Greg Benadiba has been a recruiter for 21 years, and he opened his new book with the most expensive phone call of his career: the one he didn't make. In this return episode of The Elite Recruiter Podcast, Greg sits down with Benjamin Mena to put the principles from Recruitment Principles: Timeless Truths in the Age of AI to work, starting with the three he would keep if a recruiter could only live by three.

Before we get into it, Finish The Year Strong 2026 kicks off September 28 through October 5. It is a free virtual summit built to help you close out 2026 with momentum and set the foundation for 2027. All live sessions are free. Register here: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/

This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the AI first CRM that captures every call, email, LinkedIn message and interview automatically, then tells you the next action to take. Atlas customers report 50 percent higher candidate response rates, 15 hours saved every week and monthly billings up 85 percent. Learn more at https://recruitwithatlas.com/

Then the episode gets tactical. Benjamin plays a candidate who just accepted a 15 percent counteroffer and Greg runs the conversation live, showing why counteroffers are won or lost in the very first call, not the last one. Greg walks through the roughly 25 touchpoints his team has mapped across the candidate journey, the post placement survey system he built for about $20,000 that flags a struggling placement inside the first two weeks, and the story of Nancy, a placement whose 5 out of 10 survey score triggered the call that kept her in the job. He shares the exact referral ask that leads a placed candidate back to the people they mentioned in their very first conversation, and why more than half of his firm's business now arrives that way.

Greg is one of the most AI forward leaders in the industry, which makes his list of things he will never automate more interesting: the prescreen, the reference call and the offer call. He explains why he passed on voice agents, how his team runs a Notion knowledge base tethered to a custom GPT that he estimates has saved around 5 percent of the firm's business, and what he means when he says AI will reveal who was never really recruiting.

For the first time on the show, Greg tells the full story of how a 24 year old applicant who was rejected as too junior came back a month later, got the job, and years later became the owner of that same firm. As Greg tells it, it started with a small gift of shares from the founder, continued with a decade of buying more, and ended on the day his boss handed him a resignation letter. He closes with the question nobody ever asks him, and the answer is a plan of 100 mapped calls every single day.

Coming up in November, the first ever Firm Leaders Summit runs November 16 through 18. Live sessions are free. Registration link: Details soon

📘 Recruitment Principles: Timeless Truths in the Age of AI: https://amzn.to/4gGUdf4

🤖 Free Recruitment Principles GPT: https://gregbenadiba.com/gpt

🔗 Greg Benadiba on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gbenadiba/

🌐 Greg's website: https://gregbenadiba.com/

🎯 Finish The Year Strong 2026: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/

🚀 Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/

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

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

What if everything you were taught about growing a desk was optional?

Finish The Year Strong 2026 kicks off September 28th through October 5th, and the live sessions are free. This is your line in the sand for the rest of the year: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/

This episode is sponsored by Atlas, the CRM that actually understands context. Atlas captures every call, email, and message automatically, then tells you the next action to take. And whether you place permanent or contract, Atlas covers both with its new contract suite, so you never chase a timesheet again and you get live margin visibility on every single placement. Atlas customers are reporting 50% higher candidate response rates, 35% more new clients won, and monthly billings jumping 85%. See it at https://recruitwithatlas.com/

Almost every recruiter got the same day one instruction: business development is the job. Make the marketing calls, chase the ads, win the clients. Dan Lambert did the opposite. He skipped BD entirely, doubled his candidate metrics instead, and as he tells it, went on to post eight million dollar years before taking over ownership of Lambert Nemec Group.

His logic was almost uncomfortably simple. Candidates are the inventory, and if you own the best inventory, clients have no choice but to deal with you. So while his colleagues left voicemails chasing ads, Dan interviewed 25 candidates a week against a target of 10, placed his people on his teammates' job orders, and waited. Those candidates became controllers, then CFOs, then the clients calling him with exclusive, hidden job orders no other agency ever saw.

Dan walks through exactly how he did it, including the no pressure takeaway call he ran on week one job ads, the follow up cadence that turned cold postings into clients for life, and the story of telling a hiring manager to hire her own free candidate instead of paying him a $20,000 fee, a decision that won him every search she ran afterward. He breaks down his prep ritual too: the week is planned before Friday ends, and he never left the office without two Monday interviews booked, because a Monday without interviews is a day you never get back.

You will also hear his honest take on AI and recruiting tech, why LinkedIn is a lookup tool and not a recruiting strategy, the candidate update call he believes is the most ignored moneymaker in every firm's database, and the order of operations behind his firm's low turnover: candidates first, clients next, the organization, then you.

If you have ever believed there had to be another way to build a desk besides pounding out marketing calls, this episode is your proof, and your permission.

And mark your calendar for the brand new Firm Leaders Summit, November 16th to 18th, with free live sessions: Details soon

Finish The Year Strong 2026: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/

Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/

Connect with Dan Lambert on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-lambert-57bb1110/

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

Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

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

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

Join the Recruiting Agents Workshop with Seb Sharp, August 25 and 26, and build your own autonomous lead agent and placement agent live: https://the-recruiting-agents-workshop.heysummit.com/

Julia Arpag was laid off at five weeks postpartum with a newborn, a toddler, and two teenage foster sons at home. Two and a half years later, as she tells it, Aligned Recruitment has closed $1.3 million in revenue and 30 clients while she works 30 hours a week. And she built all of it having never sold a single thing in her life before starting the firm.

This talk is pulled straight from the Elite Recruiter Community library as a primer for Finish The Year Strong, where Julia is coming back with a brand new session. It is the rare talk where she steps back from tactics and lays out the ten principles underneath everything: optimizing for time and money instead of money alone, hiring multiple coaches for different gaps, building an audience of 74,000 on LinkedIn, and the DM plus voice note sequence that turns profile views into discovery calls. She walks through the five CRM categories she works for just twenty minutes a day, why warm leads are the closest to the money strategy in the entire business, and how aiming to serve instead of sell keeps the anxiety out of your voice on every call.

She also gets honest about the expensive misses, including a $30,000 mastermind that produced zero closed leads, and why she would still rather try and miss than sit frozen waiting for the perfect move. If you are heading into the final quarter wondering whether you can build a real firm without sacrificing your family, your health, or your sanity, this is the mindset reset before the summit.

The year is not written yet. Register for Finish The Year Strong 2026 and catch Julia's next talk live.

🎯 Finish The Year Strong 2026: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/

🤖 The Recruiting Agents Workshop: https://the-recruiting-agents-workshop.heysummit.com/

⚡ Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/

🔗 Julia Arpag LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julia-arpag/

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

📩 Newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscrib

Has AI actually helped you make more placements this year, or has it just been noise? Before you dive in, this is your last call for The Recruiting Agents Workshop with Seb Sharp, August 25 and 26. Two live build-along sessions where you will create an autonomous lead agent, a placement agent, and connect your entire tech stack, plus recordings, templates, and a week of Slack access to Seb after the sessions end. Grab your seat now: https://the-recruiting-agents-workshop.heysummit.com/

In this episode Benjamin Mena sits down with Dan McCarthy, Senior Talent Engineer at Zapier and one of the founding members of the a16z Talent Engineer Fellowship, to break down recruiting's newest role and how you can step into it before the rest of the industry catches on.

Dan's path into this seat is anything but typical. He was a jazz musician, a New York bartender, a wine educator, and a CrossFit gym owner in Brooklyn before Shopify hired him into tech recruiting at 40 years old. He had never heard of an org chart. By his own telling, he led the entire engineering recruiting team in hires his very first quarter. Two layoffs later he landed at Zapier, where he was handed a blank canvas: build our talent intelligence function.

What he built instead of dashboards is the heart of this conversation. Dan walks through the talent intelligence MCP he assembled in about a month using completely free APIs, including Indeed Hiring Lab, the Department of Labor, O*NET, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and WARN Act data, so recruiters walk into every intake call armed with real compensation numbers, competitor hiring activity, and talent pool data. Then he gets specific about the agency version: what a solo recruiter or a two person shop can stand up over a single weekend to change their next client pitch.

Benjamin and Dan also get into the ego build problem on LinkedIn and why screenshots of tools built yesterday are making everyone feel further behind than they actually are, the difference between building to learn and building to ship, who is reviewing your code and updating your API keys, whether a three person agency could really bill five to ten million dollars with a builder in one of the seats (Dan's honest answer: possible, but probably not in the next six to twelve months), the sales engineer ratio that may be coming to recruiting teams, and why Dan completely changed his mind about AI interview screens.

If you have ever felt too far behind to start building, this episode is your permission slip. As Dan puts it, nobody is behind. This is day one.

