruitment fails when it's disconnected from BD, and what happens when you actually embed the two together. Sam's been on both sides of the fence, he started in recruitment at S3, built an academy that helped win Team of the Year, then moved into sales and brand at Bold where he took the business to a million pounds in revenue before stepping into the MD seat. Now he works with recruitment companies as a fractional marketing and sales strategist, and he's seen the same problem almost everywhere he goes.Sam breaks down a 90-day marketing-to-BD framework that turns a single industry report into four or five meaningful touchpoints with decision-makers, without a single recruiter needing to cold pitch. He explains why the marketing asset itself is actually the least important part of the whole process, and why the real ROI lives in the conversations it creates before and after it goes to market. He's blunt about the fact that most recruitment companies hire a mid-level marketer on thirty-odd grand, expect them to be a one-person department with CMO-level strategy, and then wonder why nothing moves the needle.There's a sharp segment where Jamie puts Sam on the spot with three budget scenarios a solo recruiter with three hundred quid a month, a ten-person firm with two grand, and a twenty-person business with a marketing apprentice and three grand to spend. Sam walks through each one with practical, specific recommendations from email infrastructure and sub-domains to outsourced execution, to when it actually makes sense to bring in a fractional CMO with an exit plan built in from day one.They also get into why evidence-based content beats thought leadership every time, why your consultants' call transcripts are the most underused content goldmine in your business, and why the next twelve months might be the era of the savvy SME, the recruitment firms that blend smart marketing with old-school BD and actually meet people face to face.If you run a recruitment business and you've ever felt like your marketing spend isn't translating into revenue, this one will reframe how you think about the whole function. Follow Amplifying Recruitment wherever you get your podcasts.

Most recruiters don’t wake up worrying about umbrella legislation.They’re thinking about placements, clients, and keeping the desk moving. But a major change coming in April could quietly put recruitment businesses on the hook for millions in unpaid tax if they get one decision wrong.In this episode, I’m joined by Sean White, Managing Director at Omnia Outsourcing.Sean started his career in industrial recruitment before moving into payroll, so he’s seen this from both sides of the fence. He breaks down one of the biggest legislative shifts the recruitment sector has faced in years and explains why burying your head in the sand is no longer an option.We talk through what’s actually changing, why HMRC is pushing joint and several liability down the supply chain, and what that really means for agency owners. Sean explains how non-compliant umbrella companies have historically disappeared when things go wrong, leaving contractors exposed and agencies thinking they were safe, until now.You’ll hear why accreditations alone aren’t enough, what good looks like when it comes to payroll reporting, and the simple checks recruiters should be making right now. We also get into the uncomfortable reality of what happens if you get this wrong, from eye-watering tax bills to reputational damage that can wipe out years of work.Beyond the risk, we explore the opportunity. Sean shares why this legislation creates a short window for recruiters to have smarter, more consultative conversations with clients and procurement teams. Done right, compliance can become a point of difference, not just another headache.We wrap up with Sean’s view on what 2026 holds for recruitment. A year shaped by legislation, tough decisions, and a real gap opening up between businesses that take this seriously and those that don’t.If you run a recruitment business, this is an episode you can’t afford to skip.Subscribe to Amplifying Recruitment for more straight-talk conversations with people shaping the industry. New episodes every week.

Most recruitment leaders are telling their teams to “get back to basics”.The problem is, half the team has no idea what the basics even are anymore.The market has changed.The tools have changed.Attention spans have changed.And quietly, motivation has taken a hit.In this episode of Amplifying Recruitment, we get into why modern recruiters are struggling to do the hard work that actually drives results, and what leaders need to change if they want performance back.Jamie sits down with Mat West, founder and CEO of ewi, a global recruitment business operating across multiple continents. Mat started in recruitment over 20 years ago, built desks from scratch in 25 countries, and later took the leap to build his own business backed by investors. He’s led teams through hypergrowth, cash-flow scares, global expansion, and cultural scale without losing the human edge.The conversation covers what really happens after you leave a big corporate and put everything on the line. Running out of cash six months in. Personally taking loans to make payroll. Learning the hard way that profit on paper means nothing without money in the bank.From there, it moves into something most recruitment podcasts never talk about. Dopamine.Mat breaks down why cheap dopamine hits from emails, LinkedIn notifications, and quick wins are killing recruiter drive. He explains why real motivation comes from doing hard things consistently, and how he’s reintroduced structured phone-based “human hours” into the business to rebuild confidence, energy, and momentum.You’ll hear why telling recruiters to “go back to basics” doesn’t work anymore, how leaders need to redefine what good actually looks like today, and why AI should be freeing recruiters to build deeper relationships, not replacing the most valuable parts of the job.It’s a grounded, honest conversation about leadership, behaviour, discipline, and what the next version of recruitment really needs to look like.If you lead a recruitment team, or you’re a recruiter feeling stuck, this episode will hit close to home.Subscribe to Amplifying Recruitment for more real conversations with leaders building recruitment businesses in the modern market. Follow the show so you don’t miss the next one.We’ve distilled our most impactful Business Development Training into one focused, fast-paced day so you can unlock client-winning strategies without sacrificing your schedule✅ Proven New Business Development Frameworks✅ Plug & Play Client Engagement Funnels✅ Prospect Conversion Skills You Can Apply Immediately✅ Live Follow-up Q&A for implementation support ⁠⁠Click here for all the info.⁠⁠

Most recruiters talk about growth. Very few talk about what happens when it all collapses.This episode is a raw look at what it actually takes to rebuild after losing everything. Not a pivot story. Not a highlight reel. A real one.Jamie sits down with Paul Micallef, founder of Pegasus Search & Selection, to unpack his journey from starting his first recruitment business at 24, scaling fast in a booming market, and then watching it fall apart during the 2008 financial crash. No cash buffer. No warning. Personal loss on top of professional failure.Paul shares what that period taught him about cash flow, ego, overexpansion, and why he now runs Pegasus very differently. Leaner. More human. Still ambitious.The conversation moves into how Paul rebuilt from scratch, why he stayed hands-on as a biller, and how personal branding on LinkedIn became one of his most reliable growth levers. Two years of daily posting. No shortcuts. No instant wins. Just consistency and value.They also dive into podcasting as a business development tool, why most recruiters get content wrong, and why serving your market beats selling to it every time.If you’re a recruitment founder thinking about scale, struggling with visibility, or quietly worried about what happens if the market turns, this episode will hit home.Follow or subscribe to Amplifying Recruitment for more honest conversations with recruitment leaders who’ve actually been through it.

Most recruiters feel the same frustration. You want the freedom to build your own book, keep more of your fees, and skip the endless admin that eats half your week.But the moment you try to go solo, you hit the wall: operations, finance, legal, tech, insurance, contracts. It’s overwhelming.In this episode, Cosmo Currey returns to unpack the 75 percent commission model behind Van Kaizen and answer the questions recruiters have been messaging us about nonstop. Cosmo explains:How the model works, What you actually get for the 25 percent you give upHow the passive income streams workWhy their global network changes the gameAnd what real support looks like when you aren’t trying to do everything alone.He also breaks down contracts, fees, ATS access, international roles, rebates, legal support, and what happens if someone joins and decides it isn’t for them.If you’re a recruiter curious about earning more, keeping full ownership of your clients and candidates, and avoiding the lonely grind of being fully independent, this one’s worth your time.Subscribe to stay updated with every new episode.