The Elite Recruiter Podcast

David Dickey was a consistent $500K biller for years. This year he is on pace to break $1 million. When asked what changed, his answer was not a new sales script or a bigger client list. It was one hire. The Firm Leaders Summit is November 16, 17, and 18. Three days built for recruiting firm owners and leaders: hiring and training recruiters, growth, BD, and becoming the rainmaker for your firm. Register here: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the CRMx that captures every call, email, and LinkedIn message automatically and tells you the next action to take. Learn more at https://recruitwithatlas.com/ David is the founder of The Patriot Group, an executive and technical search firm focused on aerospace and defense, with deep work in the unmanned and drone space. Before recruiting, he was a Marine officer who went on to build government contracting companies. When the VP offers started coming in, it was his then girlfriend, now wife, who asked why he did not just go out on his own again. That question started The Patriot Group, which turns 15 this January. In this conversation, David walks through every pivot. From government consulting to running veteran career fairs, 25 events in four years, to going all in on recruiting. He explains why contract-funded GovCon roles are a race to the bottom on margins, and why he only works headquarters roles that are not tied to a single contract. Then the big one. David recruited for about 12 years before making his first CEO placement. The fear that held him back is the same one most recruiters carry: if I call myself an executive recruiter, I lose everything else. He shares the referral that opened the door, what he would tell himself five years ago, and why owning your positioning on LinkedIn matters more than waiting for credibility to catch up. We also get into the hire that changed the year. In the summer of 2024, David brought his youngest stepson into the business from a sales background. He took over the processes, the forms, and training the firm's AI on Claude, which freed David to focus on better clients and sharpen the firm's message. David also breaks down why he moved away from contingency to an engagement fee model, why the first move for a recruiter stuck at a low average fee is to raise it, and how years of building his LinkedIn network turned simple connection messages into searches. What You'll Learn: Why David only works headquarters roles in GovCon, not contract-funded seatsThe fear that kept him from executive search for 12 years, and what finally tipped itHow one hire freed up his time and put him on pace for $1MHow his stepson uses Claude and Loxo to automate submissions and curated resumesWhy he dropped contingency for an engagement fee modelHow his LinkedIn DM game turns connections into executive searchesThe Marine Corps principle he still applies when a placement does not work out 🔗 Links: 🎖️ Connect with David Dickey: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dickeydavid/ 🏢 The Patriot Group: https://thepatriotsgrp.com/ 🚀 Firm Leaders Summit: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.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

Your desk goes quiet. The calls slow down, the interviews dry up, and you start wondering what changed. John Ruffini has an answer, and it usually starts with what is sitting in your pipeline. The Firm Leaders Summit runs November 16 to 18, three days built for recruiting firm owners and leaders on hiring, training, BD, and growth: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com Money Makers 2.0 is on Amazon in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover: https://amzn.to/4AYuOqu This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the CRMx that captures every interview, call, and message automatically, then tells you the next action to take, now with a contract suite and live margin visibility on every placement: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ John has spent 30 years in recruiting, starting on a direct hire desk and spending the last 10 to 15 years training, mentoring, and developing recruiters across accounting, IT, and healthcare. Ten years after his first book, he sat down with Benjamin Mena for the release of Money Makers 2.0, a full rewrite of the original for the way recruiters work today. He opens with the question he uses when a passive candidate tries to shut the call down, and its twin for the hiring manager who says they just posted the job. Then he walks through his forecasting rule. By his math, only about 30% of an active pipeline closes, and a resume submission does not count until the client agrees to interview. A recruiter who wants to bill $30K a month, as he tells it, needs roughly $100K of interview-stage deals in motion. He is clear that seasoned billers who know their clients can close far more, but for a quiet or growing desk, the math is the wake-up call. From there it gets practical. Why he calls active candidates every week even when he cannot place them, what one active and one passive interview a day does for a desk, how he tracks the companies where competitors are placing and he is not, and why he never blocks more than 45 minutes of calls at a time. He shares the story of a recruiter who trusted the plan through six slow months and went on to have 80 nurses working for her, and a friend who left voicemails for a niche clinician for six months until she called back because he was the only one who kept calling. What You'll Learn: The Million-Dollar Recruiting Question for passive candidatesThe marketing version that gets hiring managers talkingHow to ask for referrals that produce real namesThe pipeline math behind a consistent monthHow to find your own send-out to placement ratioThe call block plan that separates busy from productiveWhy most deals fall apart, and the steps recruiters skip Money Makers 2.0 is on Amazon in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover: https://amzn.to/4AYuOqu 🎙️ Connect with John Ruffini on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnruffini/ 📱 John on Instagram and TikTok: @beabetterrecruiter 🏢 Firm Leaders Summit: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com 👥 Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 📬 Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe ⚡ Try Atlas: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ 🔗 Connect with Benjamin Mena: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminmena/