⚡ The Recruiting Agents Workshop with Seb Sharp (August 25-26): https://the-recruiting-agents-workshop.heysummit.com/

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

🤖 Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/

🔗 Connect with Dan McCarthy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamdanmccarthy/

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

📩 Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Before we get into it: The Recruiting Agents Workshop with Seb Sharp is happening August 25th and 26th. Two live build-along sessions where you will build an autonomous lead agent, a placement agent, and wire your entire tech stack together, with recordings, templates, and a full week of Slack access to Seb included. Sign up here: https://the-recruiting-agents-workshop.heysummit.com/

This episode is sponsored by Atlas, the CRM that actually understands context. Atlas captures every interview, client call, email, and LinkedIn message automatically, then tells you the next action to take. Atlas customers are reporting 50% higher candidate response rates, 15 hours saved every week, and monthly billings jumping 85%. Learn more at https://recruitwithatlas.com/

What happens when the only way forward is outworking every degree in the room? David Fishman spent eight years in the Coast Guard, started on a temp desk, and launched Sparrow Company in 2009 when the alternative was going broke. Thirty years into the business, his desk regularly produces $1.5 million a year, his longest client relationship has lasted three decades, and he recently ran a streak where ten straight presentations turned into ten placements. First candidate presented, first candidate hired, ten times in a row.

In this conversation, David breaks down how he built all of it without a college degree and why the chip on his shoulder became his biggest advantage. He shares the intake questions that shape every search, explains why he reads a resume like a photograph, and reveals how patience let him win back clients he lost three or four times by simply outliving the tenure of the HR leaders who cut him. He also unpacks why he stopped tracking dollars and started tracking deals, how the wave cycles of recruiting punish anyone who gets comfortable, and why the first three days of your week decide whether you have any momentum left by the next Monday.

You will also hear how David expanded into the temp business by recruiting his own business partner, what it means to have his son and daughter working inside the company, and why at 58 he still wakes up feeling like something is chasing him.

What You'll Learn:

• The resume-reading method behind a 10-for-10 presentation-to-placement streak
• The intake questions that tell you if the wind is at your back or you are digging through mud
• How to win back a lost client by outliving the tenure of the person who cut you
• Why tracking deals instead of dollars protects you from the summer complacency trap
• The Monday-through-Wednesday work rhythm that keeps your momentum alive
• How to turn a no-degree chip on your shoulder into a 30-year career

Sign up for The Recruiting Agents Workshop (Aug 25-26): 🤖 https://the-recruiting-agents-workshop.heysummit.com/

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

Atlas: 🔗 https://recruitwithatlas.com/

Connect with David Fishman on LinkedIn: 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-fishman-b468112/

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

Subscribe to the Elite Recruiter Newsletter: 📩 https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Recruiters, do not limp into December. The Finish The Year Strong 2026 virtual summit runs September 28 through October 5, with the top producers and leaders in recruiting, including Pinnacle Society's Michelle Flynn, sharing exactly what is working right now to close the year with momentum. Grab your spot: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/

This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the CRM that actually understands context. Atlas captures every interview, client call, email, and message automatically, then tells you the next action to take. Agencies building on Atlas are reporting 50 percent higher candidate response rates and monthly billings jumping 85 percent. See it for yourself at https://recruitwithatlas.com/

What actually separates a recruiter who plateaus in the mid six figures from one who breaks a million? Kimberly Laipple spent years stuck between $500K and $600K before she found the answer, and it was not a new sourcing tool or a script. In this episode she tells the story most top billers never tell, starting with the moment at 18 when, as a pregnant single mom, someone told her she would never get a degree. She went on to survive foreclosure, stand in line at food banks to feed her kids, and pour herself into a recruiting desk at Scientific Search, the firm she joined 18 years ago as a recruiter and now leads as president.

Kimberly personally billed $1.4 million in her best year while running a team of nearly 20, and she is one of only 80 recruiters admitted to the Pinnacle Society, where she serves as vice president of the board. But the heart of this conversation is how she got unstuck. She walks through the inner work that took her from years of plateaued billings to her first million dollar year, why she believes the one constant in every stuck recruiter's story is the person in the mirror, and what happened when she stopped blaming the market and started examining how she showed up for clients, candidates, and her own team.

From there it gets tactical. Kimberly breaks down the Mr. Miyagi deal she makes with every new hire, six months of painting the fence and waxing the car before they ever freelance, and the repeatable process that turned her desk into what a fellow Pinnacle member called a production line, stacking $100K months back to back. She explains why nobody on her team is allowed to source a single candidate until their pitch, email, and voicemail are written and reviewed, how she reads hiring managers that everyone else misreads, and the exact playbook she used to grow from recruiter to president inside one firm: prove yourself, then ask for it.

She also shares why she still chooses contingent search at the highest level, how she builds a culture where recruiters stay seven and eight years, and the philosophy that reshaped her career: you cannot keep what you do not give away.

If you are sitting at a plateau right now and wondering whether the problem is the market, this episode will challenge you in the best way.

Links:

🚀 Finish The Year Strong 2026 Summit: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/

⚡ Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/

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

📩 Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

🔗 Connect with Kimberly Laipple: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimberlylaipple/

Connect with Benjamin Mena: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminmena/