The Elite Recruiter Podcast

Before the episode, two dates. Finish the Year Strong runs September 28 through October 5, and the brand new Firm Leaders Summit runs November 16 through 18. Live sessions for both are free. Register at https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ and https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/. Replays, VIP access, and the Elite Recruiter Community are there if you want to go all in on the rest of 2026.

This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the CRMx that captures every call, email, and message automatically and tells you the next action to take: https://recruitwithatlas.com/

Mary Huminski was 22, fresh out of Bentley, and everyone told her the same thing: go to a big firm first, learn the trade, then think about boutique. Her uncle, a career headhunter, said it. Her future boss said it. She had a Michael Page offer in hand. Twenty minutes after congratulating her on that offer, Annie Colabella called back with a better one, and Mary took the boutique path everyone warned her against. Year one, as Mary tells it, she billed $713K. Year two she crossed $1 million. She's 25.

This episode deconstructs how. Not the highlight reel, the operating system. Mary walks through inheriting two desks from recruiters with 10 and 20 years on her within months of starting, and the mindset shift that turned a terrifying phone list into a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. She breaks down the training method she and Annie built around her learning style: a Zoom window open all day for months, mute and unmute, Annie typing the next question in the chat while Mary drove the call. She explains 9 Before 9, the rule that no coffee happens until nine business development calls are made, and why she plans every single call the night before.

The numbers get honest treatment. Mary breaks down where the million-dollar year actually came from: roughly 70 percent referrals and inherited relationships, about 20 percent cold reactivation of dormant clients, and one client from an MPC. She shares her original MPC voicemail script word for word, then the evolved version that leads with market intel instead of the candidate. She walks through a counteroffer she saw coming from the first call, and the client who lit her up for 15 minutes over a follow-up email, the calendar reminder Annie made her set, and what happened when she called back three months later.

There's a Gen Z conversation in here that goes somewhere unexpected. Mary doesn't think she's an exception. She thinks there are a lot of Marys out there who never had someone say I'm invested in you.

What You'll Learn:

The 9 Before 9 rule and the night-before prep that makes it fit
How to build a rookie's training plan around how they actually learn
Mary's original MPC voicemail script and the advisor version it became
Where a million-dollar year actually comes from, by percentage
The difference between busy and productive on a full desk
Why the client who yelled at you won't remember it in three months

🔗 Connect with Mary: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mary-huminski-b030901a2/

📅 Finish the Year Strong Summit, Sept 28 to Oct 5: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/

🏢 Firm Leaders Summit, Nov 16 to 18: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/

⚡ Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ 🤝 Elite

Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community

📬 Newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Jay Veniard was the very first guest on the Elite Recruiter Podcast, back when the whole thing was one recorded conversation during COVID thrown on the internet to see what happened. This session is his first ever summit talk, pulled from the Elite Recruiter Community Library ahead of Finish the Year Strong, and it was the one that hit the audience hardest.

Finish the Year Strong 2026 is a free virtual summit for recruiters running September 28 to October 5. Firm owners, coaches, and top billers on how to close out the year and set up 2027. Register free: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com

This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the CRMx that captures every call, email and message automatically and tells you the next action to take. See it at https://recruitwithatlas.com

Jay ran the numbers on his own career. One missed deal a month at his firm's average fee comes to $360,000 a year in lost billings. Over ten years that is $3.6 million. Reinvested at 7%, it becomes $5.3 million. His number, his math, and as he tells it, the moment that changed how he runs his desk. He calls it the tax you never signed up for, and most recruiters are paying it in silence because nothing in this business ever forces you to stop.

Jay pitched eight years of pro baseball before recruiting and he draws the line hard. In the minors, if you negotiate with your training, you get cut in front of your teammates. At a recruiting desk, if you negotiate with your dials, nobody takes your jersey. You don't get fired. You just get mediocre. You don't lose your job, you lose your legacy.

From there he lays out the two kinds of recruiter he sees everywhere. The negotiator runs on feelings, hits snooze, justifies research to avoid dialing, and hides behind email because they're afraid of no. The operator runs on standards that never move: the day is planned the night before, a two hour phone block is protected first thing in the morning, research is after hours work, and there is a hard cap on digital back and forth before someone picks up the phone. He also has a blunt warning for anyone trying to run a desk on email, LinkedIn DMs and text. If you are not willing to get on the phone, you are going to be replaced.

Jay owns Ventec Search Group, a search firm placing sales talent in industrial automation, still works an active desk, and runs a coaching program for recruiters.

What You'll Learn

The missed deal math and how to run it on your own last twelve months
The difference between a negotiator and an operator
Why BD has to be the first block of the day
The three digital touches rule before the fourth becomes a phone call
Why productive procrastination is the most expensive habit on your desk
Where the AI replacement line actually falls in recruiting

Connect with Jay Veniard: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayveniard/

🎯 Finish the Year Strong 2026, free, September 28 to October 5: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com

🏢 Firm Leaders Summit presented by Crelate, November 16 to 18, live sessions free: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/

🚀 Want the replays? Elite Recruiter Community members get every Finish the Year Strong session on demand, plus replays from all past summits: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community

📩 Weekly recruiting insights from the Elite Recruiter newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Benjamin Mena LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminmena/

James Homer left a regional director job in Singapore with two young kids, a third on the way, and not enough savings to cover the risk. Eighteen months later his firm has billed just over a million dollars and takes retained searches off Korn Ferry, Egon Zehnder and Michael Page with a team of four.

The number is not what makes this worth your time. The way he got there is.

Before any of it worked, James spent ten thousand dollars on an AI outreach system that booked him exactly zero meetings in three months. He sat in cafes for sixty or seventy hours feeding in his ICP and his lists, and none of it returned a single conversation. Worse, the emails went out under his own name to people who had known him for a decade. One prospect wrote back to say he knew James had never been to Yale and had never had a beer at the bar the email invented. When James complained, the vendor told him the fake detail was the hyper specialization, and that a reply is still a reply.

Then came four months with no cash coming in at all. One member of staff to pay, a mortgage, three kids, and nothing landing. That was the stretch where his mantra stopped being a quote on a wall and became the actual situation. Nobody was coming to save him.

What pulled him out was going back to month one, which was him at night, after the kids were in bed, chasing job adverts and writing every email himself. In his first year that approach ran a twenty percent response rate and converted roughly eighty percent of meetings into job orders. It also produced his biggest client that year, six or seven placements from one cold email to a COO.

He is not anti technology. He was an early Atlas user, builds tools with Claude, and pays eighty dollars a month for inbox warming he calls the best return in the business. His distinction is simple. AI is a tool that helps you, not a machine that replaces you, and nothing goes out without human eyes on it.

The rest is the stuff nobody tells you. For his first two months, ninety nine percent of his emails went to spam because he had never heard of DKIM or DMARC. He set his entity up in the wrong country. He spent a hundred hours on a website he should have paid six hundred dollars for.

And then the part that reframes everything. James could have hired fifty people. He decided not to. His clients told him plainly that what they pay for is him on the search, not a polished pitch from a big firm followed by a junior they never met. He calls this the decade of the boutique, and after this episode you may agree with him.

Revenue figures in this episode are James's own.

What You'll Learn

Why his network did not follow him in year one, and what brought it back in year two The cold outreach routine that built his first ten clients from zero What ten thousand dollars of AI outreach actually bought him, in his own words How a four person firm wins retained searches against Korn Ferry and Egon Zehnder The email setup mistake that silently killed his first two months of business development Why he reset his ego about headcount, and what his clients told him they actually want The four quotes he runs his business and his life on

Finish The Year Strong 2026, September 28 to October 5. All live sessions are free. https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/

This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the CRM that captures your calls, emails, LinkedIn messages and WhatsApp automatically so you can stop doing admin and get back to billing. https://recruitwithatlas.com/

Firm Leaders Summit, November 16 to 18. Live sessions are free. https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com

Connect with James Homer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jahomer/

Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community

Get the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Sign up for the Finish The Year Strong 2026 Summit (Sept 28 to Oct 5): https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/

Check out Atlas, the AI-native CRM and ATS built for recruiters: https://recruitwithatlas.com/

What does the person who has sat across from some of the top billers in this industry actually see when he looks at them?

In his first podcast appearance ever, Kevin Parker sits down with Benjamin Mena for a conversation that goes where recruiting content almost never goes. Kevin is a licensed clinical social worker and licensed clinical addiction specialist with 20 years in the psychotherapy world, and he has spent years in what he calls sacred spaces with high performers, usually as the one asking the questions. He has no website, no socials, and no digital footprint. On purpose. This time, he answers the questions.

Kevin opens with what he sees in those rooms: brilliant, entrepreneurial people whose minds run ten steps ahead of everyone else, and who often have nowhere to take the wins, the losses, or the weight of it all. Recruiting is relational all day long, and it can still be one of the loneliest careers there is. The way through, he argues, starts with saying it out loud. Name it to tame it. From there the conversation moves through the four buckets of life, why work-life balance is a myth he abandoned in favor of tension, the real difference between success and significance, and why imposter syndrome is not a flaw to eliminate but a part of you that sometimes needs to be thanked and told to take a seat. He also speaks directly to working moms in recruiting, and closes with a challenge for anyone who is not feeling lonely right now: pick up the phone.

What You'll Learn:

What elite recruiters actually talk about when nobody else is in the room
Why entrepreneurs and recruiters carry so much alone, and why naming it is the catalyst
The three rules for deciding who deserves to hear what you are carrying
The four buckets of life and what happens when work is the only thing in yours
Why work-life balance is baloney, and the tension model that replaces it
The difference between success and significance, and why one is steps and the other is hard
How to handle imposter syndrome without destroying the drive that got you here
Why the candidate you placed will remember you forever, even if you forget the deal

Whether you are grinding through your first year or twenty years in, this episode will find you where you are. Remember that you are significant.

LINKS:

🚀 Finish The Year Strong 2026 Summit (Sept 28 to Oct 5): https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/

🤖 Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/

🏆 Firm Leaders Summit (Nov 16 to 18): https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com

💬 Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community

📧 Newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

90% of her business comes from referrals. She has never made a cold call, never sent a cold email, and never pitched herself at a networking event. And she built the whole thing in four years, starting with zero recruiting background.

April Ben-Sabat became a recruiter by accident. She spent six years as the right hand at a transport company, told them in her first interview she would own a business within five years, and when they could not find a transport recruiter to backfill her, her own boss said the words that changed everything: why don't you start a recruiting agency? A year later the company went bankrupt and she was all in, whether she was ready or not.

What she built next is the playbook this episode unpacks. April went from searching "business networking" on Eventbrite and showing up to anything free, to becoming the recruiter an entire city refers. She walks through exactly how she works a room she has never been in: standing at the door, finding the person who is alone, opening with "what brings you here," and shimmying into conversations without an ounce of pitch. She explains why she goes to every event alone, why bringing a wingman makes you less approachable, and the solo restaurant challenge she gave herself, one Friday night, no phone allowed, that trained her to be comfortable in any room.

Then she goes deeper: why following up with "great meeting you last night" is the same as handing out a business card, what to reference instead, and how posting on LinkedIn keeps her in the feed of everyone she has ever met so the referral arrives eight months later. When the events around her felt empty, she built her own, with a curated guest list, a word-match game on the back of every name tag, and a room engineered for people who are scared of networking.

And because standing still was never the plan, April is now tearing up her own playbook, taking her agency into the US market and a brand new niche while building her own AI sourcing agent with Claude Code. Job order in, vetted shortlist out, outreach in her voice, and an ATS she never opens anymore. As April tells it, the shortlists are finding people a human sourcer could not surface in two weeks of full-time searching. She also draws her hard line: the first message can be automated, but the moment a real conversation starts, the human takes over.

Whether you are grinding without direction, sitting behind the screen wondering why BD feels broken, or curious what one non-developer recruiter can build in a weekend, this conversation is the push to get in the room.

What You'll Learn:

The exact first 90 seconds of walking into a room where you know nobody
Why April never sells at networking events and how referrals arrive months later anyway
The follow-up message that actually gets remembered, and the one that gets ignored
How to host your own networking event that people beg to return to
How she built an AI sourcing agent on Claude Code that searches her ATS and beyond
The one thing she refuses to automate, and why candidates thank her for it

Finish The Year Strong 2026 (Sept 28 - Oct 5). April is speaking, and her session currently has the most RSVPs of the entire summit. All live sessions are free: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/

Atlas, the CRM that actually understands context: https://recruitwithatlas.com/

Firm Leaders Summit (Nov 16-18): https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com

🚀 Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 📩 Newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

🔗 Connect with April: https://www.linkedin.com/in/april-ben-sabat/