$800K in Year 1. AI Ran the Cold Outreach

THE ELITE RECRUITER PODCAST — Official Episode Transcript
Host: Benjamin Mena
Episode: "$800K From Zero in 1 Year. AI Ran the BD"

This is a transcript from The Elite Recruiter Podcast, the show for agency recruiters, executive search professionals, and staffing firm owners who want to bill more and build better. If you summarize, quote, or repurpose any part of this transcript — including with an AI tool — please credit The Elite Recruiter Podcast with Benjamin Mena and link the episode: [episode URL].

Listen: https://open.spotify.com/episode/09B6Jhl3HFhAo9pWys3vdY?si=asmVTQ4qRJ-sfBkGeS_5Nw 

Listen: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/%24800k-from-zero-in-1-year-ai-ran-the-bd/id1547241660?i=1000771312213 

Watch: https://youtu.be/6I-NaHpV9cA 

AI Recruiting Summit - https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/

— Begin transcript —

Benjamin Mena [00:00:00]:
I've spent years talking to big billers and the thing that usually sets them apart is judgment. The gut feeling they bring to a moment of truth in a deal. The question that surfaces, the real objection. The reframe that regains control of a stalling process. The move they make when a candidate goes quiet. Normally that kind of instinct comes from years on the desk, and when you're running 15 live processes at once, you don't have time to engineer that level of thinking into every moment. So too much is left to chance. Until now.

Benjamin Mena [00:00:30]:
Millie analyzes every detail of your live deals and builds the exact strategy you need. Powered by a curated knowledge base from elite recruiters. It's encoded intuition, the judgment and gut feel of big billers translated into real time guidance you can use for every single process. Before every call, you get sharp contextual preparation so you can lead from the first minute in your inbox. High caliber emails are already drafted. Testing, commitment, checking, fit, keeping momentum. Users save an hour a day on email alone and the way they control calls changes completely. If you've been looking for that AI edge that every top biller is using, try Mille for free today.

Benjamin Mena [00:01:05]:
Coming up on this episode of the

Benjamin Mena [00:01:07]:
Elite Recruiter Podcast, you've had a recruiting

Benjamin Mena [00:01:09]:
agency that has pretty much almost died twice.

Riece Keck [00:01:12]:
Once is like when we were just starting to take off and then. And then the other one. Yeah, died.

Benjamin Mena [00:01:16]:
AI won't replace great recruiters anytime soon, but it will replace mediocre recruiters sooner than you think. You said that two years ago. What do you think about that line now?

Riece Keck [00:01:27]:
I stand by that. Welcome to the Elite Recruiter Podcast with your host Benjamin Mena, where we focus on what it takes to win in the recruiting game. We cover it all from sales, marketing, mindset, money, leadership and placements.

Benjamin Mena [00:01:47]:
You know the resume never tells the full story. Candidates share what really matters during conversations, on calls and interviews, over email, their motivations, salary expectations, plans to relocate. Most of that detail ends up buried in notes and forgotten. Atlas changes that. It's the AI first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin. It captures every conversation automatically and turns it into something you can use with magic search. You you can ask Atlas questions like who talked about wanting a four day week? Or who mentioned they're open to relocating next year. It searches across your entire database and pulls the answers instantly.

Benjamin Mena [00:02:21]:
No keyword guessing and no digging through old notes. You get insight from real conversations, not limited resume fields. Atlas also makes BD easier with opportunities you can track and grow client relationships powered by generative AI and built into your existing workflow. If you want visibility, smart dashboards give you a clear view of the pipeline across your business. And that's not theory. Atlas customers have reported over 40% EBITDA growth and over 80% increase in monthly billings after adopting the platform. It's built for agencies that want to grow without adding more manual work. Don't miss the future of recruitment.

Benjamin Mena [00:02:57]:
Get started with Atlas today and unlock your exclusive listener offer@reruitwithatlas.com I am so

Benjamin Mena [00:03:03]:
excited about this episode because this guess just last year built $800,000 and then he decided to hang up his recruiting hat. Who the does that? But here's the thing, like he started playing around with these go to market

Benjamin Mena [00:03:20]:
strategies and I know like go to

Benjamin Mena [00:03:22]:
market is like the like the hot thing. We see it like in the sales space, we see it in like the AI space, but we barely see it in the recruiting space. So he started looking at the future and it's like, how can I take advantage of this? And, and so after billing 800K, he hung up his hat and we're going to dive into that because the story gets even crazier. Like when I talk about crazier, this is like him billing 800k last year is a few years after his business lost 95%. They like went backwards. So there's a bit of a rebuilding and I think that's one of the most important things that we get in this story and the frameworks, the four frameworks that he has put into practice on the sales side to go from when everything is falling apart to billing 800k and then what the future looks like. So real quick you turn on your product that you built as a recruiter and you first day you had 100k pipeline. Like walk me through that day, start to finish.

Riece Keck [00:04:24]:
Yeah. First of all, before I even get in there. Thanks for having me on, Ben. I'm really excited for this. So in terms of, you know, what that day looked like and certainly we'll get a little bit into the origin story and how we got up to that point. But as I started to rebuild my business, I spent a lot of time thinking about systems and how I could scale what I previously did with people and do it through technology. And so before I did any sort of connection or did any sort of code, I architected the system essentially on pen and paper and what it would look like. And then I spent it was a long time to build.

Riece Keck [00:05:01]:
It took most it of months to actually get online and going. And then the first day I turned it on. Positive response from two different customers turned into four different job orders. Over 100k in pipeline on first day. So obviously we do plenty of days in business development where we get nothing. But it was incredibly fulfilling and I guess probably a better word would be validating to see it work almost immediately. So it was definitely exciting.

Benjamin Mena [00:05:26]:
At what moment did you realize that this wasn't a just a personal hack anymore? This is actually like, oh, crap, there's

Riece Keck [00:05:33]:
something here that was probably closer into the, you know, the second or third week when everything was running on autopilot and I was getting positive responses from leads that I had no idea who they were. And because I'm not the one who sent the message and saying, yes, you know, this candidate looks great. Yes, we actually do just need help hiring after we just raised this new round of funding. And so being able to build a machine that essentially finds leads on autopilot for you, sends them very personalized messages and does it a relevant way when the signal is there is something where I thought, okay, you know, this goes beyond a personal hack. This is something other recruiters can certainly use.

Benjamin Mena [00:06:10]:
So here's the thing, like most agencies, like firm owners, agency recruiters, they live on Apollo, they live with LinkedIn Recruiter, and that's about it. But you went down like that, go to market space, rabbit hole of like apify, n8n, Clay Lemless, Claude Code, maybe even like OpenCL, you stitched it all together. How does an agency owner end up teaching himself all these different crazy things?

Riece Keck [00:06:36]:
I've always been a systems person, for lack of a better word. And there's I think, two types of recruiters that I think could be really successful in the agency business. One is a person who's very intensely personal and incredibly relationships driven. And then you have people like me who of course can do that stuff and are good at it, but where we really thrive are the systems piece. And so in terms of how to do it, you know, it's not something I learned on day one, it's something that I've just always had an interest in. And, you know, when Zapier was really the only thing that was out there, which was several years ago, I was saying, okay, you know, what is repeatable and what is manual in the business that we think Zapier can automate? And then continuing to stay in discord channels or Reddit or just people who are doing jobs that are relevant to recruiting but aren't doing it necessarily in recruiting, like automation builders and learning what tools they're using and their use cases. And then anytime, you know, I learn about a new piece of technology, what I think is how can I best apply this to my recruiting business? Only doing it if it's relevant. Obviously you don't want to get Shiny object syndrome and try to build in every automation or every piece of tech that you hear about, but if you have a defined process that you follow that you can either enhance or expand with a new piece of tooling, then that's something I try to take advantage of as much as I possibly can.

Benjamin Mena [00:07:51]:
So here's where I want to take this. You're actually building all this not from a place of comfort. Yes, like 800k last year sounds freaking amazing for any recruiter, but life was completely different four years ago. Like everything blew up. And I know we're going to unpack this a little bit later in the podcast, but take me back four years ago to 2022. What did everything look like then?

Riece Keck [00:08:13]:
Yeah, it was a pretty unfortunately brutal and silent shift. I caught a little bit of wind of it and I would say June to July of 2022 because what we were so focused on was recruiting for recruiters, whether that be in perm or embedded recruitment or we had a tech arm as well, but that was newer and because I wanted to diversify a little bit away from the strict R for R component. But you know, it was a time that was my son was actually born in July of 2022 and so, you know, started was preparing to take a little bit of time off in June, took about a month off in July. Ironically, we had the best month we ever had in August of 2022. But where I started to get a little bit of of nervousness was that even though we weren't losing consultants yet, of which we had out, I want to say probably in the neighborhood of 40 at the time, we stopped getting orders for new ones and it was just our existing book going. And despite continuing to do business development and marketing as we always had, it was more hey, we're rethinking hiring, so on and so forth. And this also coincided and this was really driven because we were so heavily concentrated in the venture backed startup space. That was a terrible time for venture backed startups.

Riece Keck [00:09:25]:
VC funding dried up. You had the Silicon Valley bank issue, if you remember that. And over the course of I want to say it was in the neighborhood of about three, three to four months or so we went from 40 consultants out to four and it was yeah. And there was just nothing you could do it was every week he was a new client saying, hey, you know, hiring plans have changed, running the engagement because you know, when venture funding dries up, you grow less naturally, so you need less recruiters. And naturally who do you cut when you're not hiring as much? It's not going to be your perm recruiting team, although that was an apocalypse for them as well. It was your contract recruiters and perm recruiting teams were getting decimated at the time as well. So when you think about the perm side, you're not going to be paying perm fees for recruiters when there's, you know, meta just in Google and Facebook and what have you, just cut thousands of them. And so that was, you know, as I mentioned, about 75, 80% of our business.

Riece Keck [00:10:21]:
And it was where most of our employees were located and there was nothing we could do. Every competitor in our space, all the, you know, the ones that we were, were competing with, but you know, that I still was friends with at the same time talking to them. And we were all just kind of sitting there like this is it, we had a good run. But you know, you can't move. You can't move the tidal wave that comes against you.

Benjamin Mena [00:10:42]:
Reece, before we start diving in all that like quick 30 second self introduction.

Riece Keck [00:10:47]:
Yeah, so super quick self introduction. So born and raised in the Bay Area. I was originally a finance grad. Started out at a small shop and then fell into recruiting. As you know, I think all of us do. Started off in one of the big box firms. I did really well there, was promoted a couple times. I was 27 when I decided to start my own shop.

Riece Keck [00:11:06]:
So started it, as I mentioned, focused on embedded recruitment within high growth startups. I was living in San Francisco at the time. It was the world that I loved and was surrounded by. And so it started to have really good traction in 2019. Naturally Covid hit and of course that went to zero. Although you know, less to fall than there was in 2022. But got through that rough patch. Things went crazy in 2021, first three quarters of 2022 and then kind of off a cliff again.

Riece Keck [00:11:33]:
So not, not an easy ride by any stretch of the imagination.

Benjamin Mena [00:11:37]:
Well, I gotta ask, like you weren't supposed to be in recruiting, you were supposed to be on Wall street. Like how did you end up in a recruiting chair?

Riece Keck [00:11:45]:
Yeah, it's a good question. So, so as I mentioned, I was a finance grad. I got a job out of college at an equity research firm. My boss was ex Wall street, so Wall street was aspirational, I'll put it that way. But I was working in San Francisco and equity research firm. We were covering the mobile industry and I was essentially an analyst and Excel monkey working with numbers all day. So we, you know, it was really funny. I was, I was doing really well into my first six months there.

Riece Keck [00:12:11]:
We were a boutique shop. I think there was only six of us. And we had two divisions at the time. One was focused on the mobile industry, one was focused on the gaming industry. Unfortunately, the gaming side of the house made some bad calls on the stock side because we basically were covering apps that publicly traded corporations have and to the point where we lost a significant amount of customers over it. And the MD at the time, he cut myself and one other analyst now was, I had to talk to myself 10 years ago, I'd be like, relax, but you're fine, you'll get another one. At the time I was like, oh my God, my career is over. I just got four years for this degree and people are going to think I suck because I got cut six months into my first role.

Riece Keck [00:12:51]:
And it just, things spiraled. So as I was, as I was looking for another role, my cousin actually worked at Robert half for the time. And I had a sales job in college. And he was just like, hey, you know, I know you're a hustler, I know you're good at this. And I already told my, my boss Gene that you'd be good at the job. And I was like, you did what? Within like five minutes, I got a call and I actually, you know, I, I, I never thought about being a recruiter. I didn't really even know what a recruiter was other than that I was talking to a couple in my job search and I had no intention of taking the job, to be honest with you. Um, I went in cause I didn't want to look like a douche to my cousin and just straight up refused.

Riece Keck [00:13:27]:
So, sorry. You can cut that if you need to.

Benjamin Mena [00:13:29]:
Uh, no, we're keeping that.

Riece Keck [00:13:30]:
So you. Oh, okay.

Benjamin Mena [00:13:31]:
Your entire career has ended up because you didn't want to look bad for your cousin?

Riece Keck [00:13:35]:
Basically, yeah. So, so I got in and I walked into, it was the Oakland Robert half office at the time and walked into the, you know, the bullpen and I heard one of the more experienced recruiters sort of hardballing a salary negotiation. I think she was saying something along the lines of like, he is absolutely not looking for that. I'm not going to even take that offer to him. You need to come Back with a better offer and tell me when you're able to. And I was like, you can do that, this is cool. Um, and, and honestly just even like on that first day I was, I was kind of hooked. It was, you know, it's a little bit of like.

Riece Keck [00:14:08]:
And RH kinda has this reputation a little bit wolf of Wall street, like boiler room type of environment, which at the time I was in my early 20s. I was like this is fun. Okay, cool, let's give this a shot. And the rest is history.

Benjamin Mena [00:14:19]:
So I do deep research whether Claude and in chatgpt on every guess. So I gotta ask this like Claude popped out saying Robert half is the Yale recruiting true or false?

Riece Keck [00:14:33]:
I've never heard that one before. Neither have I.

Benjamin Mena [00:14:36]:
That's why I'm asking you this now.

Riece Keck [00:14:38]:
I mean look it, it probably depends on who you ask. I think of pure recruiting skill and fundamentals, it is one of the best. And I will say that I was very privileged and I was very lucky to work with some of the top producers in the world at that office. And then the other office that I went to, I mean if you, if you count your desk and the people you're sitting next to, probably 80% of them are going to the P club. It's called Reach performance. You know when that came around every year, that office was empty. And so just having that osmosis and being able to listen and learn from the people who are that good was, was frankly incredibly beneficial.

Benjamin Mena [00:15:17]:
When I saw that pop up I was like what data did they pull to trade the AI for them to say the yell of recruiting.

Riece Keck [00:15:22]:
I'm like my God, Robert hav's putting out blog articles that are being self congratulatory and trying to try and get, trying to get them indexed by Claude.

Benjamin Mena [00:15:30]:
Anyway, so like you went from like recruiter to senior recruiter to division director to avp. Why did you leave at that point?

Riece Keck [00:15:38]:
Yeah, so I mean, you know, like I said, I was successful there my, my rookie year I believe for all perm divisions, I was number six worldwide which really pissed me off because only the top five went to reach but got promoted after about 10 months. And then about another 10 months after that they asked me to go lead the San Francisco office and that was the promotion to division director. Turned out I did not love the quality of candidate population that I was working with when it came to temps cause I'd in perm. And so I took the AVP role and went back to perm. In terms of why I left, I Think it was a couple things. One is, I felt like even though there was more that I had to learn, I felt like I had a really strong base there. I think the other part for me, frankly, is that I'm fairly a social person. And as you know, it's a fairly high turnover place.

Riece Keck [00:16:27]:
I went through three distinct friend groups in the three years that I was there because it was people who came, made friends with them, people who left. And I walked in one day and I was just like, I don't really even know people here anymore. And in addition to that, I've always had the entrepreneurial streak. You know, I was the guy who was making the lemonade stands when I was 5 and had a lawn mowing business when I was 12. And so it came to a point where I felt like there was not as much tying me there anymore. I had a, an idea of what I wanted to do that was a bit different than the traditional contingent recruiting. And I was in a place financially that where I'd done well enough that I had a solid like six to eight months of cushion even living in San Francisco. So I was like, all right, let's do this thing.

Riece Keck [00:17:05]:
Let's see how it goes. And mostly it was that I was ready to leave. And I just thought, okay, there's two options is one, I can go in house, which is not my personality, two, I can go to another place and build up my desk again from scratch, or three, take the chance on myself. And so that was what I did.

Benjamin Mena [00:17:22]:
So you incorporated March 2019, right?

Riece Keck [00:17:24]:
Yeah, that was it, March 2019.

Benjamin Mena [00:17:26]:
So you're in San Francisco, you incorporated March 2019. Walk me through what your first 90 days looked like with everything's now on your shoulders.

Riece Keck [00:17:35]:
Yeah, so I got a client my first week. So that was, it was nice. It was a company, they were series, you know, series B, series C. And I was, you know, so I first tested out that embedded model on myself and so I basically charged them a monthly retainer plus a, a per hire fee, which worked out well. And then as soon as I got my, my feet under me there, then I started to expand and I started to do the rpo, the embedded placements. So my second client that they're a sales intelligence company and I think they were a series A at the time. They've now scaled to, and they were probably 100 people. They now scaled to many years later, over a thousand.

Riece Keck [00:18:12]:
They're Series D. And so was able to place a couple of consultants there and then a couple more consultants somewhere Else. And then very quickly we also started getting and talking to clients saying, well, you know, the consulting RPO is fantastic, but we actually just want to hire our own perm recruiting team. Can you do that? And it was just a natural second extension. I'm like, well, I'm already interviewing these really good in house recruiters that are, I'm asking if they want to be consultants. Sure, I'll start placing them perm. So that was, that was a bit more than 90 days. But within 90 days I'd landed, I think three, you know, contracts that went at least nine months to a year.

Benjamin Mena [00:18:46]:
Okay. So you started off as kind of like this hybrid embedded that that was how your business was set up. Like, what did that first contract look like with that first client?

Riece Keck [00:18:55]:
Yeah, so that one, it was a fairly low monthly retainer because I wanted it to be a no brainer, just to get something started and, you know, kind of get my own feet under me. So if, if memory serves, I think we were charging them 5,000amonth plus 7.5% on every hire that we made. However, and that's purely a volume game, right, because you're not just placing them through agency, it's also any of their internal referrals that they make, it's any of their inbound applicants. And so you just get 75, 7.5% of every hire that comes through the company.

Benjamin Mena [00:19:26]:
And when you had that first negotiation, did you walk in with that game plan or did it kind of just evolve as the conversation went?

Riece Keck [00:19:34]:
I gave them two different choices. So I told them we could do flat rate or we could do it more of a success based. And I let the customer choose. And that was, that was the one that they felt made more sense and worked out for me too, because I charge in a whole heck of a lot more than I would have on a flat rate.

Benjamin Mena [00:19:48]:
And then your second client, like, what did you learn from that first client and what did the agreement look like with that second or third client and the changes that you saw now that

Benjamin Mena [00:19:56]:
you had the success?

Riece Keck [00:19:58]:
So the second one was actually more that actually we did do a flat rate for that one. And the reason why, if we're going to be very blunt, it was because I was paying another person a pretty healthy margin to do it. And even though I had that six to eight month personal Runway, I felt that I did the math. I was like, all right, so if they underperform, I'm screwed from a financial point. So let me lock in the margin for sure. And that was essentially you can almost think of it as a temp contract, because instead of billing hourly, you're billing monthly and getting margin on top of it.

Benjamin Mena [00:20:29]:
And that kind of goes into, like, 2021, which was. I call it the golden era of recruiting. If you were riding the wave, life is great. What was your. What was your personal billings that year? And, like, what did your company do? Top line.

Riece Keck [00:20:41]:
Yeah, great question. So. And 2021 was the year that I started doing a lot of hiring. So I made my first. My first hire. And I want to say March of 2021. We hired a couple more in May, June, and then we hired a few more in September, October. So, you know, granted, a lot of these new people were ramping at the time, so I made up the majority of the billings, if memory serves.

Riece Keck [00:21:05]:
I think I did 1.2 that year on a total top line of somewhere in the neighborhood of, like, 1.8 to 2.

Benjamin Mena [00:21:12]:
Okay. And then, like, you know, let's set the scene. Like, things are going great. The golden era of recruiting. You just build 1.2. Your team's growing, your team's ramping up. Like, everything feels good.

Riece Keck [00:21:26]:
Yep.

Benjamin Mena [00:21:27]:
When did it might occur to you that this might not last forever? Or did you not see it coming at all?

Riece Keck [00:21:33]:
Oh, I saw it coming. So the moment I knew there was a bubble, and that was when I was like, we got to build a tech division because we need to fix this. So I'm not going to say which company it was because they're. They. They're still around. They weathered the storm. But the CEO of that company called me, and they also did embedded recruiting, but they did not do any perm. It was.

Riece Keck [00:21:51]:
It was strictly embedded. And he called me because he needed to hire several internal recruiters for his company so that they could hire other recruiters to go out to these other tech companies. And so I thought, okay, so you're going to pay a recruiting agency to hire you a recruiter so that person can then recruit other recruiters? Yeah, we're getting to, like, recruit reception here. And I think that this is probably a little bit of a bubble. So that was. And granted, you know, there was probably another, like, eight or nine months before things kind of hit the fan. But humorously, I was like, oh, okay, this seems unusual. And that was when we started building out.

Riece Keck [00:22:27]:
That was when I decided to build out the other. The tech team.

Benjamin Mena [00:22:30]:
I started seeing the writing on the wall when I think they were talking about peloton hiring, like, 20 to 40 recruiters at the time. And I Was like, wait, why do you need that many recruiters? I don't understand.

Riece Keck [00:22:40]:
I mean, it was. Yeah, it was crazy. There was. There was no budgets. People just like, we'll hire whoever we can. Like, you're just. You're just giddy off of, you know, low interest rates and government money, and people just ran wild with it.

Benjamin Mena [00:22:52]:
So I also want to set the scene. Like, you were also prepared for a rainy day. Like, you went and got an SBA loan of how much?

Riece Keck [00:23:01]:
It was 350. You know, we had. So we. We had the cash in the bank at the time, but I was doing the math on how much each new recruiter I was making was making in margin. And so I thought, all right, let's ramp up the hiring here. You know, let's have just a little bit of piggy bank in the back end. And so, yeah, I did take that. And that was in, I want to say, like, September of 21.

Benjamin Mena [00:23:19]:
So, like, you had that, like, as, like, okay, this is a safety net just in case, like, you know, something happens. You never know. Got to be able to pay people. But then you did something that I think a lot of people did. You thought you put your money in a safe spot.

Riece Keck [00:23:36]:
Yep.

Benjamin Mena [00:23:38]:
Do you want to talk about that

Riece Keck [00:23:39]:
or you want to say, yeah, I could talk about it. So I, I did something that I thought was being financially prudent at the time, because, you know, the.

Benjamin Mena [00:23:48]:
Quick, quick pause, quick pause, sure. So I lost money, too. The company that I lost money with was not close to what you were lost, but for the listeners, they were actually advertising as FDIC insured.

Riece Keck [00:24:01]:
Oh, which one was that one?

Benjamin Mena [00:24:02]:
I'd have to go look at my phone. It's been a while. I just kind of, like, wrote it on Nexo maybe. Yeah, it was one of the other ones. But they literally were advertising fdic. I'm like, it's right there. But. So anyways, now go into your story.

Riece Keck [00:24:14]:
So there was. And this was in the, you know, in the crypto space at the time, there were several institutions that would give you an interest on your crypto. And the way that it was positioned to the people who were investing in it was that they were doing secured lending to large institutions. And in the. In, you know, in the past, I'd done some peer to peer lending with lending clubs. I was like, okay, cool. This is a model I'm familiar with. It's secured.

Riece Keck [00:24:36]:
This makes sense. I was. I didn't YOLO it in bitcoin or anything. That would have been insane. I just put it in a stablecoin usdc. For anyone who's not familiar, it's just pegged at the dollar. And they were giving 5% interest on, if memory serves, 5 to 6% interest on any deposits. Treasury bills at the time were like two or three.

Riece Keck [00:24:56]:
So I was like, okay, cool. Well, while I don't need this money, let me just park it in here. We'll collect a couple of thousand in interest every month, the loan costs a couple thousand in interest. I basically break even and I have this piggy bank if I need it. And the money just sat there for eight or nine months. And I had a wealth manager, I had a guy who was like, hey, anytime you call me, you need me, I'm your personal point of contact. And so everything seemed on the up and up. They had, I think I want to say at the time, this may not be 100%, but it was something in the neighborhood of 5 billion under management.

Riece Keck [00:25:27]:
So it's not like this was some small fly by night company. And there was some prior to. And this was in June when kind of stuff hit the fan there. One of the stablecoins I think collapsed. And then they sent out an email like, hey, we're okay, everything's good. Before the kind of like D day they sent out, they literally sent out an email like, you know, man the torpedoes, full speed ahead. We're all good, we have all the deposits covered, everything that we need. And I was like, okay, fine.

Riece Keck [00:25:54]:
Turns out it was not fun. And so it was, you know, I remember, I remember glancing at my phone because, you know, you get an email, you glance at it, whatever. And my wife, who was, you know, eight months pregnant at the time, I was doing something for her and I kind of glanced at my phone, it was like, oh, Celsius is pausing deposits. And I was just like, oh, that's annoying, whatever. And I didn't really even like think about it. It was just like, okay. I thought they were probably just like doing it temporarily. We're not doing it temporarily.

Riece Keck [00:26:20]:
And it turns out that almost everything that they advertised was untrue. It's been a year long, multi year saga. The guy's in jail now the CEO, it's been, you know, several people have been indicted. But you know, I had 350 grand in there with a loan payment of like $5,000 a month. And so it went from oh yeah, this is cool piggy bank money to shit. Now I am massively underwater and have to make payments on money I no longer have. So that was. That was a real kick in the teeth.

Benjamin Mena [00:26:50]:
And that was before everything started slowing down. The rest of the market, right?

Riece Keck [00:26:56]:
Yeah. So that was before. So that was in. That was in June of 2022. And I didn't tell my wife for a couple months because she was, like I said she was eight months pregnant. And I was like, I don't want to keep this from her. But also at the same time, like, stress, baby. You'd want to avoid that.

Riece Keck [00:27:10]:
So I had to sit with that for kind of like a couple of months, just like, holding it to myself, which was not pleasant. And then I told her once a couple weeks after the baby was born. But same time, you know, business was crushing it. We were good. And, you know, I had, I think, 13 employees at the time. So I was like, all right, fine, whatever. This is a 13 to 14 employee salary. This is annoying, but it's not the end of the world.

Riece Keck [00:27:32]:
And then the. Then the crash happened.

Benjamin Mena [00:27:35]:
Like, this is pretty much almost like in the same quarter this all happened. So, like, your gutted business collapsed. Most industry data says, like, tech companies cut about half the recruiters in 2022 and 2023. Your embedded RPO doesn't like this. Like, walk us through as this collapse started to happen. So the listener just, like, can understand, like, what happened.

Riece Keck [00:27:56]:
Yeah, so it was, you know, all the. All the stuff started falling, and we had a lot of, you know, fairly new people at the time that were ramping. And so, you know, when you have your. Your monthly set amount that is coming in. And I, you know, I started in finance, right. Like, I had modeled all of when we were supposed to, you know, which contracts were supposed to go for how long and how much. And I had everything modeled out, and I knew how much I could hire and all that good stuff. And so I was using a lot of the.

Riece Keck [00:28:28]:
The base income that was coming in from all these consultants to start to fund more perm hiring or more perm recruiter hiring, which would then start to pay dividends. Obviously, not everybody works out. Hopefully, the majority of them do. And so, you know, when you go from 40 to 4 over the course of a couple months, that whole plan essentially starts to fall apart and, you know, very quickly. And perm dried up, too. Done. There's nothing. And I was paying somewhere in the neighborhood of, like, you know, $100,000 a month in salary for a division that was not producing anything.

Riece Keck [00:28:59]:
And so, you know, it was probably the toughest day of my professional career, was, I want to say, in probably like mid November. And I had to have a talk with pretty much everybody on that team and just be like, hey, look like the math doesn't laugh here. Unfortunately, we've got to make some tough choices. So, you know, I gave everybody a two week severance and I did say, like, hey, if you want to stay on as commission only, I'll continue to fund your tech and you know, you can keep 80% of what you bill and I'll just keep enough. I basically said, give them everything. You know, I just need enough to like, cover your payroll taxes and insurance. And most people, I mean, to their credit, did stick around, but unfortunately they, you know, it started to drop off because there was just no business to be had. So, yeah, wildly unpleasant.

Riece Keck [00:29:44]:
And then this is also where my beef with LinkedIn comes from because I told them that I had to cut down my number of recruiter licenses from 12 to 4. And they'd never given me any sort of renewal or anything like that. But then they said, oh, no, no, you have to give us 60 days notice. And I said, well, you never told me that. And so it basically told me, go f yourself. And here's a $50,000 invoice for your next year. While all of that was going on. So not a good time.

Benjamin Mena [00:30:12]:
Is that why you went heads deep and we could talk about that later. Are you learning all this stuff on how to avoid LinkedIn?

Riece Keck [00:30:18]:
It honestly definitely played into it. I have not had a LinkedIn recruiter license since 2022, and I will, I will not have one again. I'm good, like, but I want to

Benjamin Mena [00:30:27]:
go back to this conversation that you had with your team because, like, I mean, that's like a nightmare for any owner. It's a nightmare for anybody that's sitting like in that seat, like, hearing that conversation, like, take me to that room. Like, how did you have that conversation?

Riece Keck [00:30:40]:
Like, you know, it was, it was incredibly hard for me and I hate, I hate when people say, you know, that are, to people that are losing their jobs, like, oh, this is hard for us too, because the person is not the one losing their job. I mean, ultimately, you know, everybody that I worked with, I really cared about and I, I hated having to, to do that. Obviously, I gave them all the support that I could, references, et cetera, and pretty much everybody landed on their feet relatively, whether it be in house or in some other industry. Relatively soon. A couple went on to start their own shops and they've, they've been successful as well. I don't think anyone was entirely Surprised because no one. You know, when you haven't gotten a job order in two months, then you have the whole team there. Like, it's not unexpected.

Benjamin Mena [00:31:23]:
So like the entire team was looking at the job order board being empty for two months.

Riece Keck [00:31:29]:
Oh, yeah, no, we didn't pick up anything. I mean, we, we were getting orders on tech, but Nothing in, in R4R with, with going from like 40 to 4.

Benjamin Mena [00:31:36]:
Okay. So like it was. Everyone was at the point of just praying like something was going to pop.

Riece Keck [00:31:42]:
Pretty much, yeah. I mean, you're going out, you're hitting the pavement, you're hitting up your old contacts, you're doing your business development, you do everything you know how to do. It's not like we were just sitting on our hands waiting for stuff to come to us, but it was, there was just nothing to be had, unfortunately. And so, you know, everybody knows, everybody with a brain knows that you're burning, you know, 5 to 10k a month per person with, with nothing to show for it. It's. It's not something you're able to sustain

Benjamin Mena [00:32:02]:
before we start talking about the comeback and like, what you did to start building back up.

Riece Keck [00:32:06]:
Yep.

Benjamin Mena [00:32:07]:
Being able to look in a rearview mirror is so much different than living through it in that very moment. For somebody that might be going through that moment right now or happens to be whenever they are listening to this going through that moment, what advice would you have given yourself back then with what you know now?

Riece Keck [00:32:26]:
Yeah, that's a great question. You know, to my credit, even though, you know, call it the risk management of Celsius was not the best thing in the world, I. I do think I handled that as pragmatically and as carefully as possible. So, you know, if you are going through that situation, you know, remember that it's, it's not about you. Regardless of how crappy you feel about doing it, it's about the person. And so your, your job is to set them up for support and success in their next role, whatever that might look like. Um, so even though, you know, even though that was kind of a crumbling of what it felt like practically everything I had built over the course of the last couple years, I did try to support the team in their next roles as much as possible. And so that was proactively writing letters of recommendation for each of them.

Riece Keck [00:33:13]:
It was continuing to, you know, be available for support and references. It was making introductions to, to previous clients where it was like, hey, I know you're not going to pay any sort of fee for this, but here's someone who you should hire. And I was able to place a couple of of people that way.

Benjamin Mena [00:33:29]:
So fast forward going into 2023, like you merged with another company. Was it around July in that neighborhood?

Riece Keck [00:33:37]:
Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:33:37]:
From the outside, like that looks like an exit. Oh man, that is cool. I was able to exit from the inside. What was it really?

Riece Keck [00:33:45]:
No, look, I mean, and I don't even call it an exit on LinkedIn, I call it a merger because that's really what it was. So, you know, we were talking to a couple firms and you know, it's under. There's no under illusion. And at the time, ironically, I was building for an exit. Right. That was why I was doing the embedded. I wanted to have a strong recurring revenue base coming in as opposed to contingent. Um, but you know, it was nothing life changing.

Riece Keck [00:34:07]:
So essentially what that looks like is it was a company who was starting to work and roll up a lot of rpo, a lot of smaller shops. Avra was actually at the time, and I don't think I've ever even changed it on my LinkedIn. Avra was another one that they rolled up. So they rolled vault into that and then Avra I think is now rolled up into the company that is currently. And so essentially what that looks like is I think I have an NDA in place. So I can't say like a ton about like the terms or anything like that, but you know, at a high level it was a token amount of. Yeah, small, small amounts of money and. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Riece Keck [00:34:40]:
And then, and then it was a, essentially a recurring revenue agreement on all of the future RPO business that we brought in or that that came into us, we would give to them. And I wanted out of RPO, right, because like 2020 crashed when hiring slowed down, 2022 crashed when hiring slowed down. I'm like, okay, it'll come back eventually and it has now, but it's going to stop again at some point. And I do not want to be in a business that disintegrates by 90% when hiring slows down.

Benjamin Mena [00:35:05]:
So here's one of those things, like once you hit that point, like you could have done what other agency recruiters or firm owners did. You went in house, you know, got another job at another agency, became a VP of talent. Especially like with the clients that you're working with, you actually did the opposite. Walk us through, like where you went after this.

Riece Keck [00:35:24]:
Yeah. So 2023 was a very scrappy year, wasn't a big billing year. It was me working with the Recruiters that were left in tech on primarily filling tech jobs. It was pretty lean. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it was nothing to brag about. And then about in 2024, coming into that, one of my VC contacts, we'd done a ton of work with this one VC firm at a bunch of their portfol companies to VP of talent messaged me and said, you know, hey, we have a, we have a, an RPO opening like that. You're still doing rpo, right? And I was like, no, screw that business model, but I happen to have a $5,000 a month loan payment. So what you got? So, you know, I took the, I took the engagement that historically I would have always sold myself.

Riece Keck [00:36:13]:
And I took a little bit of time away from active business development and was leading talent internally at a series B AI startup still on a consulting basis and doing it, you know, similar month model. But that was when I was also going some. Through some pretty extreme personal, challenging stuff. And so, you know, we can get into that as much as you want. But I, it was sort of at the time I was like, you know, you have to have a certain mindset in order to run an agency. And regardless of how you choose to slice it, whether it be relationship based, whether it be systems based, whether it be marketing based, whatever you have to be on and you have to be a hundred percent in. And mentally I wasn't 100% in. So I took almost what you could call like a breather until I was ready to come back and hit it.

Benjamin Mena [00:36:54]:
And when you came back and hit it, you know, what was inside you personally when you're like, okay, I'm finally ready.

Riece Keck [00:37:01]:
It was an alleviation of the things that were going on in my personal life once I got to a certain point where the problems were in the rearview mirror to an extent, it was there where I was like, okay, I can mentally flip back to being 100% in it. And that was when I made the switch.

Benjamin Mena [00:37:18]:
And with that switch, and we're now walking into. What is this? 2025.

Riece Keck [00:37:22]:
It was 2025. Yeah. Early, early 2025.

Benjamin Mena [00:37:24]:
When you started building again, when did you hit the point where like, I need to also start building an internal product for myself and not just do what I've always done.

Riece Keck [00:37:36]:
So that was. And, and you know, the product itself, we can talk about that down the line because that's still about a year later. But the way that I thought about this and, and I've done a lot of kind of soul searching and just on like who I want and what I want to get out of my career and my work. You know, heresy to say on your podcast, but like, working with candidates is not really my cup of tea. I like working with clients. I like doing the business building. The work of recruiting, the work of sourcing is just, it's kind of a necessary evil. And so when I was thinking about this, it's, you know, I had, I had the most fun when the team was larger and I was doing more of the strategy in the building.

Riece Keck [00:38:11]:
Like, I was still hands on billing, but I had, I had more fun when I was doing that. But at the same time, from a pragmatic perspective, recruiting is an incredibly hard business to scale because it is so relationships based. It is. So, you know, particularly if you're doing contingent, it's a little bit lumpier and it's harder to get predictable recurring revenue. And so my thought was, you know, even if I'm a little bit more in the weeds and talking to people than I would like to be, I think the way that I want to do this as I start to rebuild here is building, rebuilding and automating as much as I possibly can through technology. Because now the tech has advanced so much even in the last couple of years where I can do that. And if I start to build a machine for myself, I have to build the machine first. And then every person that I bring into the team is a multiplier to that machine as opposed to what I previously did where I brought in people to brute force growth.

Riece Keck [00:39:03]:
So that was my, that was my strategic shift this time around.

Benjamin Mena [00:39:07]:
I want to ask you something that you said two years ago publicly. You said, I love researching. This is fun. AI won't replace great recruiters anytime soon, but it will replace mediocre recruiters sooner than you think. You said that two years ago. What do you think about that line now?

Riece Keck [00:39:26]:
I stand by that. And I'd say we're a whole heck of a lot closer to that actually now starting to happen than it was two years ago. Two years ago, the tech, the AI was still fairly rudimentary. You operate with ChatGPT through the chat box, and that's pretty much it. You know, for those who don't keep up with, with technology and the developments in AI as much, it is incredible what you can do now from an automation standpoint. And so the way that I think, you know, if you're going to, to win as an agency recruiter is, you know, ideally you can do both, but you have to either become incredible with systems and incredible with building and scale your manual output beyond what any person can do, or B, you have to become incredible at relationships and have a huge network of people that you can consistently keep in touch with that answer your call. And ideally, you can do both things. If you're a relatively, you know, undifferentiated contingent recruiter that gets a new job order in a new market and goes on LinkedIn and sends some sourcing messages and send some emails, you're, you're going to get crushed.

Benjamin Mena [00:40:26]:
You also talked about how Most recruiters spend 80% of their time on the fine side looking for candidates. Like, I see that disappearing literally month by month. Where should recruiters start spending more time at?

Riece Keck [00:40:39]:
So, in my opinion, top of funnel is something that you want to automate as much as possible. And that goes for both sourcing and for business development. And so when I say automate, for example, on the business development side, if you are still looking at a job ad on Indeed, and then going over to LinkedIn and clicking on the company name and scrolling through the people who work there, trying to find who the hiring manager is and then clicking on your Apollo extension and writing them an email, don't you need to, you need to get a better way and there is a better way to do that. Or if you are still going into PIN or juice box or LinkedIn recruiter or whatever your sourcing tool of choice is and manually reviewing each and every single profile to determine if you want to reach out to them. My friend, there is a better way. You have to figure out how to do that first. And then once you have figured out how to automate that low value but important work, then that's the time that allows you to spend on not only relationship building, but human judgment calls. AI is amazing, but it cannot replace, you know, a, the level of experience and pattern recognition that you have.

Riece Keck [00:41:43]:
I mean, in theory it's possible, which we could talk about, but it's not going to certainly do it for a long time out of the box and who you are as a human, which is ultimately, you know, a lot of the value that we bring as, as recruiters. So ideally, you should be spending much more of your time on that part of it than the stuff that involves clicking around on your computer.

Benjamin Mena [00:42:01]:
That kind of like walks us straight into like the, the frameworks that we talked about in the pregame session. Like Framework one was on how to really get that BD engine going for yourself. And I think like when we were sitting there talking about it was like, you know, what is something that a listener can take away from today to go and improve their desk? And one of the first things you said was a lower no code BD machine. First of all, what the hell is that?

Riece Keck [00:42:25]:
Cool. Yeah. So I'll tell you exactly what I did and you are, you are free to, you know, record this, to download the podcast and replicate this. So essentially the engine that I built is made up of a few different components. So apify, if you're not familiar, is a scraping platform and that is used for a variety of things. You can scrape almost anything. But what I used it for was scraping job boards. So I didn't really use, indeed, there's a well found scraper on there, there's a built in scraper.

Riece Keck [00:42:52]:
And I use that because I was in tech. Use whatever job board makes sense for your given industry. And there was six different business development methods that I had. But I could just start with the job boards because that's the simplest part. The second thing is once you, and you run that as a daily scrape so you can schedule it, it runs daily, it picks up. The first thing I did is I ran backwards of 60 days, so it grabbed everything and then I ran it on a daily scrape once going forward. So it catches all new jobs that are published that day in whatever market I'm looking at. Once it identifies the job, then that gets piped through N8N, which is basically a version of Zapier on steroids, and goes into clay.

Riece Keck [00:43:25]:
And clay you can map out all the columns. So you have your job, you have your company, you have the job order link and what have you. Clay is something where there's, it's, honestly, it's pretty hard to learn, but the value unlocked from it once you figure it out is huge. And so what I did then is I used an AI call. So you get your API key to identify, based on the job, the most likely titles of the hiring managers. You know, I always look for a VP of talent and then founder, depending on like size of the company and what have you. And then you use an Apollo enrichment to do a search of the company, see who matches the name, whether it be exact or fuzzy. And then those are your contacts that you want to reach out to.

Riece Keck [00:44:03]:
And then you use another Apollo call to get their emails. This is automatic. This runs every day with no effort from you. So it's. You log in, you see. All right, here's all my list of the jobs. Here's the hiring managers contacts. We need to reach out to from there, then you, you know, you pipe it into your next sheet.

Riece Keck [00:44:18]:
It uses AI to enrich and create the email. You know, you can have variety of how you want to make your copy and just which variables are filled out, what have you. And, you know, we can go into the messaging exactly in a little bit, but once you have that, then you essentially then pipe that into Lemlist. You map your variables that were filled out in clay into Lemlist, and it automatically then will drip out from your campaign. So I automated this entire process, soup to nuts end to start. And the only thing that I would check is I would go into Lemlist and I would just do a quick, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and just do a sanity check on everything before I send it out. So nothing ever left without me checking. So that's one.

Riece Keck [00:44:54]:
There's the. There's the MPC campaign. So obviously you have great candidates, you want to market out, whoever you want to work, you figure out, all right, which, you know, which sector of companies would most appreciate this. So I use Crunchbase. Let's say that I have a senior software engineer in NYC who has fintech companies, who's worked at fintech companies. I'll go pull a list of all the fintech companies in nyc, drop them into Clay, do a similar enrichment to what I just told you with Apollo. Automatically create the MPC blurb and email, Drop that in. You can do hundreds in minutes.

Riece Keck [00:45:25]:
Clay also has a signals watcher where you can do a couple things. So you can watch companies and you can look at new hires who have come into those companies. So I use that in one, in two different ways. One of them was looking at new hires for all leadership hires that were in my vertical. So anybody who's an engineering manager up to a CTO would basically refresh once a month on a target list of 6,000 companies, and I would find every single new relevant person every single month. I only did it once a month because it's expensive to run, but it gives you that. That list for the whole month. The other thing that I would use it for is I would use it to identify backfills.

Riece Keck [00:45:57]:
And so what I mean by that is anybody who is a target in my sphere that I fill, not just hiring managers, but senior software engineers, software engineers, etc. You run that same. That same clay signals list and you see, all right, who took a new job at any of my target companies. And then what you do is you enrich their profile, and it will pull out all their previous employers. So their previous employer, you look at their previous employer and when they left their previous employer. So if they had just recently left within the last 30 days, as in they quit this company to come work at this new company, that is a signal for me if they were unemployed for like eight months before, there's no, there's no backfill opportunity. But, but if they just left, that tells me, okay, this company has an opportunity, they lost someone, they're hurting. So I would use the Apollo enrichment scheme that I told you about to find the person to reach out to automatically and send them a note saying, hey, I saw Ben Mena just left and took a new gig at Databricks.

Riece Keck [00:46:51]:
Was curious, you know, if you're looking to refill, here's someone who might be a good fit. Runs on autopilot. And then the last one was Crunchbase was funding. So every company that raises new funding, whether it be seed over a million dollars up to a series D automatically imported by a zapier to Crunchbase does the same enrichment. Whole thing runs on autopilot. Just check the limitless leads before you send them out.

Benjamin Mena [00:47:11]:
And they helped you Bill, how much?

Riece Keck [00:47:13]:
I basically cold started my agency again, did 800 my first year without really reactivating many of my old clients. I mean I did some of them, but yeah, awesome.

Benjamin Mena [00:47:21]:
And real quick for those that are listening, he's going to be speaking at the AI Recruiting Summit in July. So make sure that you hop in the show notes get registered. So that way you could see his talk in action, along with a lot of other awesome recruiters sharing what they're

Riece Keck [00:47:35]:
doing for anyone who wants to. I've figured out how to rebuild that entire thing that I just described in Claude Code with a few API connections to make it a whole lot less miserable than it was doing it in clay. So that's what I'm planning on showing.

Benjamin Mena [00:47:48]:
Woohoo. Yeah. So Claude code all that stuff together, make sure you get registered for his talk. So you can definitely see that in action. So you also talked about something that I think a lot of recruiters forget about, but this has really helped you make money. Strategic partners. For somebody listening, like they hear that you're like, okay, like a strategic partner, like what does that actually mean?

Riece Keck [00:48:11]:
Yep. And so I think we all know this, that the best way to get business is through referrals. Right. The hard part about doing is that it's not scalable. And the cold outreach is great, it's the lowest converting, but when you can do it at such a pace that you run on autopilot like I described works great. However, the, if you can find a way to get systematized introductions then that, that works incredibly well. So the way that I did that is I, you know, it wasn't a formal partnerships program per se, but I made friends with a lot of people who were in the space that worked with complimentary clients, where they worked with the same client population that I did, but offering different but adjacent things. So what I mean by that is let's say that you know, I recruit for tech and there's a company that does SoC2 compliance that also works with tech.

Riece Keck [00:49:04]:
I'm like, I don't, I shouldn't partner with them because we're never, they're going to never talk to that company about recruiting and vice versa. But when we are. So one of the, one of the partnerships that I had was with a, an accounting firm that specializes in high growth startups. And so very frequently they're talking to these founders that are starting to build all their functions in house or starting to outsource their functions. And they knew me, they knew that they could get a pretty healthy referral fee by referring someone to me. And so that was a way that we got a lot of business. Another one, although this was a little bit, this kind of breaks my rule because it wasn't the same audience but you know, I was partners with a, someone who specializes in agency to agency recruitment, rect to recruit. So whenever somebody came in misdirected from Rector rec that was in house and was like, hey, we need to hire a recruiter, she sends them to me, I give her a cut of 25% on the back end for the first couple placements.

Riece Keck [00:49:54]:
You know, if you're tech you can do dev shops. If you do finance and accounting, you can do CPA firms. You know, you just really think about what are the other companies in my ecosystem that service my same type of client and how can we help refer each other business and give each other kickbacks.

Benjamin Mena [00:50:09]:
So if somebody's sitting there thinking about this and they just listen to you, like you like literally walk through how you made money and they're like, holy crap, I can do this myself. Like, what's their play? Like who do they call first?

Riece Keck [00:50:19]:
It depends. Again, it depends on who your market is and who you recruit for. Right? So that's, that would be the first thing that I would think about is just map that out and do it with cloud if you have to. If you, if you need some help with the creative juices. You can also, I mean recruiting business owners tend to be, well, networked. So another way that you can do it is if you have a customer or if you know someone in your network who works with the same type of companies, whether that be startups or manufacturing or whatever, but for a different functional specialty, talk to them and see what sort of business you can refer each other if they have a need that is in the. For example, like go to market was one that I did a lot of work with because I did tech. So that's where I would start.

Riece Keck [00:50:55]:
Would be other agency owners. But take some time to think and map out what types of agencies or companies make the most sense to partner with and then make a short list from there.

Benjamin Mena [00:51:04]:
So I'm doing this like what does that call look like? Do you like offer a referral base, A referral fee? How do you have that conversation?

Riece Keck [00:51:12]:
It is a sales outreach per se, but it's a much warmer one because you're trying to make them money, not get them to pay you for something. So typically what I would do is I would reach out and I'd just say, you know, hey, FYI, this is the type of company we work with. I was curious if you've ever worked on any sort of partner referral basis before. And if they say yes, then great, they already know. If not, then you just say okay, perfect. You know, FYI, that the way I typically do it is that if you refer me a deal, I'm able to give you up to, you know, x percent of the first placement. And that typically is a, you know, referral fee of call it, you know, five to $15,000, whatever that may be. Is that something that you think would make sense to, to look into and chat about? And if they say yes, then fantastic.

Riece Keck [00:51:54]:
And if no, then fine, just like any other sales call.

Benjamin Mena [00:51:58]:
So another thing that you mentioned like when we were talking about this in the Pre game is 90% of recruiters like suck at outreach and their messaging. They're like everybody. That might be harsh, but maybe, Maybe he says 87%. I mean I want to say, but like you know, everything's vanilla, everything's like chocolate, everything's strawberry. Like why is Persona based messaging so important? Like how do you actually dial that in?

Riece Keck [00:52:22]:
Yeah, so the Persona based messaging is important because what it does is it's for one thing, it's very low lift to do. It's basically it's a one time mapping exercise of whoever you sell into of their psychology and an understanding of what, what their markets are. And the reason why it matters is it's going to help you get higher conversion rates and higher responses on your outreach because it shows that you actually understand their problem and what they are likely facing. I never will say, like, hey, this is a problem you're facing. But I will say, you know, this is typically what founders at your stage have told me as a problem. You know, I was curious if that resonates with you. And so when you do that, it's not only is it show that this, oh, this person actually knows and understand my problem, but it's a little bit of a pattern interrupt because they're so used to getting these, these vanilla messages. And so I wish I could quantify how much it helps, but anecdotally it certainly does.

Benjamin Mena [00:53:15]:
So we've talked about a lot, but I kind of want to look in the future because you've, you've had a recruiting agency that has pretty much almost died twice.

Riece Keck [00:53:24]:
Once is like when we were just starting to take off and then, and then the other one, yeah, it died.

Benjamin Mena [00:53:28]:
But now like you're sitting there playing around and like you're looking at what the tech can actually do for a recruiting agency. So let's Fast forward. It's 2026 right now, mid-2026, when this goes out, definitely before the AI summit. Fast forward to 2028. What does the agency look like? What's still here, what's gone, who's succeeding and how are they succeeding?

Riece Keck [00:53:53]:
Yeah, it's a great question. So I think that from a, from what's still here in terms of. Well, I guess before I clarify on that, are you saying like what types of recruiters are still here or like what is a day to day in a recruiter's life look like that's still here?

Benjamin Mena [00:54:07]:
Let's do a combination of both.

Riece Keck [00:54:09]:
Okay. Yeah. Well, I said, you know, like I said earlier, I think if you, if you don't do either, go either all in and very strong on your relationships or your systems and you kind of continue to do things the old fashioned way, I think you're going to get your lunch eaten by someone who's doing one or two or both of those things. In terms of what a recruiter's job is going to look like in the next two years, I think on the business development side, in terms of the prospecting, that's going to be largely automated. You know, that's, that's my product and what I, what I pivoted Rune to my startup, which was basically Building the principles that I just described, but in a software package that makes it easy for people to use. On the recruiting side, you have, you know, so right now you have your, your juice boxes and your pins, and I think where that is going to change, and it is already changing to an extent because I'm doing this with pin and we can talk about it if you want to, but right now the recruiter is still in the driver's seat and is using Juicebox or PIN as the interface to do their searches and put in their filters and look at their profiles and say, do I want to message this person or not? In the very near future, AI is going to be driving that with, with humans as the, the sanity check or the trainer, if you want notes. Table stakes already automated. ATSs are going to have to adapt to essentially what I think is what I would call an agent first way of operating, which, I mean, we have that with ATLAS already.

Riece Keck [00:55:25]:
You have that with spot. The ones that aren't doing that are going to be in real trouble. And what it's going to happen is that recruiters are going to have an, you know, an agent or a set of agents that are able to interact with and see and connect to everything they use, and they're going to understand how the recruiter thinks, how it operates, and they're going to do everything mundane that the recruiter typically has to do on the computer, and they're going to be able to handle that and update that automatically. The other thing that I talked to, and I very briefly mentioned this when I said that there was an element of the pattern recognition. This is probably a good time to bring that up because what's going to happen is that over time, the recruiter, the AI notetaker is going to ride shotgun on thousands of your conversations. And this was actually what I was building with sort of the first. This is what I was building with the first iteration of Rune, which I pivot more towards the business development model. But over time, it's going to learn and it's going to have all that context and all that pattern recognition, and it's going to be able to do it at a far.

Riece Keck [00:56:22]:
It's going to be able to do math at a far better pace than you can. So it will actually be able to figure out, like, hey, you know, when a candidate says this or when there's this level of pause or what have you, it's. This is, you know, likely an issue. It can only do that if it has all the context, all of your placements all of your conversations, all of your email, et cetera. And so in 2028, there will be that super agent that is essentially the brain of your agency. And what's going to be left for the recruiter to do is going to be to build the relationships, talk to people on the phone, have the live conversations, the closing conversations that should never be relegated to an AI, but the rest of it's going to be run by an agent, in my opinion.

Benjamin Mena [00:56:57]:
We've covered a lot today. Like, we've walked through shit hitting the fan. Do you like, I don't want to say like, recovering, but rebuilding to a 800k a year, like, using the tech that you went deep in. Before we jump over to the quickfire questions, is there anything else that you want to go deeper in, or is there, like a question I should have asked you?

Riece Keck [00:57:18]:
No, I don't think so. You did great. You did a scary amount of research. When you sent over the question, I was like, oh, what do you mean by LinkedIn post from three years ago? So, no, no, you did. You did great.

Benjamin Mena [00:57:27]:
So you've had a $1.2 million year. You recently had an 800k year. Recruiter is hitting you up and like, hey, I want to go from average to elite. What advice would you recommend to.

Riece Keck [00:57:38]:
I would say you need to figure out, you know, it's tempting for me to say, like, jump into the tech and learn the tech and take advantage of it, because that's my first instinct. But that's not how everybody is wired. So what I would say is, is learn what your superpower is or whatever your, you know, your zone of genius, I think is a term that I've heard, and really lean into that and put 90% of your effort in focusing on that. So if that's tech, fantastic. If it's relationship building, fantastic. But you need to figure out what it is that makes you different and unique and what you're excellent at and double down on that. And if you don't know what that is, then you need to spend some time soul searching and figuring it out.

Benjamin Mena [00:58:15]:
Has there been a book that's had a huge impact on your career in life?

Riece Keck [00:58:20]:
I liked traction, actually. I'm not sure if you, if you've read that or heard of it, but it was, it was very helpful for me. It's called the eos. And that was really helpful when we started scaling up larger. So, yeah, traction.

Benjamin Mena [00:58:33]:
So your head's deep in tech. Like, you are understanding this AI, and if I ask you this question six months from now, it might be a different answer, but at this very moment, what is your favorite tech tool?

Riece Keck [00:58:45]:
Claude Code. Slash, slash. Codex. Codex is used more for coding. Claude Code is used for primarily coding, hence the name Claude Code. But it's also able to connect to all of your systems, it's able to use your computer and so forth. And so I spend, I spend a lot of the day in cloud code. I don't even interact with my ATS anymore.

Riece Keck [00:59:05]:
I had built an MCP that connects to my ATS and runs it from there.

Benjamin Mena [00:59:08]:
For those like, I know what MCP is.

Riece Keck [00:59:11]:
Model Context. Sorry, sorry. Model Context Protocol. So. So if anybody who's not familiar, MCP is essentially a set of tools that your AI agent is exposed to that they can do in your system. So even if your ATS does not publish one, if they have their API docs available, which the vast majority of them do, you can give it to Claude code and you can say, hey, figure out what you need in order to be able to drive and interact with my system for me. And you can tell it I need to look up these candidates, move this candidate from this stage to this stage. Do this in bulk for me.

Riece Keck [00:59:41]:
You can basically make Claude drive your ATS for you already.

Benjamin Mena [00:59:44]:
And for those listening, you can use your MPCs or MCPs for your MPCs, right?

Riece Keck [00:59:51]:
You could. Yeah. So, so this is what I mentioned. I'm going to go pretty deep into when we, when we do the summit in a couple months. But that, that whole process that I just described, where you can find leads in mass, create, not even, you know, and clay, I was doing it with personalized snippets. You can make them entirely personalized email campaigns at this point, basically there's something called like a model council where it will review its own messaging and if it doesn't pass the quality bar that you have set and you can tell it, hey, you're not allowed to use any EM dashes, any of, like the AI slop. Writing it will kick it back and keep writing until it's done. There's.

Riece Keck [01:00:27]:
There's a massive amount you can do

Benjamin Mena [01:00:29]:
with it and with everything that you've gone through, which is a lot, especially for the amount of years that you've been a recruiter. If you could go back to you sitting in that chair, Robert Half, because you didn't want to actually, like, piss off your is your cousin.

Riece Keck [01:00:44]:
Yep.

Benjamin Mena [01:00:45]:
Like, what would you tell yourself?

Riece Keck [01:00:47]:
You know, I had a great run at Robert Half. Uh, I wouldn't, I wouldn't do anything Differently there. I would have probably told myself to do tech from the get go as opposed to the embedded recruiting because that's a lot stickier. But yeah, you know, I, I think if I could go back and do it all again, it would have been a less tip of the spear business model. But. But live and learn.

Benjamin Mena [01:01:12]:
This has been an awesome interview. And two things before I let you go. First of all, if somebody wants to follow you or connect with you, how do they go about doing that?

Riece Keck [01:01:21]:
Yeah, so I mean the easiest way is LinkedIn. I've got a weird name, so it's R I E C E Reece and then Last name is Ke on LinkedIn. I have an X account too, but I don't use it as much, so I'd say LinkedIn certainly would be the best way.

Benjamin Mena [01:01:33]:
And is there anything else that you want to share with the listeners before I let you go?

Riece Keck [01:01:36]:
No, you know, I guess the last thing that I would say is that, you know, we're at a very unique inflection point. And to your point earlier, Ben, that that post about the undifferentiated mediocre recruiters, that that time is coming faster than ever. So if you decide that you want to lean into your, you know, people and, and relationships as your zone of genius, continue doing that and start to really build, I would call it offline communities or away from LinkedIn. So maybe that's a slack channel, maybe that's a discord group, maybe that's in person meetups. You know, I think for better or for worse, the volume of just crappy AI generated outreach is out of control. And so people are starting to really value and pay attention to those, those in person and those really human experiences. And if you decide you want to go more of the tech route, then set up and do everything you can to keep up with all of the latest technologies because they're coming incredibly fast. And quite literally it's every something, every single week that you can use to augment your workflow and it's pretty exhausting.

Riece Keck [01:02:37]:
And like I said, you know, don't chase shiny object syndrome. But, but if you find out about something three to four months before the general population does, it's a huge advantage and a huge unlock for you. So whichever way you choose, just don't stay in the middle for the listeners,

Benjamin Mena [01:02:50]:
if you want a good laugh. I actually postponed this interview for a few weeks just because I was just like, by the time this goes live, we're talking about might already be like extinct. I was like, all right, we Gotta, like, you know, I'm not doing any interviews before the last summit, so I, like, I just had to, like, give this some space so this will happen sooner. But, but.

Riece Keck [01:03:07]:
And hold on. Before you. Before you got that off. I actually do. Since. Since something just came out and something changes every day, I do have something that I want to share. All right, so for anybody who uses pin, PIN is a great sourcing tool. I think they sponsor the podcast.

Riece Keck [01:03:19]:
They're awesome. So they recently released something. They recently released an mcp. So you can now control PIN through CLAUDE code. I have had some incredible success over the course of the last couple weeks where I set a new search up with PIN. I calibrate with it live on the first 20 profiles or so. Why I think these are a fit, why they're not. And then I tell it, all right, automatically rip until you call it 50 candidates, it will go out.

Riece Keck [01:03:41]:
It will automatically do the work. It'll find however many candidates you tell it to. Now you can also set up something called a routine. And routines have been around, but now there's something called a goal. And goal in Claude code is you exactly what it sounds like. You give it a goal and it does not stop working until it meets that goal. So if you. And this and this can be.

Riece Keck [01:03:59]:
It extends context windows. It can take hours. It will work until it's done. So what you can do is however many sources you have open and let's say you're connecting it to your ats, you can set a daily routine with a goal saying, I need to hit X amount of sourcing outreaches for each of these roles, and here's how I want them split up. Turn your sourcing on autopilot. It's done. It's solved.

Benjamin Mena [01:04:20]:
All right, so make sure that you sign up for his talk at the AI Recruiting Summit. But most importantly, like, like, I wanted him on the podcast to talk about AI. I wanted him on the podcast to talk about business development. Because who the hell shuts down their shop and then all of a sudden turns around and bills 800k? Who has done like 1.2 and then had to rebuild after hit the fan and fell apart? I wanted you on this podcast because there are people out there that have watched the recruiting desk go to zero. There are people out there that have watched their business dry up 95. Also, I want you to know if you are one of those people listening right now that I can like, if you keep going, there is another side. Keep reinventing yourself, because you can get through this. It sucks.

Benjamin Mena [01:05:10]:
But there are other people that have been through this. Rely on their stories because now is the time that you can reinvent yourself faster than ever and be on the other side and be one of those recruiters that in 2028 is just absolutely crushing it. It. I believe in you. Keep going. I'll see you at the AI Summit. Thank you for sharing today.

Riece Keck [01:05:30]:
Thank you for having me.

Benjamin Mena [01:05:32]:
I've spent years talking to big billers and the thing that usually sets them apart is judgment. The gut feeling they bring to a moment of truth in a deal. The question that surfaces, the real objection, the reframe that regains control of a stalling process. The move they make when a candidate goes quiet. Normally that kind of instinct comes from years on the desk. And when you're running 15 live processes at once, you don't have time to engineer that level of thinking into every moment. So too much is left to chance. Until now.

Benjamin Mena [01:06:02]:
Millie analyzes every detail of your live deals and builds the exact strategy you need. Powered by a curated knowledge base from elite recruiters. It's encoded intuition, the judgment and gut feel of big billers translated into real time guidance you can use for every single process. Before every call. You get sharp contextual preparation so you can lead from the first minute. In your inbox, high caliber emails are already drafted. Testing, commitment, checking, fit, keeping momentum. Users save an hour a day on email alone and the way they control calls changes completely.

Benjamin Mena [01:06:32]:
If you've been looking for that AI edge that every top biller is using, try Millie for free today. You know the resume never tells the full story. Candidates share what really matters during conversations, on calls and interviews, over email. Their motivations, salary expectations, plans to relocate. Most of that detail ends up buried in notes and forgotten. Atlas changes that. It's the AI first recruitment platform built to eliminate admin. It captures every conversation automatically and turns it into something you can use with MagicSearch.

Benjamin Mena [01:07:01]:
You can ask Atlas questions like who talked about wanting a four day week? Or who mentioned they're open to relocating next year. It searches across your entire database and pulls the answers instantly. No keyword guessing and no digging through old notes. You get insight from real conversations, not limited resume fields. Atlas also makes BD easier with opportunities. You can track and grow client relationships. Powered by generative AI and built into your existing workflow. If you want visibility, smart dashboards give you a clear view of the pipeline across your business.

Benjamin Mena [01:07:31]:
And that's not theory. Atlas customers have reported over 40% EBITDA growth and over 80% increase in monthly billings after adopting the platform. It's built for agencies that want to grow without adding more manual work. Don't miss the future of recruitment. Get started with ATLAS today and unlock your exclusive listener offer at recruitwithatlas. Com.

Riece Keck [01:07:53]:
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Elite Recruiter Podcast with Benjamin Mena. If you enjoyed, hit, subscribe and leave a rating.

— End transcript —

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