Sales Mastery: How 7,000 Recruiters and 600 Agencies Increased Revenue with Sean Anderson

Benjamin Mena [00:00:00]:
You are going to rock the year, and we're going to help you do that. Here at the Elite Recruiter Podcast, we have the Rock the Year event, the Recruiting Growth Summit, kicking off on March 10. It is going to be awesome. We're going to be focusing on mindset, we're going to be focusing on sourcing, we're going to be focusing on AI, we're going to be focusing on operations and high performance and BD and sales. Every single thing that you need as a recruiter to make sure that you can rock 2025 and make it the year of abundance. Make it the year that that works for you. Make it the year that you crush every single one of your dreams. Let's go get it.

Benjamin Mena [00:00:39]:
Coming up on this episode of the Elite Recruiter Podcast, I think the biggest.

Sean Anderson [00:00:43]:
Myth is thinking things are going to stay the same. People think, well, I've got a black book of contacts. I know them, they know me. I'm safe. I'm like, based on what? Everything comes to me through this. So I was like, what if I started teaching people this and I could teach it without anyone, just me and my business partner could sell it. So in the easter weekend of 2020, when everyone was like, where the hell is the world going? I'm in a box room in my old flat in London building this training program. And then I launched it and we signed 165 recruitment businesses up in three and a half months.

Benjamin Mena [00:01:14]:
Welcome to the Elite Recruiter Podcast with.

Sean Anderson [00:01:17]:
Your host, Benjamin Mena, where we focus on what it takes to win in the recruiting game. We cover it all from sales, marketing.

Benjamin Mena [00:01:25]:
Mindset, money, leadership, and mans. I am so excited about this episode of the Elite Recruiter Podcast because the recruiting industry is changing and there's a myth that is holding recruiters back. We're going to talk about that myth. We're going to talk about why you need to break through these myths and like all these things that we've known for so long. The world's changing fast, and that's why I have one of the biggest experts over in the uk, Sean Anderson, sharing with me probably one of the biggest recruiting podcasts out there. He has trained over 7,000 recruiters in over 600 agencies about how you can make more money. And we're going to talk about what's working. We're going to talk about what's not working.

Benjamin Mena [00:02:06]:
We're going to talk about the differences between UK recruiters and why they're crushing it compared to sometimes us recruiters. But we're going to really start breaking some myths. So, Sean, I'm so excited to have you on the podcast.

Sean Anderson [00:02:17]:
Thank you. Just, thanks for the invite. It's good to be. It's weird being on the other side of the, of the mic. It's normally me doing the talk and doing the questioning.

Benjamin Mena [00:02:25]:
I say the same thing. I like to stay behind the scenes and just ask some good questions and shut up and get out of the way. And so this time I get to ask you the questions. But real quick for like, and, oh, many people in the UK know about you, but not as many people in the US know about you.

Sean Anderson [00:02:39]:
Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:02:39]:
Quick 30 second intro.

Sean Anderson [00:02:41]:
Yeah, I think you, you did, did it? Well, I mean, I, I launched Hoxo eight years ago with a vision to change the way recruiters worked. Really? I, I believe there was a change coming even back in 2017. And you know, the, everything was just phone based and outbound. I thought it would change. And in that time I've now worked with over like say 7,000 recruiters. I've built my own brand on LinkedIn to over a million views a month. And every client comes inbound. And I teach clients how to do the same thing.

Sean Anderson [00:03:06]:
How do they become a key person of influence in their niche, but not just build vanity metrics, but turn it into revenue.

Benjamin Mena [00:03:13]:
And I think that's a big thing a lot of recruiters, like, miss when they're starting to talk about things and do stuff online. It's like, hey, look how many clicks I got. No, like, is the clicks turning to revenue?

Sean Anderson [00:03:23]:
Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:03:23]:
Well, real quick, like, I know you've been training for a while, but how did you even get started in this wonderful world of recruiting?

Sean Anderson [00:03:30]:
How did I get started? Yeah. I was a teacher in the UK in 2010 and I went traveling to Australia. And there's two ways you could learn to be a teacher in the uk. The way I did was not valid in Australia, so there was a conversion price to, to spend money. And I was 24 years old. I was like, I'm not paying that. So I met a load of English and Irish guys in a bar one night and they're all in recruitment. And that was what happened.

Sean Anderson [00:03:53]:
So the Australia market is just dominated by British and Irish recruiters. And I joined Randstad, the second biggest firm in the world. Did a year and a half there. Then I moved to London. I spent five and a half years in a really cool boutique firm where I was their top performer and then got to a point where I was about to launch my own agency. So Hoxo was originally a recruitment company that I was planning for two and a half years. Oh, wow. I changed the planet the last minute.

Benjamin Mena [00:04:17]:
Okay, so real quick, you started recruiting. Just a conversation at the bar?

Sean Anderson [00:04:21]:
Pretty much, yeah. I. I had a friend who had just landed from. We were traveling together, but he went on a different route. He ended up in Bali and I ended up in Singapore. And then when he landed in Melbourne, he was already interviewing with recruitment and I was kind of like, I don't know, I just. When it's your friend. I didn't really take much notice of what he was doing.

Sean Anderson [00:04:40]:
And then he was telling us about it and we literally saw these guys in, on a table next to us, all in suits, local to like from the uk. And I was like, what are you guys doing? Recruitment. Recruitment. Everyone was in recruitment. I was like, oh, what the fuck is this? I've got to think about it. And then I literally just recruited myself. I phoned around the city of Melbourne and blagged my way through and got myself a job.

Benjamin Mena [00:04:59]:
That's phenomenal. That's awesome. So you were actually looking at launching your own recruiting firm? Like, what kind of like shifted you into training?

Sean Anderson [00:05:07]:
I didn't even. I moved into marketing first. So the, the original Hoxo was a, was a marketing agency, like a classic traditional digital marketing agency. But the reason I did that, long story, 2016 was my final year in an agency and I, you know, I was their top billing recruiter. I'd done about a third of the business revenue on my own as a contract recruiter. I built the contract division up to the business which was generating majority of the GP in the company. And I've started planning with my best mate. We were going to launch Hoxo, the recruitment company.

Sean Anderson [00:05:34]:
This was a two year plan. So 2015, 2016 was a plan. In 2016, when it became time to really get on with the, you know, the move, I found myself, I'll be honest, I was a bit burnt out. The kind of daily grind of how we were working, we were picking up the phone and ringing hiring managers and trying to book meetings and it was just physical. Everything was so manual, so dated. And then I'm listening to podcasts like this. But in 2015, 2016, and I'm like, I'm learning from some gurus all over the world. But yeah, I'm making calls to hiring managers in the morning and trying to hit 10 before 10am I was like, there's got to be a way I could generate content.

Sean Anderson [00:06:11]:
And then, and then I started following people like Stephen Bartlett and Gary Vaynerchuk and Casey Neistat and Tony Robbins and all these people that were like having huge influence online. And I had this brainwave that I could be a recruitment business owner with like the biggest brand in the market where. And also so I'm burnt out from the repetitive nature of the outbound role. Even though I had a great client base and you know, I wasn't all outbound, but it was still a lot of that. There was also my non compete in my contract meant that I couldn't ring anyone for the first six months that I knew. So I'm like, there's nothing in here that says I can't be seen or heard or watched or viewed or listened to. So I was like the zero around my content plan here. So I had this vision but I didn't know what I was doing.

Sean Anderson [00:06:54]:
Like I'd never done any content at this point. So I quit my job as with the plan of launching a recruitment company and in the four weeks of non of garden leave where I can't even do any work, I recruited a marketer that I knew and I told him about what I wanted to do. I bought a lot of online training programs so I was learning myself. And then I started ringing recruitment businesses that I kind of familiar with. I have friends who knew and I signed four people up to a contract that I didn't even know what I was going to do to deliver it, but they believed in me. So I was like, I've got something here. And I realized that no one in recruitment internationally was doing this in 2016. No one.

Sean Anderson [00:07:31]:
Like there was no, there was no personal brands, there was no content plans, there was nothing. And I was like, I could either build one business for me and just be the big fish in a small pond or I could try and impact the industry. And genuinely I saw this like global scale of everywhere in the world was dominated by British and Irish recruiters who needed a competitive edge that all worked on the phone and had no experience in marketing. So I thought, fuck it, I'm going to try building something and in six months if it doesn't work, I'll just go back to what I know and I'll do what I'm going to. And the business grew. And so for the first three years going into the pandemic, we were a physical digital agency. But I was the face, I was the brand, I was getting all the views, I was getting all the leads, I was selling and we were signing people up to Retain contracts where we would, we would effectively outsource your market into my team. And that model is not a good model.

Sean Anderson [00:08:18]:
Like I. It wasn't fun, it was stressful, it was, it was difficult. You know, I'd never run a marketing agency in my life, so there was loads of problems with it. We made good money, we delighted some customers, we didn't do great things across the board every time and got to the pandemic and I was sat there thinking, everyone said that, you know, marketing is going to be the first cost that gets cut. And I thought, well, I don't actually do any of the work. Me and my business partner were the front end sales engine and we didn't really, we're not marketing experts at this point. We'd add copywriters and designers and account managers and all these people in our team. What I did know is I was getting a million views a month on LinkedIn and I had a really cool strategy that I documented in my old teacher days.

Sean Anderson [00:08:59]:
I'd written everything down, I was planning, I was organized, I was like, everything comes to me through this. So I was like, what if I started teaching people this and I could teach it without anyone, just me and my business partner could sell it. And so in the easter weekend of 2020 when everyone was like, where the hell is the world going? I'm in a box room in my old Fly in London building this training program. And then I launched it and we signed 165 recruitment businesses up in three and a half months onto this program which literally catapulted cash flow. The actual agency survived quite well in fact, that kind of dipped and then grew again. And so we ended up at the end of 2020, we had this weird business where we had the original business and had this second business growing alongside it, which was training. One was physical done for you services and one was just training. It's a long winded answer to your question, but.

Sean Anderson [00:09:48]:
So it's actually only been since the pandemic. But then over the last few years I've basically been unwind in the agent, the original agency. I've been on white to the point where we don't do any of it anymore. So we're purely a cause of personal brand and a branding consultancy for the recruitment industry. We're not done for you service.

Benjamin Mena [00:10:03]:
Talk about a shift in evolution right there.

Sean Anderson [00:10:05]:
Yeah, I think I've pivoted. What I've always done is I felt something that's important to me that I think is needed, I then do it If I succeed in it, people then typically want to come on the journey with me and I can show other people out there. And I think I keep doing that in my career. But I feel like now we're in a really strong. We've been in the same seat for five years. People know us, we've worked with clients all over the world. We've got a great track record. Like, we're in a good position now and we're now evolving with AI and everything and, you know, making sure that we're not left behind in the next.

Benjamin Mena [00:10:33]:
Couple years, like with you able to, to kind of see the future, what is it, two, two times or three times already? And I know we've talked about AI in this podcast a lot, but, like, where do you see the next two to three years?

Sean Anderson [00:10:44]:
I think it's going to be like so different. I think pre pandemic, the world was a completely different place. And then post pandemic we saw, I think in 12 months I saw more change than in six months. I saw more change than in three, the three, four years before. Because of the four. I think AI is like an ongoing pandemic that isn't going anywhere. Like it's coming faster and faster and faster and we can't escape it. It's not like we're going to go, oh, we've got a vaccine, it's gone, it isn't happening.

Sean Anderson [00:11:13]:
This is fucking coming. So apologies if I wasn't supposed to swear on this shot. You're good. So I think the industry needs to embrace it rather than be scared of it, but realize where the human, you know, I don't think we're going to be replaced. I think we're just going to end up doing less of the job, but with the really high value bits and we're going to, we're going to cut out so much wastage and time and I think it's gonna be a really good thing. Personally, I think it'd be a really positive thing. It's gonna separate people who are open to change from people that wanna stay the same.

Benjamin Mena [00:11:44]:
And I mean, by the time this actually goes live, like, who knows what OpenAI is gonna drop with combination of like operator and deep research in the last week. It's just insane. What's happening exactly. Well, anyways, let's jump into recruiting. Let's focus on the recruiters. So, like, you've trained 7,000 recruiters, 600 agencies. Part of your plan is to really just add additional six figures in six months and like your focus most of the time is LinkedIn like for recruiters or LinkedIn? Yeah, like that aren't invested on LinkedIn, like we'll say I am, like you are. Why should they start now?

Sean Anderson [00:12:18]:
Well, LinkedIn is, has a monopoly in our industry right now. They are able to, you know, the spend on LinkedIn from the recruitment industry is just astronomical. Like the outside of people, it's the biggest spend that a recruitment company will have will be their LinkedIn licenses. If they've got, you know, a fair few people in the business, companies are all invested heavily financially. They spend all their time on it. You know, I ask my customers, do you use LinkedIn in the background all day? The answer is yes. Do you check it on your mobile device before you start work? Yes. In the evening? Yes.

Sean Anderson [00:12:49]:
Do you check it in bed? Most people say yes. I'm like, you'll end up getting divorced, be careful. But the truth is it's, it's all encompassing. It's, it's social media that's in our hand pockets, on our screens all day, every day. And our customers. The Data proves that 50% of all like LinkedIn users actually attend the platform once a week. They don't all in contribute, but they're there. So if you've got 10,000 connections on LinkedIn, like 5,000 are there every single week they're going there.

Sean Anderson [00:13:15]:
I think the role of a recruiter is to get attention. That's the primary role of a recruiter. All day, every day, you're trying to get attention. You're trying to get someone to answer the phone, someone to reply to an email, someone to reply to an InMail, someone to come back to you. You're always trying to get attention. That's it, that's the job, right? When you get the attention, you've then got to have the skills to, to do good things with it, but you've got to get the attention first. And then you've got all these people coming to a platform that you've connected to on a weekly basis, like, why are they there? They're there to learn, to procrastinate, to engage, to develop their careers. They're not there for hot jobs necessarily to be headhunted.

Sean Anderson [00:13:46]:
They're not there to have sales spammy approaches, but they're there to, to interact. They're going there to there to consume. So I'm like, this didn't exist when most people that are probably listening to this got into the industry. It wasn't the same platform, it wasn't an opportunity, but now it is you're spending all your money on there, you spending your time. You've probably got thousands of connections. You've probably got thousands of niche connections that are relevant to the industry that you serve. What are you doing with it then? How long do you need to look at that before you realize there's a gold mine site in front of you?

Benjamin Mena [00:14:15]:
I feel like most recruiters completely forget all the connections they have.

Sean Anderson [00:14:19]:
Incredible. I asked this question every time, right? Is it fair to say, listening, looking at your LinkedIn network, your first degree network, there's hiring managers in there that have hired people in your space in the last 12 months that you didn't get any access to. And everyone I've ever asked says yes. Other candidates in there, perhaps top candidates that move jobs and didn't pick you as their recruiter. And yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone says yeah. It's like, well, that's the biggest problem. Everyone's spending money on LinkedIn Recruiter Pro licenses.

Sean Anderson [00:14:47]:
Thousands of dollars a year sending out cold spammy inmails all day, every day, trying to hit everyone. But then they've sat there with these thousands of people that already know them and they're not doing anything with it. It's just literally ridiculous. And it's so easy to tap into that, you know, to get six figures in six months, which is our kind of like strap line, it's not difficult. It requires a plan, it requires a process, an application to that process. But it's not rocket science. But most people don't want to do it.

Benjamin Mena [00:15:13]:
Okay, let's break this down. Like, you know somebody that's listening to this podcast, like, what kind of plan should they start putting into place to actually start tapping into that network, Working the network to get to that six figures in six months.

Sean Anderson [00:15:25]:
Yeah. I mean, the three things that I always teach and on a high level explain, is one, you should be growing the network all the time. You shouldn't stop at 5,000. Like, unless you've hit. You've got a tiny market that you know everyone, which you won't. You know, people overestimate their reach and their network and the people they know. You should always be looking to find because there's always new hiring managers, people always retiring, people always get promoted, there's always people coming in. You should be invested in that constantly.

Sean Anderson [00:15:49]:
You should be working that network on a one to one and a one to many scale. So one to one is you should be looking at the people that are interacting with you followers, people engaging with your content, people viewing your profile. There's indicators everywhere, the people that are looking at you every day. But the one to many strategy, which is where most people get it really wrong, is their content. They don't understand who they're talking to, why they're talking to them. But you want to be, you want to be sharing sustainable value. You want people to think, Ben is a really useful contact, like, he's someone I'm really glad I'm connected to. That's, that's the goal, is that you want to be really useful.

Sean Anderson [00:16:24]:
Most people think transaction, I've got a job, I've got a job. Can you help me? Can you help me? Can you help me? And all it is is just milk the cow constantly. And it's like, that's not how it works. And then the final thing is you've got to have a process to actually follow up and sell to the network using those tools. You know, when you're creating all this engagement, one to one, one to many, like, are you going for the kill? Are you opening the door? People don't do it, they just don't do it. So they're leaving so much cash on the table, so much opportunity on the table, and they spend all their time banging on doors of people that don't know them, don't trust them, have no connection point and they've got this massive repository of opportunity that they leave for another day.

Benjamin Mena [00:17:03]:
When you say, like, they don't go for the kill, they miss an opportunity. Like where recruiters really screwing that up.

Sean Anderson [00:17:07]:
That and how they're just, they're not seeing that. You know, LinkedIn effectively doesn't. You don't make money on LinkedIn, but you don't do deals on LinkedIn. It doesn't work that way. LinkedIn is a vehicle to get people on the phone and get people in a meeting. So, you know, on a really basic level, if people are interacting with you online, there's a good chance you could get a meeting out of those people. You know, if someone's viewing your profile for the third time, it's not that difficult to say, look, let's have a conversation here. Like, what? What do you want now? You don't want to speak to everyone, you've got to be selective with it.

Sean Anderson [00:17:40]:
But if you're not looking at your brand and thinking, who are these people and am I missing out on really cool candidates and clients? Then, you know, more fool you. Awesome.

Benjamin Mena [00:17:51]:
And I know you typically teach it, what is it? It's 20105 is the methodology that you teach.

Sean Anderson [00:17:56]:
It's something called the 3X system is the methodology. The 20105 is one part of it. It's the engagement strategy. The one to one engagement strategy.

Benjamin Mena [00:18:03]:
Okay, awesome. And real quick for everybody listening, what's that breakdown again? What does that exactly mean?

Sean Anderson [00:18:09]:
It's basically a framework to follow on a daily basis. 20 connections, 10 minutes of likes and comments, and five direct messages. Like, if you follow that in a 15 minute frame and you do that over and over again on a weekly basis, you'll have more phone calls, books in your diary than you can handle.

Benjamin Mena [00:18:23]:
And for the listeners, and I know a few other guests have like actually talked about the, the 2010 5. I'm pretty sure Sean is the one that originated it.

Sean Anderson [00:18:29]:
Yeah, yeah, it's my, I made that up.

Benjamin Mena [00:18:31]:
Yeah, so I was just trying to like, you know, hey, hey guys. This is the guy who came up with it.

Sean Anderson [00:18:36]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just something I was always doing. Like again, everything I'm telling you is what I've done first and then I've evolved it through clients feedback and people have done incredibly well. I've gone, maybe you should do it differently and learn this. And you know, so it's evolved, but it's essentially what I was doing in 2018, 2019 to build my business.

Benjamin Mena [00:18:54]:
Talking about like back in 2018 to now, like, I want to talk about some things that are working and that used to be working and aren't working. I also want to talk about some myths, like, what do you, what do you think is some of the things that, you know, old school recruiters like myself in the game almost 20 years. What do you think is a myth that's like holding us back?

Sean Anderson [00:19:11]:
I think the biggest myth is thinking things are going to stay the same. So most people think I've got relationships and I look, I believe recruitment is a relationship game, but it's not necessarily just like an analog relationship, like a physical relationship game. So people think, well, I've got a black book of contacts, I know them, they know me, I'm safe. I'm like, based on what? There's new people every single day entering the market. There's competition trying to get in with those relationships every single day. There's people hitting online channels where those relationships are seeing them every single day. You know, you're making that one phone call every three to six months and checking in. They're blowing you out of the water because they're being seen every single day, you know, through social media, through channels, through AI, through different methods.

Sean Anderson [00:19:56]:
So the way in which we can consistently engage people. Now is so much more powerful than back in the day. And when you're so busy as a recruiter and you haven't got much time because you're always working on different vacancies and things, you overestimate the reach of your relationships. And actually what happens when these guys go, what happens when they retire? What happens when they move out of the sector? Like, the people who invest now in the future of recruitment are the ones that are going to still be performing in three years, those that go, this is how I've always done it, this is how I'm going to carry on doing it. I genuinely don't think you're going to have the same marketplace in two to three years. And also the jobs are going to change. So if your job changes, your clients jobs are going to change, the candidates jobs are going to change, you know, and the tools that we have at our disposal, so do they. If you're not using those tools and investing in those tools and being part of it, then how can you truly understand what's changing in the markets for your clients as well? So it's like, you're right.

Sean Anderson [00:20:49]:
I think you're either all in or you're all out. And there's so many people that are just sat thinking, nah, this is just noise. I'll be honest, I was probably a little bit like that 18 months ago. I think there's a middle ground. So there's the automate everything, use AI for everything. There's the don't make anything, don't use AI for anything. And there's a middle ground where you've got to think, what are the goals? How can I make things slicker, more efficient and how can I remain authentic? Because that's what it's about. It's about being authentic.

Sean Anderson [00:21:20]:
You can do as much as you want online with social, with AI. You can write so much more content using AI. But doesn't mean it's going to be good. It doesn't mean it sounds like you.

Benjamin Mena [00:21:29]:
I know I was using a lot of AI content when like Chat GPT first came out, but I get give it like two months and I was like, I can pick it out, that you can pick it out. Everybody.

Sean Anderson [00:21:38]:
All the emojis and things in the way, like the overly dramatic headlines and things. You can see people just, they've not written that.

Benjamin Mena [00:21:44]:
I mean, think about this like you run a recruiting firm, you have a team of recruiters, you're sitting there telling people to sit there and like, you know, go Do XYZ get more content online? But so often than not, I don't see the actual firm owners sharing like they should, like, what is this mistake and how do they fix that?

Sean Anderson [00:22:00]:
Yeah, so basically that's what I mentioned before, that like, this is a top down approach, not a bottom up approach. People think, well, my team are younger than me, they use Instagram, they'll be better at this, they'll let them do it. Right. And it's complete nonsense because ultimately, if you're the recruiting firm leader, you've not got there without building great contacts, building relationships, our strong network, incredible stories, war stories. You know, you've done a lot, you've achieved a lot, you've seen a lot, you've made mistakes. That is what people are going to engage with online the most. And you're gonna have the network online that's gonna see it. Plus, if you say, I want you guys to perform a certain way and you're not prepared to do it and you don't understand it, then how is that gonna ever stick? This is not.

Sean Anderson [00:22:45]:
So the firms that I work with that have absolutely nailed it, it comes from the top. The founder, the leadership team are like, we want to do this. And also if you are heavily internally focused as a leader, you know, you're recruiting through your people. Often they're sat with, like I said, dormant networks. They've got all these people, but they don't speak to them anymore. I, I was in that boat. In 2015, I got promoted to the manager of the contract division. And I had a load of people working for me and I had about three or four that literally were trying to like eat up my desk, all of my contacts, all my relationships.

Sean Anderson [00:23:15]:
And I was like, phone this guy, tell him you work for me and blah, blah, blah. And then I'd get an email or a WhatsApp from the guy going, oh, too big for me now. Yeah, you know, like you got younger. The time to speak to us anymore. Like, I'm like, I've been promoted, I'm trying to do my new job. I can't do both. Whereas now I could do both. I could be online, I could be still engaging the network, I could be showing the network why I'm actually doing on a daily basis the business that I'm building.

Sean Anderson [00:23:41]:
They could understand why maybe I'm not the guy that's going to pick up the phone, but I am the guy that's opening the doors so that my team can come through. Do you understand? And like, I'd have all the stories that keeps people engaging, that. And I could be like, look, my team get onto these guys that are following me and watching me and there's so much you can do. But it comes from the top. It absolutely comes from the top. There's also like, depending on the size of the business is going to be more difficult. But you've also got like, some people in our industry don't care how people work. As long as they get the output, they like the results.

Sean Anderson [00:24:15]:
As long as they're billion, it doesn't matter. Yeah. So you bring in enough money, you produce enough, do what you want. I don't typically work with those people. You know, the clients I work with are the ones who go, this is how we want to play. Like a really cool soccer coach or whatever who's like, this is the methodology that our team will operate within. And oftentimes that business, the leader has to show that first and step into that seat and be part of it. The thing is, it's not that much work.

Sean Anderson [00:24:42]:
It's like 30 minutes a day for three times a week. It's not an awful lot of work. And there is AI you can do to speed things up. Like, it's not a massively labor intensive product. I would say it's about the leader taking this seriously and then defining how they want their team to operate. But you're never going to get 100% of a big team on board at the beginning. It's not going to happen. I've tried that and it doesn't work.

Sean Anderson [00:25:04]:
You know, I think you might get 20 that are really bought in, 20 that I've got no intention of ever doing anything. And the rest will want to see the 20 succeed before they step in. They're the second movers. So if I was working with a big company or a larger team, I'd say I only want a handful of your team that have got a mix of seniority and interest, ambition. They're up for it. I can then do enough with that team to show the rest of the business that this is worth investing my time in. But there'll always be maybe 20% that are just like, I'll just pick up the phone and sit in the corner.

Benjamin Mena [00:25:36]:
Well, if you want a good example, you guys, I think it just last night or this morning released a top 100 recruiters list.

Sean Anderson [00:25:43]:
Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:25:44]:
And the number one person is actually one of my friends, Mike Williams. And they do a few million dollars a year and 40% of his business comes from LinkedIn postals. Why not real life Example of something that you literally just shared this morning. I'm so excited we're going to be kicking off a AI and clay boot camp at the end of this month. I've actually partnered with Steven from the Art of Sales Academy. You guys saw him talk at the last summit. But we are putting together a four week boot camp because if you guys want to get off, some of these AI tools are complicated and I'm going to be sitting in the class learning along with you. But these AI tools, once you master them, they can have such a huge impact in your business.

Benjamin Mena [00:26:24]:
But the problem is learning the tools. So we partnered up to put together a bootcamp starting at the end of this month to help you master these tools so that way you can multiply what you have done for your recruiting business. And on top of that, I'm also going to add in a free VIP ticket for the Rock the year summit. So that way you don't miss, miss any of that. Also so excited. Join me for the boot camp so that way we together can learn how to master these AI tools so that way it can work for you.

Sean Anderson [00:26:55]:
With the reason we did that. You know, I keep, I have got these anecdotes of all these people that I've worked with, Atlas who sponsor my show that I just think are phenomenal again in the AI space. They've, they've got the, the data engine to be able to actually prove the data, like to be able to crunch data and show the reach of people. So we were like, let's put it together. It's funny because when you look at the top 100, I think I've taught at least half of them. At least. That's awesome. Yeah.

Sean Anderson [00:27:19]:
So I was like there's some, I haven't ever just. But I'm like me, I was pretty. Because we, we literally just went go like go and find the, the recruiters that are doing well to Atlas. So you know, that was good, good proof for us. And yeah, look, the money people are making is insane from this. Like if you're doing this because you think it's a vanity project, oh, you know, you're not doing this because you think it's a vanity project, then trust me, it's not. It's a revenue generating asset. It's a differentiator because it does two things.

Sean Anderson [00:27:47]:
It makes your outbound easier. It doesn't replace the phone. It just means when you pick up the phone, people know you, people recognize you. It's much easier. And then when you get consistently doing that over time, more people come inbound, more CVs, more hiring managers, more opportunities. I've got a client called Kyle Winterbottom. He's in the top 25. He does over a million a year UK pounds, so 1.213 million on his own.

Sean Anderson [00:28:10]:
He's got a little marketing and what he's got one delivery consultant and a community marketing manager next to him. Last year he sent me a WhatsApp and it was like, just on a $210,000 retainer in the U.S. chief data officer and a team build. And it was referred, it came to him by a client inbound who he's never heard of, didn't know. And then when he said, well, where did you hear about me? They were like, they named another client and he didn't know them either. So, you know, referrals have always been our best business, where someone says, look, I've heard really good things about you. We're now able to do that on a completely different scale. And it'll make the physical referrals of the people you know more.

Sean Anderson [00:28:52]:
More likely because they're going to keep seeing you and they're like, oh, God, you were really good at what you did. They'll come back, repeat business. And then the opportunities are endless in the market that you physically cannot get around and would have been impossible pre LinkedIn brand building.

Benjamin Mena [00:29:08]:
And I know one of the best ways to probably, like to answer this question might be to go look at the top 100 lists that you and Atlas put together.

Sean Anderson [00:29:15]:
Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:29:15]:
Or Hoxo and Atlas put together. But.

Sean Anderson [00:29:17]:
Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:29:17]:
What kind of content actually needs to be created by recruiters?

Sean Anderson [00:29:21]:
Good question. On a very basic level, it should be a reflection of what you're talking about on the phone. I went through a phase when I first started content creation in 2017, where I spent a lot of time scratching my head thinking, what do people want to hear about? What, what, what could I write about today? And it was Gary Vaynerchuk who, you know, his quote was, document, don't create. I think for the average salesperson, it's just a game changer because I was like, I'm already having like 10 calls a day. I'm already selling this shit. I'm already having these conversations, I'm hearing the problems. So everything I'm talking about now is coming from the phone. It comes from my meetings.

Sean Anderson [00:29:59]:
I'm not making this up. This comes from 500 meetings a year with recruitment leaders all over the world. Right. This is real. And if you're on the phone and you're having really good conversations and you're consulting, you're advising, and you're spotting trends and challenges. That's literally the fuel of what should be coming out on LinkedIn. Because when you have a call and someone says, ben, thanks so much for giving me those insights, like, I didn't know that that should go straight to LinkedIn and hit a thousand people. Doesn't need to be more complicated.

Sean Anderson [00:30:27]:
If you're a subject matter expert, don't make it more complicated than replacing. Just put what you're putting on the phone out there in story format. Now, there's way more to it. There's hacks, there's structures, there's processes, there's templates, everything we've got to help people do it and people do. What I find is that the biggest three problems to doing this, number one, ideas. People struggle with ideas. You know, they just don't know where to start. And I always say, you know, on a basic level, don't look at what you could be writing about.

Sean Anderson [00:30:55]:
Just look about what you're already talking about. Look at your calendar, look at what's actually happening in your desk, in your life. But then we've got some really cool processes to be able to give people to just remove that barrier and that within a day they can be producing content that's authentically them. But the second bit, which is really difficult is the confidence piece. People then worry, even when they've got the idea and they've written it down, they think, what's going to happen? The first thing is we go to the negative. You know, what's the worst case scenario? My clients might fire me because of this. My candidates will hate me and I might end up losing my job and be homeless. Like, people go to that level of negativity with it, and we are predispositioned to see the worst in things.

Sean Anderson [00:31:33]:
That's just human nature. But confidence comes from, you know, confide. To confide in someone is in others. You can't confide in yourself. Confidence comes from other people, validation. So we provide that support to our customers. Where we're reading their content, we're literally checking it. We're giving them the confidence that we're like, we believe this is a really good post, like, this is going to perform well, and if it doesn't, what air to work out.

Sean Anderson [00:31:54]:
Why not with you? Now, you can work with my team or you can work with your own team, but oftentimes people don't have anyone that they know that has already been there. They don't They've got no one in their recruitment business that's already proven it. And they can go, what do you think? They're just all looking at each other, going, well, I don't know is any good? And then the third thing is time. As I said, people are already busy. People think when you don't understand the process and you don't understand the methodology, it looks big, heavy, laborious tasks. Whereas when you understand it and you're like, is that it? And you can knock out your content and all your engagement in 30 minutes. You're like, you're already spending that time on LinkedIn. You've told me you were spending it in bed.

Sean Anderson [00:32:30]:
You're spending it in, in breakfast. You're doing it. It's already there. You know the post I released this morning, even though I schedule a lot of my stuff now, I wrote it in McDonald's at 6:45am After a gym session, I get a black coffee in McDonald's. It's the only place open at that time in the morning outside of my gym before I come back and do the kids stuff, I'm there on my phone just writing it out. And it all came from a conversation last night. Simple as I was like, the conversation with a prospect was so vivid. I was just like, I just detailed out what I said.

Benjamin Mena [00:33:04]:
We need to think less, do more, act and talk to you about how to structure it.

Sean Anderson [00:33:10]:
Yeah. I mean, what. At the very basic level. Yeah, it's just getting your own thoughts out and trying to be you. Don't try and be anyone else. Don't try and be chatgpt. Try and be you. It should sound like you.

Sean Anderson [00:33:20]:
I don't want to read content and then jump on a zoom call with you and think, okay, hell, you're underwhelming. You know, if you're not a walking encyclopedia, don't use ChatGPT to write the most intelligent content of detailed dates that you don't understand. It's about authentically representing yourself if you.

Benjamin Mena [00:33:37]:
Want to get off. I always get annoyed when I have like a, before I go to bed thought, just drop it on LinkedIn and I wake up and I'm like, how did this get 50, 000 impressions? What the hell?

Sean Anderson [00:33:46]:
Yeah, they're often the best. I woke up last week to a, to a comment on my YouTube from some guy I don't have. He saw it and he just tore me apart. And it was like Friday morning. I found it really funny. I was drinking a coffee, having a laugh at it, and he Wrote like, I mean, I'm wearing a black T shirt. He said, why are you dressed like a 22 year old? He said I had a fake beard, which I don't know what makes my beard fake. It just made.

Sean Anderson [00:34:10]:
Oh, he faked that. I know. I don't know how that would work. But anyway, I took a screenshot of it, put it on LinkedIn. I was like, look, what the fuck inspires people to write these comments? Like, Christ, this is what the overwhelming feeling was. People on LinkedIn are pretty good. Like, we don't get that level ofshite on LinkedIn. I get it on Facebook and I get it on YouTube.

Sean Anderson [00:34:27]:
So I was like, thanks, LinkedIn, for just being a little bit more professional than this was my post, it was a bit of fun and I had like 150,000 impressions. It was comments for days. Still get an engagement now. And you're like, it took me about a minute, maybe 30 seconds to a minute. Just a screenshot on my phone and just write my thought bomb. Why did it resonate? Because it's so relevant, it's so fresh. People understand it, people have been there, people feel it. And that's when you know your content's good, is when it's in other people's minds.

Sean Anderson [00:34:53]:
If something's in your mind and no one else has ever thought about it, it won't fly. But when it's when you speak about things that are already on front of mind and you're putting your own lens on it, that's the ingredients to fly.

Benjamin Mena [00:35:05]:
I love that. Well, I want to jump over to a different topic.

Sean Anderson [00:35:08]:
Yep.

Benjamin Mena [00:35:09]:
UK versus US recruiters. You've trained so many thousands of recruiters. Have you seen the differences between the two?

Sean Anderson [00:35:18]:
I mean, I'll be really honest, most of my clients globally have been British and Irish people. So, okay, they're dominant. Like, we're just dominant everywhere. So even the US firms we've worked with, most of them have been like expats, Brits who buy our training. But the ones that I've dealt with and I've got relationships with, I think. I think there's a different level of. It's just a completely different market landscape. Like, you've got so much space, the land of opportunity, so many people.

Sean Anderson [00:35:44]:
And the recruiting space is so much small. Like, small. It's like, you know, there's less firms in America than there are in the uk, so we've got more recruitment businesses, we've got way less people. We're like sardines packed in a tin and you guys are sat there, like, with desert acres around you. And. And what does that. How does that impact people's life and behaviors? And it gives. I mean, the UK recruiters are hungry.

Sean Anderson [00:36:10]:
They've got to be. They've got to fight. They've got a literally scrap because there's so much competition where, like, London is like the home of recruitment. Right. So people in those difficult conditions, they have a different level of energy and fight for what they can achieve. And so I actually find the US is like going back in time. Like, it's like the UK was 10, 15 years ago. And even though the UK US is incredibly advanced from a technology and social media perspective, it's not in the recruitment space.

Sean Anderson [00:36:37]:
Recruitment space is behind us and it's. There's about three huge firms in the US and then there's all these little boutiques popping up everywhere now. And yeah, I think that the opportunity is clearly out there for, you know, it's like the golden ticket for recruitment businesses to go and open in the us. Everyone's talking about it is constantly on the narrative when it comes to the people doing the job. I don't think it's ultimately that different. I just think if you've worked in the uk, you'll have a different level of fight and different level of experience than you will in any other part of the world, I think.

Benjamin Mena [00:37:09]:
And the reason why I ask is I actually don't talk to that many people that often based in the uk, but the recruiters that I see have moved from the UK to the US are just destroying it.

Sean Anderson [00:37:20]:
Yeah. Because they've worked at a pace that they come over. Like they literally come to America and they just carry on doing it and it's like, wow. They're prepared to do things that maybe the Americans have never thought about. It's. Australia is the same. When I started my career in Australia and partly why I moved back to London. Well, and it wasn't from London, but I moved to London was just full of British recruiters saying, I'll, you know, the most difficult market.

Sean Anderson [00:37:42]:
It's where it all started. It's where everyone comes from. I was like, I want to go and try it there. It's a bit like the Premier League in soccer. And, you know, you got the mls, so you got the A league. And it's like, this is where it's really the most competitive. And what that's done is it's sprouted out people to go and open all over the world. And every.

Sean Anderson [00:37:59]:
Like my clients in Dubai of British And Irish. My clients in Singapore and Thailand and Malaysia. I've got clients in Australia and New Zealand in the US, in Canada, they're all pretty much 80 will be from. They originated in the UK because of the markets were so tough and they perform well and they've gone off to pastures where it's a bit easier and it's a bit more space and less competition and they've nailed it.

Benjamin Mena [00:38:22]:
That's awesome. Before we jump over the quick fire questions, is there anything else that you want to cover about all the topics that we've bounced across?

Sean Anderson [00:38:29]:
No, I just think people who are listening, you hear a lot. This is such a noisy space. You know, there's so much tech, there's so much innovations, there's tools for everything. There is. There's tools for everything. But if you're already sat on LinkedIn and you're already spending the money on the licenses and you've already got thousands of connections before you do anything else, whether you were with me or not, that should be a huge focus. That should be a huge, huge focus because you want to be a business that in a couple of years, you know, you've got serious trust online because AI won't build trust. AI is damaging trust.

Sean Anderson [00:39:02]:
You know, you can spam 10,000 emails out today using AI and automation and you might get 10 replies and think that was a good day. I think 9,990 people ignored you, put you into spam filters, blocked you before you've even the opportunity to give them something valuable, you know, so you've got an opportunity here to nurture and grow a trusted base of contacts. You've got to make the most of it.

Benjamin Mena [00:39:26]:
Awesome. Well, jumping over the quick fire questions and this is, you know, our world's changing fast. If you had a recruiter that actually called you up, ask you a question, they are just entering our industry in 2025. They're like, hey, you've talked to 1000s of recruiters. What can I do to succeed as a recruiter in this space? What advice would you give me?

Sean Anderson [00:39:45]:
Do less. Better. So be hyper niche. Hyper niche. Like, if you really want to succeed, I think you want to be the guy that knows everyone in a micro niche. Like, you want to be so well connected in one space. And the people that think they're casting the net wide by doing multiple facets, that's just not going to fly in the future. Like you'd rather be the absolute master in one discipline.

Sean Anderson [00:40:10]:
You recruit one type of person on an ongoing basis and you become Famous for that. And yeah, you're going to turn other business down and there's going to be some customers that might not want to work with you because of it, because you only do one thing. But realistically, people respect people that high perform and the only way you're going to high perform is if you just focus in one area.

Benjamin Mena [00:40:30]:
And the same question for somebody that's been in the game 5, 10, 25 years, like, you know, world's changing, I want to keep on crushing it. What advice would you give me?

Sean Anderson [00:40:37]:
If you're in the game for 20 years or whatever, then you've obviously got a viewpoint into the future for yourself. You think, what do I want from my life? You know, I've got a wife, kids, husband, you know, where, where am I going? And I think you should be building your business and your career around where you want to go and what you want to like, how you want to live. Because I think when you get to a certain point, how you make your money is equally as important as how much. If I'm 20 years in the game and you tell me cold call for 12 hours a day and I'll make a million dollars a year, I just still wouldn't do it. I don't want to do it. Like, I don't want to wake up and do that at this age. I've done all that shit, I've tested all the things, you know. So I think when you've been in a game longer, it's about how, how do you want to work and what impact will I have on your life? The goals? Because I see so many recruitment business owners who think they need to scale huge teams to be successful and they don't.

Sean Anderson [00:41:27]:
When you actually, you break it down, they just want to put a certain amount of money away so they're financially free in five to 10 years. And I'm like, it's actually quicker to get there if you don't have the headcount. If you just invest the cash that you make through your billings wisely, maybe have a couple of people around you that make things slicker, you could get so much more money out the other end. But they don't, they don't know that. They just hear all these exit stories and these growth strategies and scale, scale, scale, scale. It's a trap. For some people, it's the right way. They want it, they're built for it.

Sean Anderson [00:41:55]:
But I look at my life and I'm like, I wake up every single day and I do the school run, you know, I'm there for breakfast. I've got a young baby. I've got two step kids. I want to be there at night. You know, I want to be in their lives. And if I have a remote business where we meet quarterly, I have clients all over the world. I host events, I do these really cool things. But 80 of my time, I'm in this house, I'm with my family.

Sean Anderson [00:42:18]:
I've built it around what I want that makes sense. I've really consciously thought about my wife and the impact that'll have on her and the kids and the relationships I want to build. And all these things are important to me, as important as how much money I make. Because at the end of it, I'm not going to go, fuck, I was loaded. But I lost them. All the people that matter. Like, it doesn't. It doesn't make sense.

Benjamin Mena [00:42:41]:
I love that because it's, you know, as I've gotten older and now I have a kid, it's like the definition of success changes.

Sean Anderson [00:42:47]:
Of course, 100%. Like, you want to provide a great life for your family. I'm sure we all do. But some people are comfortable sacrificing, you know, four days a week in a different city, working over stupid hours, taking clients out, staying in hotels, whatever, building this huge team to one day exit. And if you want to do that, great, but you don't have to. You don't. And I think for the old, for the older generation, I enjoy these conversations. I enjoy helping people because I have.

Sean Anderson [00:43:17]:
I have two levels to my service, right? I have the training, that's 7,000. But then I actually consult with like 45 businesses right now where they're in a community, they work together, we meet, we have events. I am like an advisor on a brand perspective. And, you know, we go real deep with these people. And most of my customers, when you actually scratch away, they really do want to build a job in a business that they love going to work, they love it. They wake up energized. They want to be in it for 10 years. They don't want to rush, you know, build something, exit.

Sean Anderson [00:43:50]:
And they don't even know what they do if they did well.

Benjamin Mena [00:43:52]:
Has there been a book that's had a huge impact on your career?

Sean Anderson [00:43:56]:
Yeah, two. So there's the compound effect by a guy called Darren Hardy. I read when I first started my business, and that talks about the small little daily actions and the impact they have over time. And, you know, that's how I see all of my success has been through, I think consistency to date, I'm not the best guy at anything, but I am one of the most consistent guys at everything I do. And recently I read a book called Essentialism. I think the. Greg McEwen I think was the. The author.

Sean Anderson [00:44:25]:
And that's about doing less better. That's about saying, you know, you could be doing three or four things and moving the needle slightly each year, or you could narrow it to one maximum two things and move them substantially. And that was when I told you at the agency business, at this training business had all these different products. We were doing so many different things and now it's like. And everything's focused in one area and said the biggest impact on. And now I look at everything in my life and I'm like, do I really need to do that? Do I really want to do that? I'm trying to get rid of things. I'm always trying to get rid of things. Essentialism, what's the most essential things to give me what I want?

Benjamin Mena [00:44:58]:
Looking at tech tools, is there a tech tool that's absolutely essential for you?

Sean Anderson [00:45:02]:
A Fathom AI I use for my all my calls. Incredible. Like literally every single meeting I have fathoms in the background. It collates the information, it summarizes, it gives me the notes. I was always typing in meetings and writing notes and you know, and then the admin around, sending proposals and all the things that go out after. Especially in recruitment, you know, admin. Putting it in a CRM now it's one click, it's in. It's just Fathom for me is incredible.

Sean Anderson [00:45:29]:
I know there's other products like Metaview and Cloud Call. There's always tools that do the same thing in recruitment. But an Atlas Atlas CRM I don't use. But I think they're incredible that I did the top 100 with. They've built that into their CRM. They're like the most forward thinking CRM in the world, I believe. And that's why I partner with them. I love leaning on my voice, I love leaning into conversation.

Sean Anderson [00:45:49]:
The bit I don't enjoy is this is the documentation. Like I think all recruiters typically go down that route. Right. So the more we can remove that, the better.

Benjamin Mena [00:45:58]:
Awesome. Well, I mean you were a top biller before you launched your company. Your company is crushing it. You have a great podcast, a rag podcast with should subscribe to them and check it out. But you've been successful in so many things, like at your core, like what do you think is driving you to keep on hitting all that success over and over and over again.

Sean Anderson [00:46:21]:
I think probably is fear of failure more than achievement. So if you look at recruitment, I think especially in the UK is like you built in like everyone else is on, on this. So if you get a vacancy, so have five other agencies. You know, everything you've got could come crashing down. Even when I built a big contractor book and I was earning a quarter of a million pounds a year as a 26 year old recruiter in London, that could come crashing down at any time. You know, there could be one project that gets caught and five contractors have gone. People could be head running your contractors into different teams. So I've always felt like nothing is stable, nothing has legs.

Sean Anderson [00:46:57]:
So I'm always like, I love the growth, the growth comes from doing the same things and keep innovating. But I would say my primary objective is to survive still is to survive and thrive and make sure I maintain and I'm there and I'm in the game. You know, my fear is people forget who I am. People forget what we're doing. People, you know, someone else has got the voice, someone else has got the ear of the market. That's probably what keeps me, keeps me going. And then in my personal life it's probably similar. It's like, you know, I'm really into, I stopped drinking alcohol, I go into ice baths every day now.

Sean Anderson [00:47:30]:
I'm not like a complete lunatic who wakes up at like 4am and eats raw eggs or anything. But I am in the gym, I am doing cold therapy, I don't drink alcohol. I've really switched up what I'm eating. My whole family, we eat really good food and I'm like, longevity is really important to me. I really want to be here. Like My daughter is 15, 16 months old, she's incredible. I'm nearly 40 in two years time. Like I'm older than my mum and dad were when I was that age a lot.

Sean Anderson [00:47:56]:
I'm like 10 years older. So when she's my age, I'm gonna be in my mid-70s. I want to be fit and healthy. I want to be there for her kids. Like I'm already thinking those things through. So there's a little bit of fear there, you know, that things can go wrong and I'm not in control of everything. But it's probably the same. Everything's about could it come crashing down if I don't perform my best.

Sean Anderson [00:48:16]:
That's kind of, I think, underlying all of my, all of my behavior, which might be negative for some people, but it tends to work for me, that.

Benjamin Mena [00:48:24]:
Kind of goes to the next question. Like, you know, with everything that you've done, like in recruiting and also running a business, you have weeks that are just, excuse my language is hell. How do you get through those weeks and just keep on going?

Sean Anderson [00:48:37]:
Even now, I still feel it, you know, I think emotion. I try and run my business on logic and not emotion, but that's easier said than done. But it does get easier with time and experience, you know, and you've got to understand data, you've got to understand the metrics early. So, like, when I was a recruiter, one thing we were really good at was understanding the data. I knew my ratios, I knew how many vacancies I needed a month to spit out 10 contract deals a month. Like, I knew that I knew I needed one in four. If we got 40 vacancies a month, we would do 10 deals like we just did. And we did it.

Sean Anderson [00:49:12]:
But I could see that and I could see icebergs coming ahead. So there was not that many surprises. It was always data driven. And I'm the same now in my business. So I think I do a lot again about panicking, about changes in the horizon. I feel a lot of emotion based on things that haven't even happened. When it actually gets to the point of things dropping, I'm like, I'm pissed off because I predicted it was going to happen. But the best way I deal with it is I talk.

Sean Anderson [00:49:37]:
I have a coach who I speak to on a biweekly basis. I speak to my business partner, I speak to my wife. I write everything down like I'm constantly. I have a journal every day just in my iPhone where I write down. I've got like five questions I ask myself every day and I answer them every day. I use ChatGPT a lot now as a coach as well. So I don't know if you use any of those tools to like, I just speak to it. I literally ask it to be a high performance coach for entrepreneurs.

Sean Anderson [00:50:01]:
And then I start talking and it. It literally talks back and it's incredible. And I use it for. Even this morning I was, you know, bouncing a few ideas off it. I use the tools at my disposal. I'm not afraid to ask for help. I'm not too proud to admit when I'm struggling. But I'm also not as trigger happy with the emotions as I used to be.

Sean Anderson [00:50:20]:
I'm trying to see that the data will tell me a bigger picture.

Benjamin Mena [00:50:24]:
What are a few of the questions that you ask yourself each day?

Sean Anderson [00:50:27]:
Okay. I'm up. So literally I asked myself, what have you been doing since the last journal entry? So I give a bit of a diary of the day before or sometimes I miss a day. I put this morning. I've done the following so far, so depending I'll always be writing in there before midday. So I'll usually have a little recap of what time I woke up and what I've been up to. What does the day look like for the rest of the day? So that's when I'll think about what I want to achieve for the rest of the day. How am I feeling right now? Which usually makes the bulk of the.

Sean Anderson [00:50:53]:
The bulk of the. Of the journal. That's where I talk about my emotions. Am I stressed, am I happy, am I feeling whatever? And then I finish with what am I grateful for? And I try and always put three to five things that I'm grateful for. I've been doing that for about 12 months on a daily basis. I made that up. Like it just seems to work for me. I was, at first I was just writing and it felt really loose and it just didn't.

Sean Anderson [00:51:14]:
Now I've got a structure I follow. I can, I, I need process in all areas. I think once you got framework you can, there's freedom in a framework without the framework. It's like my content stuff. Going to LinkedIn with no framework I think is dangerous. When you've got a framework, you've got freedom to move well.

Benjamin Mena [00:51:29]:
And this next question I'm going to ask two ways. It's going to be at the very beginning of your recruiting career, but also kind of like the beginning of hoc sale.

Sean Anderson [00:51:35]:
Yep.

Benjamin Mena [00:51:35]:
If you can go back in time with all the knowledge that you have, all the success you've had, all the hard freaking days, the weeks, those losses, everything. And give yourself advice. In your first recruiting job, say a month or two in, what would you tell yourself?

Sean Anderson [00:51:49]:
You are incredibly valuable to the people that you serve. So like I think as a junior recruiter, you don't really understand the value that you offer. Like you don't really get like I know running a business now, the impact of great people by having the right person in the right seat is everything. When you've got the wrong person, it. Everything else you're trying to achieve is on the, on the slide, you know, equally recruitment know finding the right job is one of the top three decisions we make. If you're in the wrong role, everything else in your life can be affected. You know, it's, it's so difficult. So I think we put people on a pedestal in the early days of recruitment.

Sean Anderson [00:52:23]:
We look up at customers, maybe not candidates, but we definitely look up at customers. And I, I just would be like, look, you've got to. Again, this is why you have to go micro niche, because you have to understand the niche well enough to be able to confidently display and explain the value that you can offer to someone. But you can be like, look, we are. It's so mutually beneficial to know each other. Like I say to people, I operate in this space exclusively every single day and I've got nothing for you right now. I've got literally no, no vacancies for you right now. But I guarantee I will, I guarantee I'm going to be useful to you in the future of your career.

Sean Anderson [00:52:57]:
So investing some time, knowing me now is going to benefit us both down the line. But that didn't come in day one. That came in year five, year four. I wish I could display that level of confidence earlier. It's not going to come on day one. But if you've got the right niche, you can do that really, really quick. It's funny, I was literally on a train from London back to where I live in the north of England last week. Bearing in mind I finished recruiting in 2017 and I didn't really do a deal properly.

Sean Anderson [00:53:22]:
I wasn't filling roles in 2016. So 2015, one of the final people I ever placed in a job was a candidate who I'd worked hard for, like, three years to get him. Like, he was one of the best in the market on a contract basis. He had such good reviews. I knew if I got him in front of a client, he'd always, he'd get the job. Like, everyone was like, he's just amazing. And I never got the right time, I never got the right vacancy for him. And he was really selective.

Sean Anderson [00:53:46]:
But I worked him, I met him for beers, I met him for lunches. I even lived locally. We went to the football, we did all these cool things. And in 2015, one of the final things I did is I found him a job. And it was the right role at the right time. I'm having a coffee, waiting for my train, and this guy comes into the coffee shop and he's like, wow, Sean. And so we got talking. He was getting on my train, getting off a couple of stops before.

Sean Anderson [00:54:06]:
So we had an hour, we sat together for an hour and it was incredible. And he was telling me that recruiters don't do it anymore. They don't Meet him. They don't ask the same questions. They don't. They don't buy in those beers and the lunches, and they don't. They don't try and build that human relationship that we've got. And to this day, we'd still class each other as friends.

Sean Anderson [00:54:24]:
And he's still at the company I placed him at. He went permanent. He had a bit of a sabbatical. He went to Romania, came back to uk. He's there now in a big role, and he's like, not only did you nurture that relationship to the point where I enjoyed working with you, but you found me an amazing job that I'm still in 10 years later. So the impact you have on people is incredible, if you see it that way.

Benjamin Mena [00:54:46]:
Same question. But looking at the very beginning of your days at Hoxo, what advice would you give yourself?

Sean Anderson [00:54:52]:
Do less, better. So. But again, I didn't know enough to be able to. I had to kind of do a lot of different things to find my way, but I probably thought I needed to offer more services and that would be more valuable. I think a lot of people think the more I can offer, the more valuable it is. Like, my first training program was 16 modules, 16 weeks. I threw everything I knew at people. People bought it.

Sean Anderson [00:55:17]:
Some people loved it. Most people said it's great. But actually, 30% of it was amazing. And the rest, I probably don't even need to know. Like, I'm not going to be able to do all this stuff. It's too advanced, it's too much. So all I've been doing is stripping back now is six weeks. I was doing 11 groups a week at the time.

Sean Anderson [00:55:34]:
Now I do four a year, and I make 10x the revenue that I was making then. So do less, do it better. Have an amazing, tight product suite. Be the best. That's what I would say to myself. And anyone listening is like, you know Gordon Ramsay, Chef Ramsay in the us when he goes out there, yeah. And his Kitchen Nightmares is all over. It started in the uk, obviously, went to America.

Sean Anderson [00:55:57]:
But what does he do in every restaurant? He goes in, he looks at this big, ugly menu, and he cuts it down to a handful of dishes that they can execute incredibly well every time. And to me, there's no different to what I'm doing. What you're doing. Recruitment market. In any business that was. We think that suites of services are more attractive, but what we do is we blind people, we make things more confusing. It's difficult to market the services. It's Difficult to execute them all at the same standard.

Sean Anderson [00:56:23]:
So do less better.

Benjamin Mena [00:56:26]:
Love that. Well, and you've, you know, you've had 7,000 people go through your training program.

Sean Anderson [00:56:31]:
Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:56:31]:
But in that you've talked to tens and thousands of recruiters over the years.

Sean Anderson [00:56:35]:
Yep.

Benjamin Mena [00:56:36]:
You know, I'm sure you get asked constantly, you know, tactical questions, how do I make more money, how do I do BD better, how do I fix my LinkedIn? But is there a question that you wish a recruiter would actually ask you and what would be that answer?

Sean Anderson [00:56:47]:
I think if it was relating to like LinkedIn and brand, I'd like them to ask me like, what's it like a year or two down the line? Because I've done it, you know, I've already got to that point. I know what's on the other side of the work. I know I felt it, I've experienced it and it's incredible. So I'd like people to, they think very short term. Most people think, you know, if I do this next week, will I get money from it? Whereas I'm like, we can give you some tactics that are going to change the game in seven days, like you're going to see results. But the real benefit is 12 to 18 months, 24 months down the line. That's what it gets. Real fun.

Sean Anderson [00:57:21]:
And I wish people would think that way when they don't. But I'd say the same about recruitment ownership as well. Like I've interviewed over 375 guests on my show internationally. I get 30,000 downloads a month to the rag. And what I'm trying to do with my show is help recruitment founders exclusively build a business that suits them. So I mean, I interview people from every any way they can build a recruitment company. If it's an interesting model, I'm keen on hearing about it so that people can go, I'll take a bit of that, I'll take a bit out and find what works for them. And I wish people would ask like that question, how do I build what's right for me as opposed to how do I build the biggest business? How do I build the fastest growing, most revenue generating business? They should be asking how do I build what's going to give me sustainable value, sustainable fulfillment, you know, that's linked to my, my life in general, not just what metrics the world thinks are success.

Benjamin Mena [00:58:15]:
I absolutely love that. Well, before I let you go, I know the easy answer for this, but for those listening, how they go about.

Sean Anderson [00:58:22]:
Following you, I don't have a connection, ability anymore at that 30,000 connection mark. So there's, there's probably no point in trying to connect. But please follow me and you know, you can always drop me an email @shawnox home media.com I think Instagram. I'm Sean Anderson Hoxo and the same on TikTok. So I'm not as prevalent on those platforms but I'm, you know, I'm present on there. So if you, you know, you really want to get hold of me quickly, you could probably get me faster by just messing around one of them. Yeah, following me, drop me an email, see me on any of those platforms.

Benjamin Mena [00:58:50]:
And before I let you go, is there anything else you want to share with the listeners?

Sean Anderson [00:58:55]:
I've actually got, if you're open to it. I've got something called the Free Seven Day Challenge, which I've launched in January this year. I've taken all my, you know, my paid stuff and created a really light, practical seven day challenge for 2025. It's completely free, anyone can take it. And in a week I'll give you a really valuable process to follow. Like it's not the finished article that I would if you pay me. But it's enough to get you to the next level on LinkedIn. It's enough to get you engaging with people, building content out and following up and making some cash off it.

Sean Anderson [00:59:24]:
So I'll give you the link to put in the show notes. But yeah, I hope people take it. It's completely, completely free and I'll see you on the other side of that because obviously I've done all the video content. I'm in the community, you can ask me questions there as well.

Benjamin Mena [00:59:34]:
Awesome. Well, definitely I'll put that in the show notes, so definitely check that out. But I just want to say thank you so much for coming on. I know you've talked to thousands and thousands of recruiters, so you got a good picture of how the environment's changing, how the market is changing, the impacts of artificial intelligence, but really just how recruiters can get out of their own freaking way, bust those myths that we've been holding onto. So I really think 2025is going to be for you listening, the year of personal abundance. So let's go make that happen. Thank you guys.