Firm owners, the Firm Leaders Summit runs November 16 to 18. Save your seat: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com This episode is brought to you by Atlas, the CRMx that actually understands context. It captures every interview, client call, LinkedIn message, email, and WhatsApp automatically, then tells you the next action to take. Learn more at https://recruitwithatlas.com/ Brooke Weinert and her husband Tommy had a plan: one of them would keep the paycheck while the other built a recruiting firm. Then their entire team at a 2,000-person government contractor was let go, and both of them were out at once. Within 48 hours they were at the dining room table with a spiral notebook, writing the business plan for what became Mount Indie, a cleared recruiting firm built for government contracting. Eight years later, Brooke is founder and CEO, and the firm runs a second line of business most owners would be afraid to touch. Shadow Labs, their cleared recruiter training platform, trains in-house recruiting teams, often at the same companies Mount Indie recruits for. A mentor warned them it would cannibalize the firm. As Brooke tells it, the opposite happened: training clients keep coming back for surge support and their hardest-to-fill roles. Brooke and Benjamin get into how a discounted favor for people they knew turned into a product, why she built a Client Readiness Framework after reading The Pumpkin Plan, and how a dashboard tracking every step from first submittal to offer tells her team which clients deserve their time. She breaks down Evergreen, the retainer model they built by listening to GovCon clients, including the client who went in-house, came back, and grew from 50 to 150 employees with Mount Indie embedded in their hiring. They also cover why Mount Indie has never hired an in-house salesperson, how a quarterly newsletter and LinkedIn content turn into clients over years, what EOS forced them to start doing, and why they earned a facility clearance but have no interest in becoming a prime. If you have ever wondered what else your firm could sell without putting your recruiting business at risk, this one is for you. What You'll Learn Why training your clients' recruiters can bring in more recruiting work, not lessHow a Client Readiness Framework shows which clients are worth your team's timeHow to structure a retainer for clients whose hiring swings with contract awardsWhy protecting your brand and your recruiters' bandwidth can be worth slower growthWhat EOS changes for recruiters who never planned on running a businessHow to test a new revenue line by talking to your clients first Links 🔗 Connect with Brooke on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brooke-weinert-6632752b/ 🏔️ Mount Indie: https://mountindie.com/ 🧪 Shadow Labs: https://shadow-labs.io/ 🚀 Firm Leaders Summit: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.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

How To Build An AI-Native Firm That Beats Firms 4x Its Size. Firm Leaders Summit, Nov 16 to 18, free live sessions: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ Atlas, the CRMx built for recruiters: https://recruitwithatlas.com/ Alex Papageorge is back. Since his last appearance the idea he was duct-taping together with n8n, Clay, and OpenAI has become a fully built recruiting firm running on Azure, with three AI agents named Donna, Sunny, and Mina sitting on Mac Minis on his desk. The argument Alex makes is simple and uncomfortable. If you think you're using AI because you pay for a sourcing tool with AI in it, you're not. You're renting tools. The firms that pull ahead over the next two years won't be the ones with the best tool, they'll be the ones whose tools talk to each other through a real data layer. Ask your firm what its data architecture strategy is. If the answer is "our ATS," that's the pause for concern. He walks through what that actually looks like for a recruiter. When a candidate replies at 1 AM asking about salary, an agent answers inside a minute, because the information lives in one central source of truth instead of six systems an agent has to go hunting through. Recruiters stay on the calls that need a human. Mina sources, reaches out, qualifies, and books the calendar. Sunny takes candidates who didn't land and finds the companies hiring for exactly that role. Donna runs operations. None of them replace the recruiter, and Alex says on tape that staying human in the process is a principle, not a 2026 answer. The number that stops you is the cost. Alex says the infrastructure runs about $150 to $160 a month, maybe $1,000 if he added 25 more recruiters. That figure is infrastructure only, excluding sourcing and interview tools. He also explains why most recruiters are burning tokens: they ask AI to figure out what a plain automation should just move from A to B. Then the conversation turns to clients. Every hiring manager now has the same tools recruiters do, and Alex is hearing it in meetings: the 20% fee is being called a commodity. His answer is not to get cheaper but to be the trusted partner who can explain why a search isn't working and what changing A, B, and C would do, backed by a weekly report. He also shares the email result Benjamin saw on screen in the pregame, 157 candidates with a 62% open rate and a 58% positive reply rate as Alex tells it, and why deliverability, mailbox rotation, and A/B testing are the unglamorous reason behind it. What You'll Learn Why "our ATS" is the wrong answer to the infrastructure question, and what the right one sounds likeHow a central source of truth cuts token costs instead of adding to themWhat Donna, Sunny, and Mina each do, and where the human stays in the loopWhy clients are calling the 20% fee a commodity and what to sell insteadThe first thing to do Monday morning if you just realized your tool stack isn't a strategyThe two questions Alex wishes recruiters would ask him Connect with Alex Papageorge LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-papageorge/ Email: [email protected] Website: https://superrecruiter.io/ Ask him on LinkedIn for his free infrastructure pack. Super Recruiter is hiring and is starting to partner with solo recruiters who want to run on their infrastructure. 🚀 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

Finish The Year Strong is live this week, September 28 through October 5. It is the final free virtual summit of 2026 and every session is built to help you close Q4 hard. Big billers, AI, automation, mindset, all week. Register here: https://recruiters-finish-the-year-strong.heysummit.com/ If you are hearing this after October 5, the Firm Leaders Summit runs November 16 through 18, presented by Crelate. Three days for owners and firm leaders. Register here: https://firm-leaders-and-owners-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com This episode is presented by Atlas. Atlas is the CRMx that captures every call, meeting, message, and email you touch, ranks your candidates, builds your BD shortlist, and plugs into your Claude and ChatGPT stack. Customers report 50 percent higher response rates, 35 percent more clients won, 15 hours back a week, and billings up 85 percent. See it at https://recruitwithatlas.com/ Bodie Nowak has been in recruiting for 18 years. He and his partner Daniel run Blackwood Partners, a construction and AEC search firm out of Dallas. Just the two of them and Bodie's niece Zoe. In their best year they billed just under $2 million together. Not a 20-person firm. Not a scaled team. Two people and an admin. But the story that got them there is the one nobody talks about. In 2009, less than 18 months into his career, Bodie billed $11,250 for the entire year. Wife at home, kid in kindergarten, on a draw. He interviewed for a Coca-Cola route job at $50,000. He turned it down because the cap would lock his upside forever. Then he spent the rest of the year in a dark makeshift office wondering if he had made the worst decision of his life. He hadn't. In 2010 he pivoted to upstream oil and gas and built the practice from scratch. By 2014 he was billing $800,000 a year. Then OPEC crashed the oil market the day before Thanksgiving and he had to walk away from everything he had built. In 2016 he restarted in construction, in Dallas, from zero. In 2023 he and Daniel bought the business and launched Blackwood Partners. In this conversation Bodie tells Benjamin what does not make it into a Pinnacle Society speech. The 8 months in jail he chose over 2 years of probation because control mattered more than comfort. The letter he wrote to the warden every day for a month. The wife who trusted him when he could not trust himself. And the reason he refuses to scale even though a 15-person firm would love to hit the numbers his 2-person shop hits. He also gets tactical. Bodie walks through his contingency BD system, how he lays contracts across an entire market, why he calls the hiring manager the same hour he learns they interviewed a candidate, and the one trait he hires for above everything else. If you are in your own $11,000 year right now, this episode is for you. If you are grinding yourself trying to scale to 20 people, this episode is for you. And if you have ever wondered whether motivation is a lie, Bodie has your answer. What You'll Learn: Why the long way is actually the shortcutHow to build $1.9 million a year with a 2-person teamThe contingency BD system Bodie calls "lay paper all over the town"How Bodie and Daniel built a 50/50 partnership that survived a market crash and an acquisitionWhy control over comfort is the operating principle behind every hard decision Bodie has madeThe one trait Bodie hires for over every other Connect with Bodie Nowak on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bodienowak/ 🎙️ Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 📬 Subscribe to the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe