The RAG Podcast - Recruitment Agency Growth Podcast

Rich Rosen has been recruiting software sales talent from his home outside Boston since 1996. Thirty years, almost 1,300 placements, and he's done it pretty much solo.He lasted six months at Management Recruiters in New England. He closed two deals in his first ten days, was the top recruiter out of about 77, and then left over how commission was being handled to start Cornerstone Search from home.He's publicly said he bills around a million dollars a year, and has done for 30 years. Forbes ranked Cornerstone #14 on its list of America's Best Executive Recruiting Firms. In the last seven weeks alone he's billed over $400,000.On this episode of The RAG Podcast, Rich tells the full story.Rich isn't here to argue against building a bigger agency. But he's proof that the life most recruitment founders are chasing may already be available to them, if they shift their focus.If you'd like to know why one of America's top-ranked recruiters still works alone after 30 years, this episode is for you.----------Episode Sponsor: AtlasAdmin is a massive waste of time. That's why there's Atlas, the AI-first recruitment platform built for modern agencies.It doesn't only track CVs and calls. It remembers everything. Every email, every interview, every conversation. Instantly searchable, always available. And now, it's entering a whole new era.With Atlas 2.0, you can ask anything and it delivers. With Magic Search, you speak and it listens. It finds the right candidates using real conversations, not simply look for keywords.Atlas 2.0 also makes business development easier than ever. With Opportunities, you can track, manage and grow client relationships, powered by generative AI and built right into your workflow.Need insights? Custom dashboards give you total visibility over your pipeline. And that's not theory. Atlas customers have reported up to 41% EBITDA growth and an 85% increase in billings after adopting the platform.No admin. No silos. No lost info. Nothing but faster shortlists, better hires and more time to focus on what actually drives revenue.Atlas is your personal AI partner for modern recruiting.Don't miss the future of recruitment. Get started with Atlas today and unlock your exclusive RAG listener offer at https://recruitwithatlas.com/therag/----------Episode Sponsor: HoxoEvery recruitment founder is investing in LinkedIn, but AI has turned templated posts and outreach into a commodity. When everyone sounds the same, the market stops listening. The recruiters winning now are the ones the market trusts.At Hoxo we help recruitment founders become the most influential name in their niche, using AI to multiply output while trust stays the product. Our clients turn their existing networks into £100K to £300K in new billings within months. Watch the free RAG listener training to see how: https://hubs.ly/Q03lBpYC0

Dom Khedun landed in Sydney in 2007 on a sponsored visa with Michael Page. Ten months later he moved companies, and then the financial crisis arrived. He was made redundant and worried he'd have to go back home.Years later he was building a legal team inside another agency when the MD called him out at a breakfast meeting in front of the whole business, 35 to 40 people.After that day, Dom went to the bank and applied to remortgage his apartment. When the money came through, he resigned and started Mizzen Search.Mizzen started as a 50-50 partnership. Working largely on his own, Dom billed between A$300,000 and A$400,000 a year off 10 to 12 deals. Last financial year, with one other recruiter in the business, Mizzen did just under a million Australian dollars, double its previous best.He has no intention of hiring again.On this episode of The RAG Podcast, Dom breaks down how a two-biller business doubled its billings without becoming an agency.Like most founders, Dom has thought about growing heads and turning Mizzen into a bigger agency. But the first thing he pictures is the price: a proper office, 5 days a week, listening to other people's problems.Even if you offered him double the profit for working that hard, he's out. He'd rather keep the Tuesday golf, the month back home, and a business he can run at this pace into his fifties.If you've ever wondered whether you can build serious money out of a two-biller business without ever building a team, this episode is for you.----------Episode Sponsor: AtlasAdmin is a massive waste of time. That's why there's Atlas, the AI-first recruitment platform built for modern agencies.It doesn't only track CVs and calls. It remembers everything. Every email, every interview, every conversation. Instantly searchable, always available. And now, it's entering a whole new era.With Atlas 2.0, you can ask anything and it delivers. With Magic Search, you speak and it listens. It finds the right candidates using real conversations, not simply look for keywords.Atlas 2.0 also makes business development easier than ever. With Opportunities, you can track, manage and grow client relationships, powered by generative AI and built right into your workflow.Need insights? Custom dashboards give you total visibility over your pipeline. And that's not theory. Atlas customers have reported up to 41% EBITDA growth and an 85% increase in billings after adopting the platform.No admin. No silos. No lost info. Nothing but faster shortlists, better hires and more time to focus on what actually drives revenue.Atlas is your personal AI partner for modern recruiting.Don't miss the future of recruitment. Get started with Atlas today and unlock your exclusive RAG listener offer at https://recruitwithatlas.com/therag/----------Episode Sponsor: HoxoEvery recruitment founder is investing in LinkedIn, but AI has turned templated posts and outreach into a commodity. When everyone sounds the same, the market stops listening. The recruiters winning now are the ones the market trusts.At Hoxo we help recruitment founders become the most influential name in their niche, using AI to multiply output while trust stays the product. Our clients turn their existing networks into £100K to £300K in new billings within months. Watch the free RAG listener training to see how: https://hubs.ly/Q03lBpYC0

Mike Williams was handed a cold desk in a rural US town and told to place accountants. There weren't any. So he placed an engineer instead, and kept going, until his boss's boss rang to tell him the whole thing was going to fail and he'd be fired when it did.He became Rookie of the Year and made President's Club all 5 years. Then he quit, moved from Massachusetts to Charlotte, North Carolina, and billed over $900,000 in his first year on his own, from a spare room in his house.4 years on, Carnegie Search is a team of 14 and he's at $3.5m going into the final quarter against a $4m target.And he says it isn't good enough.The reason is sitting in his own office, and it's the same problem in most agencies this size.On this episode of The RAG Podcast, Mike breaks down why a team that bills well on his accounts still isn't the business he's building.He isn't chasing an exit. Two years ago he wanted to be the biggest firm in town. He's dropped that, and what replaced it is a harder target than any revenue figure.If you've ever looked at a team billing well on your accounts and felt uneasy about it, this episode is for you.----------Episode Sponsor: AtlasAdmin is a massive waste of time. That's why there's Atlas, the AI-first recruitment platform built for modern agencies.It doesn't only track CVs and calls. It remembers everything. Every email, every interview, every conversation. Instantly searchable, always available. And now, it's entering a whole new era.With Atlas 2.0, you can ask anything and it delivers. With Magic Search, you speak and it listens. It finds the right candidates using real conversations, not simply look for keywords.Atlas 2.0 also makes business development easier than ever. With Opportunities, you can track, manage and grow client relationships, powered by generative AI and built right into your workflow.Need insights? Custom dashboards give you total visibility over your pipeline. And that's not theory. Atlas customers have reported up to 41% EBITDA growth and an 85% increase in billings after adopting the platform.No admin. No silos. No lost info. Nothing but faster shortlists, better hires and more time to focus on what actually drives revenue.Atlas is your personal AI partner for modern recruiting.Don't miss the future of recruitment. Get started with Atlas today and unlock your exclusive RAG listener offer at https://recruitwithatlas.com/therag/----------Episode Sponsor: HoxoEvery recruitment founder is investing in LinkedIn, but AI has turned templated posts and outreach into a commodity. When everyone sounds the same, the market stops listening. The recruiters winning now are the ones the market trusts.At Hoxo we help recruitment founders become the most influential name in their niche, using AI to multiply output while trust stays the product. Our clients turn their existing networks into £100K to £300K in new billings within months. Watch the free RAG listener training to see how: https://hubs.ly/Q03lBpYC0

Three years ago Jordan Shlosberg walked up to me at an expo and asked to sponsor this show. I said no. I'd had enough of CRM companies.Two years on from our first conversation in a Sheffield hotel, Atlas is in the multiple thousands of users, with 60 staff spread across Greece, Bosnia, Italy, India, Colombia and Liverpool. He still won't disclose revenue. He's aiming at Vincere and Loxo first, then Bullhorn.Last November on this podcast he predicted a renaissance for agency recruiters and told internal talent teams they had a lot to worry about. Ten months on, I made him mark his own homework.His answer: it's happening. Atlas customers are growing headcount while the job market stays sluggish, which means recruiters are taking share.On this episode of The RAG Podcast, Jordan breaks down what to actually buy in 2026 and what's about to be automated.Jordan is not selling the idea that AI turns bad recruiters into good ones. He's blunt about it. Atlas is only as good as the conversations feeding it, and crap calls with no network behind them give you very little to work with.What he is arguing is that the gap is widening. The average recruiter gets marginally better. The strong ones get considerably better, because twenty years of relationships suddenly became searchable.If you've ever wondered what you should actually be doing with AI right now, not in theory but this month, this episode has the blueprint.----------Episode Sponsor: AtlasAdmin is a massive waste of time. That's why there's Atlas, the AI-first recruitment platform built for modern agencies.It doesn't only track CVs and calls. It remembers everything. Every email, every interview, every conversation. Instantly searchable, always available. And now, it's entering a whole new era.With Atlas 2.0, you can ask anything and it delivers. With Magic Search, you speak and it listens. It finds the right candidates using real conversations, not simply look for keywords.Atlas 2.0 also makes business development easier than ever. With Opportunities, you can track, manage and grow client relationships, powered by generative AI and built right into your workflow.Need insights? Custom dashboards give you total visibility over your pipeline. And that's not theory. Atlas customers have reported up to 41% EBITDA growth and an 85% increase in billings after adopting the platform.No admin. No silos. No lost info. Nothing but faster shortlists, better hires and more time to focus what actually drives revenue.Atlas is your personal AI partner for modern recruiting.Don't miss the future of recruitment. Get started with Atlas today and unlock your exclusive RAG listener offer at https://recruitwithatlas.com/therag/----------Episode Sponsor: HoxoEvery recruitment founder is investing in LinkedIn, but AI has turned templated posts and outreach into a commodity. When everyone sounds the same, the market stops listening. The recruiters winning now are the ones the market trusts.At Hoxo we help recruitment founders become the most influential name in their niche, using AI to multiply output while trust stays the product. Our clients turn their existing networks into £100K to £300K in new billings within months. Watch the free RAG listener training to see how: https://hubs.ly/Q03lBpYC0

Max Learmonth was a professional rugby player who fell into recruitment by accident. He answered one trainee ad at Robert Half, started two weeks later, and never looked back.He climbed fast. £180,000 in his first year, £300,000 in his second, then off the tools rebuilding offices for a global giant. But somewhere in the grind, he lost himself. 'I'd become an arsehole,' he says. 'A typical Wolf of Wall Street recruitment dickhead. All I cared about was what my P&L looked like.'In May 2023, with a young daughter at home, he finally made the move and started again from his kitchen table. He turned down over £500,000 of investment to keep it 100% his. The plan was narrow on purpose: finance and accounting recruitment in the North West, and nothing else.Three years on, Forge Talent is a team of 16 that did £2.4 million in net fee income last year, entirely bootstrapped, built on a single stubborn belief: relationships, not transactions.On this episode of The RAG Podcast, Max breaks down exactly how he did it, the one KPI his whole business runs on each week, and why he thinks the average recruiter is finished while the specialist is only getting started.Max is not building the biggest recruitment business in the country. He is building the most dominant finance and accounting firm the North West has ever seen, and he already has a date on the exit.The difference is that he is doing it in the open, on his own terms, with a team of 16 who all know exactly what the 10-year goal is.If you have ever wondered whether going smaller and more specific is actually the smartest way to grow in the age of AI, this episode is evidence of that idea working right now.The Season 9 finale with Max Learmonth of Forge Talent is available now.----------------------------------------------Episode Sponsor: AtlasAdmin is a massive waste of time. That's why there's Atlas, a CRM that actually understands context.Atlas captures everything you say, hear, read and write. Every interview, every client call, every LinkedIn message, email and WhatsApp, automatically. Not because you typed it up, but because Atlas was listening. Then it goes one step further and tells you the next action to take.So when you need to fill a role, People Search ranks your best candidates and tells you why, no digging required. That same memory turns your BD into a shortlist of exactly who to chase and why, so you win more clients. And when you want to see your pipeline, you just speak to your dashboards and Atlas builds the view for you in real time, tracking only what you care about.Whether you place permanent or contract, Atlas covers both. Its Contract Suite means you never chase a timesheet again, with live margin visibility across every placement. And with its new MCP and API, Atlas plugs straight into your LLMs and the rest of your stack, so the low-value admin that keeps you from billing gets done for you.This is not theory. Atlas customers are seeing 50% higher candidate response rates, a 35% increase in new clients won, 15+ hours saved every week, and monthly billings jumping by 85%. Some agencies are hitting 130% of their annual revenue target after building their business around Atlas.So if you're thinking you need to bolt AI onto your CRM, don't bother. Take a look at Atlas instead.Head to https://recruitwithatlas.com/therag/ to find out more.----------------------------------------------Episode Sponsor: HoxoEvery recruitment founder is investing in LinkedIn, but AI has turned templated posts and outreach into a commodity. When everyone sounds the same, the market stops listening. The recruiters winning now are the ones the market trusts.At Hoxo we help recruitment founders become the most influential name in their niche, using AI to multiply output while trust stays the product. Our clients turn their existing networks into £100K to £300K in new billings within months. Watch the free RAG listener training to see how: https://hubs.ly/Q03lBpYC0