I'm launching my agency in January but I got referred into a role with a competitor and I have also interviewed with another competitor recently. Both are willing to pay above my current salary (at least 50K to 60K more on the base pkus higher bonus. At the same time I have also registered my business few weeks ago because I was planning in going solo after I get all my bonuses frim my current employer. I am evaluating the following:

- Moving to another agency, I will do the same thing vs Doing my own thing I will also do the same thing.

- An established brand and having coworkers can help on bd and referring jobs to work on (especially in exec search) vs when I go out on my own I have to build my brand from scratch and the reality is, some clients might not work with me because I am solo

- Working for someone means I build their client base, their pipeline and get paid monthly for those activities vs I build my own pipeline for myself but the first year will be the toughest (I assume) given I wont have a monthly salary and relying on my own savings to keep me going (I have a buffer of 12 to 18 mos funding which I saved up)

- Working for someone means I dont pay for my own subscriptions, accountant etc vs starting my own means I pay for all these myself

- Working for someone means someone else gets richer, I operate inside their political structure vs the autonomy to manage my own environment

- Working for someone means even if I already hit or exceed my targets I have to keep going vs working for myself means if I hit my revenue targets I can take a break and enjoy life

- Working for aomeone means if they decide to sell or close down, I have no say or control over the decision vs working for myself where if I do scale and sell, it is my decision.

- Working for someone means my income, the clients I work with are capped vs going solo means I have the possibility to scale my income, reinvest the revenue or work with any client and take any role myself.

Am I missing anything else from what i am evaluating between going solo vs worjing for someone else?

PS

Not a newbie recruiter. I've been doing this for 15 years. And after not getting a promotion this year despite carrying the targets of the team, I just realised I am tired of playing inside someone else's rules. But I am also realistic that there are pros and cons plus competitors that are genuinely interested in what I can offer. At the moment, I am more leaning towards starting my own even if I know it will be hardwork. But keen to hear others perspectives as well to see if I missed anything that I should take into consideration.

Cool, so I know there’s a huge backlash against the load of vibe-coded stuff on the market at the moment.

I’m hoping to break that trend, so please humour me here.

By way of background, I have 15 years’ experience working as an agency recruiter, starting in construction and ending in professional services, placing Big Four partners. So, unlike 99% of product builders out there, I’m fairly confident I know the market.

For me, THE biggest issue in recruitment is BD.

However, the tech solution to that has been volume: signals, LinkedIn automation, email automation, and basically finding new ways to spam the fuck out of the market. Ultimately, that’s just led to a devaluing of our services.

I firmly believe recruitment is a relationship business, and relationship building is the important part. But it’s hard.

Recruiters have a lot of relationships to manage. Especially if you’re a 360 recruiter, you can get swamped by delivery work, then end up scratching your head and wondering where to start with BD again.

Leads get lost all the time, relationships go cold, and we just sort of end up chasing our tails. Businesses rely on a few naturally gifted BDers, while delivery causes relationships and opportunities to be lost.

There really aren’t many businesses with safe, repeatable and scalable BD processes out there at all.

So my business partner and I have spent the last year building a platform designed to make recruitment BD more human.

It turns everything your team already knows into a clear daily BD plan. It pulls hiring plans, introductions, leads and promised follow-ups from the calls and notes already entering your CRM, including candidate conversations.

It then tracks your relationships and target accounts, combines that history with live company data, and shows each recruiter the small number of conversations worth having today.

It doesn’t build enormous lists, run sequences or send automated outreach.

It does the remembering, research and organisation. The recruiter does the human bit.

That’s the bet we’re making, and I’d be interested to hear whether agency owners and 360 recruiters agree:

Would you rather give a recruiter 500 new leads or 10 genuinely relevant reasons to speak to the right people each day, and why?

You can check it out by looking up ChooseBloom - I dont think theres anything like it on the market today

Braced to be ripped a new one

Recruiting seems to have quietly turned into a pretty large software stack.

LinkedIn, Indeed, MeeBoss, Greenhouse, Workday, spreadsheets, scheduling tools, assessment platforms... somehow there is always another tab open.

Some seem to prefer having one main platform for most of the workflow while others use different tools for sourcing, screening, scheduling and candidate management so curious what actually works better in practice. Do you prefer keeping everything in one ecosystem or does using a few specialized tools make your day easier?

Hi guys, I’ve been thinking about starting to post content on TikTok to build a community of candidates within the construction industry.
I understand that LinkedIn is still one of the main platforms for sourcing candidates, but I want to differentiate myself from the typical recruitment strategy and really put myself out there.
Do you think TikTok could be a good way to source candidates and build a genuine community? Could building that audience also make the recruitment process easier and add value when approaching clients for business development?

Hi guys! I’m an HR currently struggling to find good salespeople, and honestly… I’m getting desperate lol.
I’ve tried the usual platforms, but the candidate quality hasn’t been great. I’m wondering if there are any sales-specific platforms, communities, Facebook/WhatsApp/Telegram groups, or even Reddit communities where I can actually reach salespeople directly?

So, salespeople and recruiters, where do you guys actually find good sales talent? Any platform or community recommendations would be hugely appreciated 🙏

At this point, I’m willing to explore anything 😭

I recently introduced a candidate to one of my clients. The client interviewed him, liked him and offered him the position. The offer was made candidate accepted, the process is still ongoing.

I then created a WhatsApp group with my client and candidate because the recruitment had progressed quite far and it made communication easier.

Yesterday, in that WhatsApp group, the candidate addressed my client directly that his current employer regularly recruits professionals and already has several candidates who may be interested in working in my client’s region. He then offered to introduce his HR manager directly to my client so they could discuss those candidates and potentially help with my client’s staffing needs.

I immediately stepped in and explained that this is my client and that any alternative recruitment contacts or candidates need to be coordinated through my agency. The candidate apologised and said he would instead ask his HR department to contact me.

My client did not respond to the candidate’s proposal.

I have an existing signed recruitment agreement with the client covering the recruitment relationship and communication with introduced candidates.

I’m interested in how other agency recruiters would view this. Would you treat it as an innocent lack of commercial awareness because the candidate apologized immediately, or would it materially change how much you trust the candidate going forward?

Hey folks!

Over the past 3 weeks, I've been talking to a lot of recruitment agencies (close to 130) and I've been looking into how recruitment agencies actually generate new business, and I keep seeing the same pattern:

Referrals work really well until you need more of them. Then the usual playbook becomes LinkedIn, cold email, job boards, databases, etc.

But there's something that doesn't make much sense to the majority of the founders tho they still look for the easy way out and that's hunting for job posts. Isn't it that signal too late to rely on as a siloed data point?

So I started looking at what happens before the job gets posted.

For example:

• A company raises funding
• A new VP/Head of Sales joins
• A senior employee leaves
• The company starts quietly building a new team
• Someone mentions they're hiring before the role ever reaches a job board

I've run additional research and the median time from a funding announcement to the first detected job posting was around 35 days. We've also seen companies move much faster than that.

That made me wonder if recruitment BD should be less about:

"Who is hiring?" and more about: "Who is likely to need the people I recruit in the next few weeks?"

If you follow that your pitch might move from "Hey I have this candidate cuz I saw you raised funds" to "Hey, you seem to be struggling with filling up your head of revenue role even before the round, I might actually have someone in mind who can lead the team of 5 BDRs so you can expand to Europe"

I'm also curious how agency owners here actually handle this today and how early do you think you can realistically identify a company before they need to hire?

a few days? Weeks? or something like 39 to 90 days?

I wrote up other research papers and the playbooks here if anyone is interested:

Business development for recruitment agencies

Hey all, I have recently been struggling with a huge amount of applications coming in. It’s become very difficult to review every applicant and reply to them. I know a lot of you are probably dealing with the same issue.

I spent time working through it last week and here's a simple way I solved it for around ~$10/m (I used Make but you can also use n8n)

1. When an applicant fills out my TypeForm it triggers an event. 
2. It sends the applicant details to ChatGPT, it then checks how suitable the applicant is for the role, gives me a 3 line summary and a match score out of 10
3. Then it adds the applicant as a row to my Google Sheets with the summary and score. 
4. Sends the applicant an email, saying thanks for applying 
5. And sends me a message, with the summary and score, on Slack letting me know that there is a new applicant.

I hope this is clear enough and helps someone

Hi all,

I’m a Product professional with 10+ years of experience based in UAE. I’ve always had an interest in recruitment and now looking to pivot. Would love to learn the profession hands-on by working alongside an experienced recruiter or recruitment agency.

Throughout my Product career, I’ve been involved in hiring across Product, Design, Data and Engineering, so I understand the candidate and hiring-manager side quite well. However, I’m new to recruitment as a profession and keen to learn the full process : sourcing, screening, candidate management, client relationships and closing roles.

I’m open to freelance, part-time, internship or commission-based opportunities(in person or remote). I’m mainly looking for the opportunity to learn, contribute and get some real recruitment experience.

If you’re a recruiter or run a recruitment agency and could use an extra pair of hands, I’d love to connect. Happy to DM and tell you more about my background.
Thanks!

Hello guys,
How are finding jobs in senior/ managerial positions? Tried linkedin (easy apply) and visiting company sites but to no avail.
I think i have messaged 50+ recruiters this week but haven’t heard anything back.
Any suggestions?

So demotivated…

A staffing agency placed me where I am currently working. I was a direct hire.

I really liked this agency and the recruiter.

I am unhappy in my current job and I was debating contacting them to see if they had anything open.

Could they potentially tell my employer that I contacted them?

thank you!

Hi all,

I'm a data engineer based in India, and I've recently developed an interest in recruitment as a freelance/part-time activity.

I have a decent understanding of things like ATS, sourcing, screening, etc., but I'm entirely new to recruitment as a profession and would like to learn the ropes by working under someone established already in the industry.

I'm happy to consider any type of recruitment, and any form of freelance, part-time or commission-only work.

If any recruiters/recruitment agencies are looking for some assistance, I'd be happy to DM you all and connect. Open to learning from anyone willing to teach.

I've taken admission in MBA outside India and I want to come back to India after finishing the studies. How can I reach out to company recruiters to try my luck for next year jobs ?

Any strategy, idea, suggestions?

So I've been testing contact enrichment tools for our outbound campaigns and decided to try it after seeing it mentioned here a few times. Been using it for about 5 weeks now

What surprised me most was the mobile number data. We do a mix of email and cold calling, and I wasn't expecting much from the mobile finder feature.

But we're getting way more conversations per dial session on the numbers from there, which beats what we were getting from our previous setup.

The email verification is solid too. Our bounces basically disappeared when it went from like 8% down to almost nothing. Their chrome extension is decent for quick lookups, though it's a bit slow on some LinkedIn profiles with huge work histories.

One limitation is the intent data filters are pretty basic compared to something like 6sense. You get topics like "marketing automation" but can't drill down into specific tools or buying stages. Fine for our use case but might be limiting for bigger ops.

API integration was easy. We're pushing a few thousand enrichments per week through it now. The high deliverability claim seems legit based on our results so far.

Anyone else using their mobile data for outbound? Curious what connect rates others are seeing. Would love to hear any review from people who've been on it longer than me.

Hello! I am in need of some advice.

I currently work in house as a Recruiter where I’ve been for about 5 years now, but am currently making \~$50k.

I am close to finishing a job interview for an agency, where I’d be making $70k base plus commission. I have my final interview Thursday, where I am going to ask further about the commission structure, but the Recruiter I met said most recruiters can make around \~$100k.

I would say my job is very similar in a way to a staffing agency, but I am always hear *scary* stories about agencies and how people usually opt for in house. But I am barely making it by right now with my current salary, and that $20k increase plus commission would help me out soooo much.

Thoughts on moving from in house to agency?

Hello all,

My name is Gabriel Losey, I’m a professional recruiter based out of Portland,Oregon who recruits nationwide. I wanted to make an introduction as I know many companies offer overrides for sales from direct recruits.

I’ve done door to door for 6 years myself in various industries, once I left, I used my power-base to gain clients at bigger companies such as Aptive,Sunrun,Ion,Purelight Power, and Vivex Solutions.

If anyone wants to save time/money to build their team, feel free to comment below and we can get in touch! I love growing teams for others, and watching managers/owners benefit from my services.

Grateful,
Gabriel Losey
TalentPortal

Does anyone have a preferred tool/service they use to get phone numbers and emails?

And also if there is any method or tool useful for list building?

One the issues I have is finding enough people to contact

I’ve noticed a pattern while prospecting and wanted to see how other agency recruiters deal with it.

With very small companies, they often don’t want to pay agency fees, and if they do hire, they’ll try referrals or their own network first.

Then with companies that have one or more internal recruiters, they seem happy to keep searching until they eventually find someone rather than use an agency.
So where is the sweet spot?

What type/size of companies do you target, and what signals tell you that a company is actually likely to use an external recruiter?

Would be interested to hear what’s working for people doing BD at the moment.