The Power of Strategic Relationships and AI: Insights for the Modern Recruiter with Marcus Sawyerr

Benjamin Mena [00:00:00]:
Coming up on this episode of the Elite Recruiter podcast, you were the global head of digital transformation and the president of Adecox. How did that actually happen? How can a recruiter be better at the relational side of the house?

Marcus Sawyerr [00:00:13]:
Don't build it when you need it. Build it before. People build relationships when they need them, or they try to, and you can smell them a mile off. People send you a message when they want something, not to give you something. So every interaction, think about what are you giving people?

Benjamin Mena [00:00:33]:
Welcome to the Elite Recruiter podcast with your host, Benjamin Menna, 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. I'm excited about this episode of the Elite Recruiter podcast. My guess, climbed his way from a sales role to a Fortune 500 executive. On top of that, he led the digital transformation for one of the largest staffing companies in the world. And then later on, he decided to bet on himself and go all in on artificial intelligence and helping recruiters win. But, man, I'm just, I'm so excited to listen to this story, a story where you're climbing the ranks all the way up to an executive having a global impact and the different things that you can do in the recruiting space on top of what's happening in the future. So, Marcus Sawyer, welcome to the podcast.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:01:25]:
Ben. Thanks for having me. Really excited to be here and have the conversation and just share any insights that you want to hear.

Benjamin Mena [00:01:32]:
I'm so excited to do a deep dive, but before we start doing that, real quick talk about your current company. What are you doing now?

Marcus Sawyerr [00:01:39]:
So, my current organization is EQ app, which I'm the founder and the CEO of. We focus on helping people who are specifically also in the recruitment space and also in sales roles leverage artificial intelligence to save time as well as progress in their careers. So we're really focused on giving people access to knowledge and the connections that they need to be successful. So that's, that's how I'm spending my time at the moment. Awesome.

Benjamin Mena [00:02:08]:
Every episode, we just start with a deep dive in recruiting. And I'm so excited. But to listen to this story, how did you even end up in this wonderful world of recruiting?

Marcus Sawyerr [00:02:18]:
So I'm like, everybody, this is exactly what you planned that you were going to do from when you were five years old and you always wanted to be a recruiter. And it was, I was playing football. I was playing sports. I was playing soccer. I had a university scholarship, and then I left university midway through because I'm like, look, I'm not going to be able to become a professional football player from university, so I need to go to league and then go and get a job in a gym. So I actually went to work for a company called LA Fitness and I became a sales rep at LA Fitness. I thought I was going to go and do a typical gym job, but that didn't happen anyway. So what I had to do was convince people in Raleigh, London in an alleyway to come and join the gym when gyms were not trendy.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:03:01]:
And so I'd go outside and I get all these leaflets. And then I started thinking to myself, well, what if I could sell to corporates instead of individuals? So I started to then innovate inside the gym and say, hey, like, we should do corporate memberships to start selling corporate memberships. And I got pretty good at it. And my thing was, if you came into the gym, you will not leave him without a membership. And I realized gym memberships are not super lucrative. I made like 13,000 pounds a year at the time and I was like, that's not really going to work for me. So let me start looking for a job. And I looked, I think I looked in a paper at that time because there wasn't much online and there was this company that was trying to help other companies find candidates, not by advertising the papers anymore on the Financial Times, but by advertising this thing called the Internet online.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:03:51]:
And it was careerbuilder.com. and so career builder first came in to the UK and I was like one of their kind of first 30, 40 employees. And I ended up staying there for a long time and done all types of roles from selling ads in the recruiting space. And yeah, I can continue to go from there, but that was kind of the first area.

Benjamin Mena [00:04:11]:
So what changed your entire career initially was you got tired of sitting outside in the middle of alleyway, in the middle of the rain every single day.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:04:18]:
That was called believe it or not. And this is what I call something very different now with AI, that was called outreach. So the outreach was when you go out into the community and you literally reach out to people and say, hey, do you want a gym membership? There's got to be a better way than this. So my life has always been thinking about how you sell things, how you get access to information and just do it in a much better way than it's been done historically.

Benjamin Mena [00:04:41]:
So fast forward, you were early career builder employee over in the UK. You know, you spent a good amount of time growing there like, how did you reach the level of success that you did there before your next jump?

Marcus Sawyerr [00:04:52]:
I had to make 120 phone calls a day. So I was like an inside sales, like, speed dialer. And then, funnily enough, a friend of my uncle's had got a new job. Barclays bank. Right. So there was an outside sales crew that could go out there and start to go. And so I wasn't part of that, but I knew someone there at Barclays, and I said to my manager, look, I can take you to this meet to meet Barclays and Canary Wharf. And he was pretty excited about that.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:05:19]:
So I went outside and we went to this meeting. They went pretty well, and we had a good conversation. And then they promote, and then I started getting promoted every year. I actually got. So I started inside sales account exec, then I went to a senior account executive, to a major, to a national. I left, set up a business, set up a Vegas concierge business, went back to become a director, and then I was running a staff and a recruiting group. So I was always working with staff and recruiting companies, but we had a product called source, curate and screen, which was a recruiting product, basically. So I was always selling recruiting services as well.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:05:53]:
So that was how I got started.

Benjamin Mena [00:05:55]:
And then, like, what finally made you jump from there to your next opportunity?

Marcus Sawyerr [00:05:59]:
Well, I had left to start my own business. I was very entrepreneurial. I had a leadership role finally at career builder after being there for ten years. So it took me ten years to get into a leadership position, and things were going pretty well. And I was selling to the largest staff and recruiting companies, building somewhat of a network there. And then one of them who I was trying to sell to, was talking about the future of recruitment and the direction it's going. And because we were quite cutting edge with some, some of the stuff we were doing, it wasn't all kind of always buttoned up, but we were always trying new things. And one of the leaders had said, hey, why don't you come? Like, I'll come and meet you at the office.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:06:37]:
And this was at the Adeco group at the time, said, yeah, sure, customer, of course, like, you want to come to meet me? Amazing. Anyway, we started talking, we got on, they said they got this thing called Adeco TV that they do around innovation. Would you be up for doing it? I was like, yeah, sure. So I threw out Switzerland. I bounded this kind of a deco tv thing, and it went really well. But how I actually got that, I was with one of my leaders at Caribbean and shout out to him. He's actually the chief revenue officer for g two now, and he was the chief revenue officer for upwork. And he'll remember this day.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:07:07]:
We worked at this meeting. A group CEO of Adecko was speaking and he came off stage and I went up to him and said, hey, I've heard about what you've been doing in the industry, in the business. Love to see if we can connect. And we got both invited to Switzerland. So I took my managers, so I'm going to be taking my managers to new places, and my manager is down. How did you even do that? I was like, I just spoke to it. So that was kind of like, yeah, that was how it started.

Benjamin Mena [00:07:31]:
So you were able to get all in all these doors and then you're like, hey, manager, come with me. Check this out, check this out, check this out. Like, close this deal for me or whatever.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:07:43]:
And I'll tell you what, I went through a ton of different leaders and managers, but there was only one that I didn't really get on with. And I remember one of my sister or somethings, like, you always do well with your manager. I just used to bring them into meetings and do stuff that I was doing and we just became friends and they would then help me, and then I would help them. And then, funnily enough, ive not told this story. Some of my managers started to work for me when I moved to adequate, so I started hiring my managers while managers.

Benjamin Mena [00:08:11]:
Okay, so you were the global head of digital transformation and the president of Adeco Xdev. How did that actually happen?

Marcus Sawyerr [00:08:18]:
Yeah, so it was part of that story of doing the Adeco Group TV. I came back into the UK and they called a meeting with me, one of the leaders, his name, Federico Vione, shout out to Federico. And we had a couple of conversations and I was just talking about the future of recruiting. And I was saying, I don't think it's a revolution. I think it's an evolution. And he was like, I just stuck with him. So we started talking about, what does that mean? And I said, well, this is how it's gonna evolve. And I just had this idea on, like, how recruiting was gonna move ahead.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:08:48]:
So he's like, we're hiring for this role, our global head of digital. I was like, okay, cool, I'll let you know if I know anyone. He's like, no, no, I think you could do it. I was like, really? I thought, it's literally, we're at this italian restaurant. I was like, okay. And I was a director at this point, so I was doing okay, but it's a big jumper. I said, okay, I'll go through the process. Anyway, I went through six months worth of interviews.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:09:11]:
I met with nine people. I was going to jump out, but I was cool with it because I was meeting all of the people I was trying to sell to and I was just being in relationships with them. And by the end of it was between me and some other person. They were going to pay a few million dollars a year, and I felt like I was the cheap option and maybe the decent option, and it worked out and I got the job and, yeah, stayed there five years and it was a really good time.

Benjamin Mena [00:09:35]:
So I got a few questions on this. Just, you know, because one of the things that I love about the recruiting industry, many of us, I just happen to follow into the space, but there's so many different avenues of a career path that you can actually take. Like, is there something that you feel that really sets you apart to get into those open doors that created this opportunity for yourself?

Marcus Sawyerr [00:09:54]:
Yeah, I think one of the key things is constantly building relationships and doing stuff with and for people and not expecting things in return. Like, that's just. I got mocked for doing that once because one of my friends and I work with him now. I invited him to one of my football games and he ended up playing and I ended up getting on the bench. I remember somebody said, how can you invite someone to your team and then you're on the bench? I don't care. I thought, if they're going to play and play it, it was only for one game, right? But I was still, if someone's got an opportunity and they're better than me at something, put them in that position, because if they then do well, then we're both doing well. So my thinking was never, like, it was never transactional. I always used to meet a lot of the same people that, and I still do this to this day.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:10:38]:
A lot of the best deals I ever got were from people that didn't have a job at the time. So they were looking for their next senior level role, and I had to spend time with them, talk to them, see if I could help them, see if I could get them connected. And then they would call me and say, hey, like, I'm now in this role. I'm thinking about the solution. How do I get connected? So it's never transactional. And I think that that has helped me over a long period of time. Reflecting on it now, was that the.

Benjamin Mena [00:11:03]:
Culture that was around you or was the culture more cutthroat, more like, I'm taking you to take advantage of this situation and you just said, fuck it, I'm doing my own path.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:11:12]:
It was an interesting culture. Caribbean had a great culture around, always trying to add value to people. So after every time you have a conversation with someone, you touch someone, you speak to them, make them feel like they learned something. We'd always follow up with articles, we'd fill up with news, we'd follow up with insights and knew that that would come back around. And our leaders were really good at that. And that actually just genuine relationships, because at that time, I didn't have much to talk about. I didn't have a house, didn't have kids, I wasn't doing all the fancy stuff that other people. I was like 23 years old where I was first there.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:11:42]:
So you don't have much to talk about. You'd go out a lot and party and do that stuff. That was fine, but there was just like a limit to it. So what you could be better than most people at is learning. So I'd always take it upon myself to learn. I'd be reading books constantly trying to upskill and always inferring people on what's going on and just send them an update. Hey, I just learned this. What do you think of that? And people really thought it was weird, like this guy that sending me these updates, but I just thought it was.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:12:07]:
I thought I would like to have stuff like that. So maybe there's a way that you would want to also get that information. So constantly learning and building relationships, those are my two things.

Benjamin Mena [00:12:16]:
Okay, so you're now the global head of Adeco Xdev. You're sitting there looking at the future of recruiting. You're sitting there looking at like, that goes, what, billions per year, $24 billion.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:12:26]:
Company, the 45 billion, $4 billion. Yeah, yeah. You don't even want to know that my first day was $24 billion. I. Yeah, yeah, yeah, go ahead.

Benjamin Mena [00:12:36]:
We. So please tell me you didn't actually delete something your first day, right?

Marcus Sawyerr [00:12:39]:
No, no, no, first. The first. My first day started. I could say this, cuz I'm like independent. My first day started before it should start. I was working for them, just doing stuff like kind of get acclimated, say my first day just hit the ground running. And my first day, funny enough, and it was their swiss based, headquartered in Switzerland. My first day is actually in the place that I live now in San Francisco.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:13:00]:
That was my first ever day after they flew me out of San Francisco and rolled out, literally, the red carpet.

Benjamin Mena [00:13:06]:
So you're Adeco does $24 billion a year. They're on the forefront. They're watching everything. They just hired you to help lead this digital transformation. How did you hit the ground running and how did you start implementing ideas for a behemoth of a company?

Marcus Sawyerr [00:13:21]:
A couple of things straight away, I knew we were getting a lot of inbound. So I knew it wasn't about my ideas. I knew it was about crowdsourcing the ideas. Collectively, we had 30,000 employees, all smart, all understood something. So I would invite them to all speak to, and then I would crowdsource them and then highlight them. So if somebody bought something at crowdsource, highlight them, say that this is the person that done it, and it starts to happen, is you get these nodes. So I say you have to collect the dots before you can connect the dots. So I was collecting all this information, and then that compounded my learning.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:13:55]:
So it's always about learning for me. Another thing I've done, I invented the first. Not invented, that's a strong word. But I leveraged the first. And I can ask the Deco Group X team, first ever Rei chat bot on our website to companies to apply to our startup programs. So I would then get all these inbounds, then we then distributed to my team members to then start to look at them and then just organize. So it's all about organization. And then once you saw enough, you didn't have pattern recognition.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:14:25]:
So it's about crowdsourcing the information and being able to jump from one mode to another and kind of figure out where you need to plug things into the business.

Benjamin Mena [00:14:33]:
What's one of the, the things that you're most proud of that you led there as that leader?

Marcus Sawyerr [00:14:38]:
There was a lot. One of the things I created was called the DVC, which ended up being a digital venture committee. And I got the group CEO, the CTO, the chief of sales and all that group, and they create this committee. And I was kind of organizing and leading that committee and getting deals done. So I remember that we vetted 1600 companies and we ended up invested in ten companies at that particular point in time. So I was most proud of kind of like colvain. A lot of those companies have like, been embedded into those businesses or changed names or done a lot since then, but also just opportunities create opportunities for other people. I had, like, at one point, I have five CEO's that were reporting into me for all these different business lines.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:15:22]:
Now they've all gone on to do great things as well. Someone's got a sneaker company, another ones in Austin doing something else. There was just like ton of wealth, of experience. Good friend of mine who I hired him because he came inbound to me from LinkedIn. Really good friend of mine, he's got great background check company out at APAC. He was one of my first hires out in APAC. We've become good friends and he's built business. So it's that network of connections.

Benjamin Mena [00:15:45]:
When you were sitting in that chair, working with 30,000 employees across the board, looking at the future of recruiting at that point in time, did you see where AI was going to make an.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:15:57]:
Impact at that time? I saw a couple of platforms that I was like, whoa, this is crazy. And the other thing that I understood before I went to Adeco, that not many people, I would say clearly understood, shout out to Jakob in text kernel and we're doing a talk soon around this one. I felt as a founder of text kernel because we bought that company at Caribbean, it wasn't a friend at the time, but he was a CEO. So I spent a lot of time in Amsterdam and that was r1 pivotal moment. I spent a lot of time there R and D team on AI at that time, way before I went to Odeco. So I saw what they were doing around natural language processing, matching, and I was then responsible for selling it. So I sold it to some of the larger staff and the recruiting firm, so I understood how that worked. So this thing is going to transform the way that the crew is done, but it was always used behind the scenes.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:16:51]:
They would sell their product and technology behind the scenes and not at the forefront. Like, you see a czech GPT kind of out there where everyone can use it. I was like, this thing is super powerful. So I understood that before I went to a deco. Not many people in the leadership team got that right away, but they did fast. And I think that that was super helpful talking about them. And it wasn't that we weren't innovating in that area, it's just that the business was so big, doing so many different things. It's like, where do you fit it in and where do you put? And then I started to see these tools pop up.

Benjamin Mena [00:17:23]:
Well, that's how score, I guess. Edecko, it sounds like the career was going great. You could have stayed there for another decade. You could have had impact, especially what we're doing now. Why did you make the jump in your own company?

Marcus Sawyerr [00:17:36]:
When I was 15, years old. We have something called a record of achievement, NRA, national record of achievement. And you write in what you're going to do. I said two things. I'm going to be a professional football. I'm going to run my own company. I didn't make it as a professional footballer in the leagues for a long period of time. I made it, played a little bit, but okay.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:17:54]:
But I knew I was always going to run my own business and it was a question of when and how. So as soon as I moved to the US to set up one of our businesses, I was leading a freelance platform called Yoss, the CEO. In the back of my mind I was like, this is a time to do something. I didn't know that it was going to evolve into the Arp, but I always had that entrepreneurial piece to me. I left career build on a seven, set up a business as well. And I just thought, if I don't do that, it's a waste. It's a waste of what I want to do, how I can maybe impact the world at scale. And I'm also not really focusing on my creative appetite to generate new things and help people become successful.

Benjamin Mena [00:18:33]:
So you made the jump. You just talked about how you made the jump. And I want to talk about the evolution of that jump because a lot of times it's like heads down. This is the business plan that I have. I'm going to go hammer it down and make it work. But your business evolves through time. We went through evolution and changes. Can you start talking about how you started making those moves and the decisions that you made to get to make those moves?

Marcus Sawyerr [00:18:57]:
So I started my business on one piece of paper and I still do this and I still tell anybody wants to listen. It's called the ten piece. At Deco, we had the four P's and it's about purpose, it's about people, it's about product and about process. I added things like prospects, partners, positioning, and there's a few. I've got performance and also profit, which is a key area. Right? And I'm like, if you can fit that on one page and you can articulate it to someone, there's a good chance that you can get some feedback. So three circles. I always have these mental models of ways that I do things.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:19:33]:
These three circles. What do I think I'm pretty good at? Where is the market going? What am I passionate about? And I'm passionate about inclusion. I think that the market was moving to more community based markets, right? Not just general social media there was a huge opportunity to give people more access to opportunity through inclusion. So that was how EQ was born, and EQ was. It actually started out as me just putting out some. I was consulting for a venture capital firm at the time, actually, and I was helping them with their DNI programming for a lot of their portfolios. I was getting feedback on terms of what the challenges were. And I can't find the right talent.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:20:12]:
I don't know how to find the right. Let's just remove that barrier for them. And my approach was start community first goes back to building relationships. So I built a community. Wasn't too sure whether they're going to be candidates or clients, but I mixed them, and we have a community, which we done events, we hosted webinars, live stuff during COVID And that really started to obviously work out because people were getting connected. And then some of those fails became clients, some of them became candidates, and it was all around mid to level professionals in tech.

Benjamin Mena [00:20:43]:
Okay, so you. I mean, I'm taking some notes, so try to figure out what to do with this podcast. So that's a whole other story, but, but, okay, so you took the approach of like, almost like a staffing company. You built a community first, where you got your clients and your candidates through a community that you built.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:20:59]:
Yep. Every.

Benjamin Mena [00:21:00]:
Everything through everything through referrals, rather than the. Most of the time when someone's like, I'm gonna go start a recruiting company and just start pounding the phones or sending emails, you went and started, like, built an environment for people to win.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:21:12]:
Exactly. And it was, it was around what I call the four C's. So you had conversation, community, connection, which also led to capital. So if you had a conversation, community, and connection, that would lead to capital. That's what people want. So that was what the community was built around. And then I was getting all of these other opportunities off the back of that. And, you know, like in staff, you've got to try and figure out what you're good at and stick to that.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:21:40]:
Right. Which is also part of the conundrum, but I wanted to use it to seed ideas, and that really helped us to figure out what we were going to do next and what the business model would be.

Benjamin Mena [00:21:48]:
Well, let me just pause right there before we start talking about that. One of the problems in the recruiting industry that I think a lot of people have is there's a thousand things to do. There are a thousand different possibilities that you could do. How did you, you know, especially with your background, you probably got like, so much inbound opportunities. How did you, like, properly say no to focus on the right thing?

Marcus Sawyerr [00:22:08]:
At the start, we didn't necessarily say no to everything. We'd explore it and then once we got some pattern recognition, we'd stop exploring things that didn't make sense. So given an example, if somebody called me for a rep and it was mid to senior level and it was in tech, like, okay, that's a great. If they want to do mid to senior level with tech and it was contingent, we would prefer to do something as a contained model versus contingent, where we take some upfront and then we take a placement fee on the end. But there was like a large security company, there was opportunity to get into all of their positions and roles. So we took it, we made a placement, then we made another one, then we made another one, then we became a preferred supplier. So it was about having your principles and your standards, but being open to seek opportunities. And it's very much like sports, right? Like the coach can give you the formula and the playbook and the things that you got to do, but when you're on the pitch, you've got to see things and adjust.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:23:04]:
And I think adaptability and being able to adjust is another key skill, especially.

Benjamin Mena [00:23:09]:
As an entrepreneur, for somebody that has the idea, because the people who've talked about it with me for a while or many times, they want to create a community. How do they go about creating a community within a space that's going to work like that?

Marcus Sawyerr [00:23:21]:
Two things. Be the host and give people value. You've done it. You've done it the other day with your AI summit, right? Be the host, give people value. They will come. And if you're not giving them any value, they're not going to come. And then it will grow for referral. And I think if you pick a niche, the value, what's the value? What's your expertise? Mine was being in the recruiting industry, HR, tech, being able to help you get access to jobs, maybe the value that you're delivering.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:23:47]:
I heard about this community which called slowers. Slow as f, right, which is basically a running community for people that are slow, but they feel bound together because it's slow. Runners, they want to run, but they're not as fast as everyone else. And it was niche, it was focused and it connected. Ours was around giving people access to opportunity through inclusion. So if you have a key strategy and look, you've also, again, got to make sure you're adding value because there's a lot of communities that have now popped up. So once you have that base, how do you then build relationships outside? You do this really well. Again, even when I spoke at the AI summit, you sent me a note with a video in it, and it was personalized.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:24:25]:
People think that you're leaked in pops because of the post you put out. No, it's all in the back channeling that you do and you share with other people and you let them know what's going on and they feel like they're in the know. So it's not just what you do on the pitch, it's what you do off the pitch as well. Outside of all the preparation of developing and cultivating the community. Love that.

Benjamin Mena [00:24:45]:
So, okay, so you have the community, you've been making placements, contingent, retained, you know, contained all those different things. But then you start moving towards artificial intelligence. Like, when did that shift happen? At night. How did that shift happen?

Marcus Sawyerr [00:24:57]:
So we were always using it in the backend for certain tasks, like generating job descriptions, like things like that. Some of the matching. We started building our own databases. But I was always trying to evolve the business model. I feel like the staff and business model is pretty lucrative, right? But this is my personal opinion. But I don't like it. I don't like it because I don't think you should get compensated based on the salary of someone else that just outright don't think it makes sense. That's my opinion.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:25:31]:
So what am I going to do about it? I think that people that think that that makes sense, I should enable them empowerment because that makes sense for them and they know how to do it. I think I don't like, because we're a small team, so I wanted to empower staffing firms to become successful by using the technology. So staffing firms started to become partners with us because they wanted more inclusive talent. So I had to switch up the model. So instead of us charging placement fees, we were doing going back to what I'd done at career builder years ago, which was source curate intro. So we had a fee for sourcing. We could source you a certain amount of candidates. These were like worm leads, and we charge a fee.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:26:06]:
Curation was another level. And then intro, we charge a fee per intro, and then you could go and make your placement fee. So I needed to operationalize that in a way by leveraging AI because we're a very small team. And so we started to use AI to do some of the administration work. That's how it started. And then as we started using more and more, we started to expose that to our clients.

Benjamin Mena [00:26:28]:
And that's where the buddy app came from.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:26:30]:
Yeah, exactly. Because we were using it internally and we said, okay, well, if we can use it internally, should we give this a stop? This is how we're doing the source. It. Here's the source. You do the sourcing with the source, right? So we give them the service. Oh, and so then, now I can do more scale and I can sell licenses, subscriptions and agreements. But those are really good in their niche, really good in their discipline and have the relationships and connections. Because of the two things, I believe you could go out and become successful.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:26:58]:
We could empower and enable them. So that was really the evolution. It became a tool for us internally, which we exposed externally.

Benjamin Mena [00:27:05]:
And we're to jump into some AI conversations now. So, you know, there's a lot of talk of AI. There's like a lot of, you know, AI's gonna do this, AI's gonna do this, AI is gonna blah, blah, blah, blah. But reality right now and over the next six months, how can a recruiter use AI to make more money and how can they use it for business development?

Marcus Sawyerr [00:27:23]:
There's a couple of things you have to do. First, you must audit yourself and understand what you are doing already. Okay? So just be very clear on what you're doing. Check your calendar, what you do, and then figure out what are the key areas that you know you need to spend time in. And typically, if you're 360 in the UK, you're going to be spending time with clients and candidates. If you're 180 in the US, you're going to be spending time with candidates in a particular niche. You want to be spending as much time as possible speaking to high quality candidates. Now, everything else, find an AI for it.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:27:58]:
You've been using AI for everything that is not everything. Everything that is not clear to your job according to how you add value. See if there's an AI for it. And look, you might find there's ten things. And out of those ten things, there are maybe five that are pretty decent, but there are two, they're killer. And then you have your own personal AI strategy. Don't wait for the company to give you a strategy. Come up with your own AI strategy on how you're gonna use.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:28:25]:
Don't just use chap GPT, obviously, you should use EQ buddy, and you should use some of the new tools that we have because we could help you, we understand it. But you should use terminals that are gonna really help you save time and cut that time with sourcing writing, job descriptions, intake calls, interview questions, screening. You're opening a new desk in a new market. You don't understand that market yet and you want to then build that up. So you need to get critical mass, all of these things. You can leverage a island and then make it habit, make it routine, and you will see how much time this saves you. There's going to be a billion dollar company with less than five people. There's going to be a billion dollar company with two people.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:29:08]:
There's going to be a billion dollar company, one person and AI. See, what are you waiting for? Like genuinely.

Benjamin Mena [00:29:16]:
How big do you think somebody can build a staffing company with a small amount of people, but with.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:29:23]:
AI, think goes back again to what are those people doing in the staffing firm? Okay, if you've got a bunch of amazing sellers that have relationships, meet with people, understand the customer, that's not going to change anytime soon, right? But then how many balls are you dropping? How much more could you sell to that particular customer, not necessarily in their department but across departments. How many referrals are you generating? If you've got a small kind of network of folks, you've got to figure out what you want to do. Do you want to be service orientated or do you know, product oriented? We're product orientated. So you, you could be a staffing company that is technology enabled. That means you have the relationships, you understand the requisitions, you understand the industry, you understand specialists, but you use everything to deliver through AI. So I think that you're going to see a big, I don't even know if it'd be called a staff, would it be called a staffing company? Maybe, maybe not. The other thing that you have on the other side when you talk about staffing is, so we've got permanent placement recruiting, but then we also have traditional staffing. Now there's a lot involved in, especially if you get to healthcare and you start talk about nurses, you start my per diem and you start talk about cat, AI will start to help with a lot of those things.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:30:37]:
However, it's still going to be down to relationships that you have with the hospitals, it's going to be down to the relationships as an exec search firm that you have with the board because you're selling at that board level. So it's all going to be about your relationships. That is going to be your key and critical currency relationships for recruiters.

Benjamin Mena [00:30:55]:
So I think, I've been telling this for a while, I think relationships is going to be the one of the biggest things that recruiters need to focus on over the next five years. You seem to be great at it. I know you covered some, like, relationship advice earlier, but once again, like, how can a recruiter be better at the relational side of the house?

Marcus Sawyerr [00:31:15]:
Don't build it when you need it. Build it before people build relationships, when they need them, or they try to, and you can smell them a mile off. People send you a message when they want something, not to give you something. So every interaction, think about what are you giving people? Are you giving them knowledge? You give them value. Are you giving them insight? They will remember and then just be aware of, like, hey, by the way, they do this, like, continuously do that with your current customers and people that you've built referrals with, and also those that have a good taste in their mouth. From your experience, if you've been in a recruiting game for a long time, chances are you've created an opportunity for people. Chances are that they've got an opportunity they wouldn't have got elsewhere. Chances are that you have some kind of Rolodex or some kind of group, people that you can build a network with.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:32:07]:
Think about how you can give that network value. Yes, we want to think about money. Yes, we want to think about the finance. You're going to make money. Like money is easy to make. Are you going to make an impact? And if you make it impact, you are going to be successful and you're going to be wealthy. It's easy to make. But you recruiters, we know this, right? This why I come out of insight.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:32:26]:
So you don't want to be in a rat race the whole time. So you've got to think strategically. Think about the move after the move, not just the move. That's how chess is. So strategic thinking, I think strategic thinking.

Benjamin Mena [00:32:38]:
And thinking about impact is one of the most. It completely reframes how you approach every conversation. But you just said something that I sound like it was a core belief to you that you've mastered ingrained in you. Making money is easy. How does a recruiter get to create that as a core value and part of their foundational belief in terms of.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:33:01]:
Making money is easy.

Benjamin Mena [00:33:02]:
Yeah.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:33:03]:
How does a recruiter do that? Well, you have to be in a situation where you've done it. You have to be in a situation where you have the right environment to thrive. One thing I used to hate when I was working at certain companies, or I've seen how companies were operating, I used to hate when they used to have capped bonuses. You want to look at uncapped opportunities, and I know why we do it right. I know the business side now, and there's something that didn't sit right because they put limits on you. I think if you want. If you want to figure out how to make money, you got to get in a niche that you're really, really good at. Build deep relationships.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:33:39]:
Then you've got your roots, and then you branch out from the roots there. That's how I can be a polymath. I can do all these different types of things. Right? So you can do HR, you could do software as a service, AI, inclusion. My roots are in relationship building, product, and understanding people. What are your roots? What are you known for? You ask candidates this all the time. What's your best strength? Why should you get hired? Why should people keep buying from you? That's the question you want to ask yourself, right? Why should people listen to you?

Benjamin Mena [00:34:09]:
Love that. Well, before we jump over to the quickfire questions, is there anything else that you want to share about your story, your growth, the leadership, the relationships, and your company?

Marcus Sawyerr [00:34:20]:
So, I think, generally speaking, relationships are the cornerstone to any business, and that will continue whether or not you're doing big business, small business, or partnerships. And that's a core belief that I have, and I've seen it reign true. I think that my journey itself has been not about transactions, but about trying to find and assemble myself in the right spaces. I think about spaces. I think about space a lot. And am I in the right space in Erada for something that will seem serendipitous to happen? Okay, so what does that mean? Do I have the right group of friends? Am I meeting with the right people, talking about the right topics? Are we talking about AI and innovation and the future of society? Or are we moaning about Billy, who hit quota before us and they sold this remove? So just. Just be aware of the environment that you find. Environment has a huge impact on your well being.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:35:23]:
It has a huge impact on your level of success, and it has a huge impact on how you can learn a compounded rate. So that's one thing that I would say, and I'm saying the other thing just around our business, like, we're on a quest to help people get access to the knowledge and the people they need to be successful. We're gonna do it in a few different ways. Right now, you've got EQ, buddy. Get access to information real time. By the time this airs, you're gonna have something you can speak to, you can brainstorm with that is smarter than me, smarter than many other people at scale, and will be able to help you throughout your career to become successful. And so that's where it's going. Like, you're gonna have these AI partners that are gonna be there for your every need to help you be successful as a human.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:36:10]:
There's, of course, risks to that as well, but there's a huge opportunity as a recruiter. So don't sit there and do the same thing you done yesterday and a day after and expect different results, because we know what that's definition of insanity. There you go. You got me on a fired update today. I don't know why, Ben. I feel like.

Benjamin Mena [00:36:33]:
Well, for the listeners, like, we actually sat down last week to record this, and I was just like, you know what? I didn't feel like I was ready to ask good questions. I do today. So there we go.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:36:43]:
These are great questions. You just got. You got me fired up. Let's go. All right.

Benjamin Mena [00:36:47]:
Quick fire questions don't have to be quick answers. A recruiter that's just getting started in our wonderful world of recruiting this year, no experience in recruiting. What advice would you give them to succeed in my space?

Marcus Sawyerr [00:36:57]:
So I think if you just getting started and you have a choice now, maybe you're like pre starting the job, but you're thinking about going into that area, really try to do some analysis on what the future of work may look like for that industry that you're going into, because some of those jobs might not exist right now. Some of those jobs you're going to double down on. So like data science, engineer those areas and then some of those industries. So I would think really around what you're recruiting for and what do you think is your unique value proposition that will help you to become world class? Go into it thinking that you can be world class and then surrounding yourself with the knowledge and the information, the people, in order to strive to become that. So just think about the specialist that you go into.

Benjamin Mena [00:37:48]:
Ah, man, I wish I started recruiting, thinking about how to be a world class man. It's what the fifth?

Marcus Sawyerr [00:37:53]:
I said a funk.

Benjamin Mena [00:37:57]:
Half the time. The podcast is for me back almost two decades ago, same question, like, you've been around the recruiting industry for, was it 19 years now? You've seen a lot of stuff. You've dealt with some of the best recruiters in the entire globe, not just here in the US. Somebody that's been in the game for a while. 510 2025 years. What advice would you give to them to stay successful?

Marcus Sawyerr [00:38:21]:
Constantly sharpen your skills and still sharpen, still. So surround yourself with the right people to continuously sharpen. Be an autodidact, a continuous learner. Don't think you know it all because you'll be stale and evolution will take you out the game, right. There's a reckoning that's coming with AI. There's a reckoning that's coming with these new age individuals who are 1920, you've never heard of that, are going to use AI and they're going to beat you down. You have the main experience that, and you have experience on how to deal with people and deal with relationships. Lean into that.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:38:57]:
That would be my advice.

Benjamin Mena [00:38:58]:
Has there been a book that's had a huge impact on your entire career?

Marcus Sawyerr [00:39:01]:
There's like two or three that are. These aren't like elementary books, right? They're not even anything great. First book I read was Steve Schiffman. Cold calling techniques that work. We used to read that. I used to read that like a Bible, right? I used to read that like the Quran. I used to read that like constantly. Every day I'd be rolling with that book.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:39:21]:
And that had helped me just on how to have conversations quickly, fast build relationships. People say, oh, you're pretty good at that. And then you build a relationship and you go from there. So that was one old school. If you're in cold calling, you still have to call people. Great book, old school book. The other one. As for whole, again, it's one of these books that it's not like.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:39:39]:
And then I'll go to another, I'll go to another phase, right? This is not one of those books that would be in the top writers writer of the year award book and blah, blah. Like, I've got some of those books and I can talk about those. It was called the Secret. And this book was just about universal positive energy and how you can bring that to yourself. This thin book, small book, helped me when I've gone through a lot trying to come up and trying to be successful, having to batter a hundred calls. So I mean that grindental growth. Now if you are thinking about marketing yourself or you're thinking about building a product or you want to do an entrepreneur, but the book that I really love is called contagious by Jonah Berger. And it talks about how ideas spread and how you can generate demand for what you have and some of the tips and tricks that people have.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:40:29]:
I'm reading that right now. I'll read that constantly as we go through product cycles. So I generally reread books and go back to them because I've got a ton here that I didn't quite get or there's a situation that I want.

Benjamin Mena [00:40:41]:
To go through outside of EQ. Buddy, do you have another favorite tech tool?

Marcus Sawyerr [00:40:48]:
Do I have another favorite? Yeah, it's called Tunde AI, and it's gonna be released soon. And it's one of our products, but the other, the other favorite, there's a lot of tech tools that I use. There's one called video AI that I like. They do something pretty interesting. We send any of these conversations, video zoom, call, whatever, and it will chop it up and slice it into clips, highlight rears. That's been pretty useful. And we use that for our testimonials. So if we're having a conversation with a client or customer and they've got some positive feedback, say, hey, do you mind if I record it? They record it, put it to video AI chops out.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:41:22]:
It's not perfect. It gets you about 90% of the way, but it's a good place for you to store and we use that constantly.

Benjamin Mena [00:41:29]:
Yeah, some of those video tools are just absolutely amazing. Hire a video editor if you can. But if you can, this stuff does pretty decent.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:41:37]:
Yeah. And you certainly see it for like, there's different disciplines and roles. And again, it's like there's an app for that. There's an AI for that. So if you think about a role or something you want to get done, there's an AI for that.

Benjamin Mena [00:41:46]:
So you've dealt with thousands of recruiters, you dealt with thousands of businesses. You probably have recruiters asking you for advice constantly. Now, is there a question that you wish a recruiter would ask you if.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:41:59]:
Im looking for a job or just generally speaking?

Benjamin Mena [00:42:01]:
Just generally speaking. Because Im sure theyre asking you AI in the future. But to the core, is there a question that youre like, man, I really wish you just asked this.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:42:09]:
One of the key things I think were not asking the question enough is how do you bake new technology into habits and then measure the results to become successful? Because I think that they're kind of like three separate things. Habits and habits obviously drive success. Right. So what successful habits can you use in order to become successful? I think that's a key thing. People don't really ask me that, and there's like weird things that I think they're not like amazing, like kind of light bulb thing, but like things that I do that I don't talk about online because I don't feel like it's the right thing to talk about, hey, yeah, I have a cold shower every single day. Yeah, I do, but I don't talk about that. Right. Why do I do that? It stimulates brain.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:42:55]:
Why do I get certain amount of sunlight in my eyes in the morning? Because it's just like, those are things like that, that are habits that you can bake into what you're doing that would just enhance your well being. Therefore, your interactions become more positive. Therefore you become more successful. So thinking about habits and compounding think about compounding successful habits.

Benjamin Mena [00:43:15]:
Brian, this next question, I trying to figure out how to, like, really ask it. Well, but you were recently brought into university to share about experiences that you've had and experiences that you dealt with and how you dealt with them. Do you want to share some of those topics?

Marcus Sawyerr [00:43:28]:
Yeah. So I had spoken at the university in California. They have some programming, particularly for students that are interested in kind of society, racial tensions. It goes around diversity, equity and inclusion. And I wanted to learn about my experiences from kind of starting 120 calls away to become a Fortune 500 executive and, like, what had happened? Because they'd really asked me that. So I sat in front of this. This group of students, very smart individuals, and the professors there, and I just talked about some of the things people have said to me directly, indirectly, some things I've heard, and then also just how I dealt with it. There was everything from being in a board meeting, from someone saying, from the street to the boardroom.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:44:16]:
What street? Right. All the way through to like, hey. Someone saying, if we went skiing, we would be able to see, because you're so black. And this is at work, by the way, all the way through to, like, coming off of stage and somebody making a snarky comment about saying, oh, was that like an Eddie Murphy skit or something like that? Like, just after I've done kind of a presentation. So I've had a lot of these things have come up. The first time it happened to me was when I was, like, probably seven or eight years old. I was walking along this road, this country road in England, come outside of London for the first time, pretty much. I was with my mom and dad, and there's this dark owner, and he's walking along.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:44:51]:
I looked at dogs. Oh, my God, that's the same dog that I've got as a Staffordshire bull terrier. I was looking at the dog. I was looking at dog. And he just kept saying, you effing n. You effing n. You effing. I was like, what? I'd never even heard that because I was in London.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:45:05]:
London was very cosmopolitan. I remember telling my dad, and my dad is an Olympic champion. He's the european champion for Taekwondo. He's ten years. Told my dad, and I remember him confronting the guy, and then that whole journey home was him explaining to me, look, these things are going to happen in life. Racing is going to happen. And I was like, what this. What life's about? Like, oh, my God.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:45:28]:
I was, like, so scared. I was like, every time, got it out. This is what I'm going to have to deal with. And he's like, but it's just how you deal with it. So there are times and environments where I'll be aware of it. And I have this memory of this black book. I put things in the black book. There are people that I know that have said stuff and done stuff they don't know that I know.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:45:45]:
I'm aware of it. Like, highly aware, and it is how you deal with it. I was trying to play on the bigger field and think strategically online and not be reactive, and what could I do? And that was one of the big parts of unincluded. How can I help people get access to more opportunities from different backgrounds? We just want to be treated fairly. So that's happened. Don't really talk about it, sing about it so much. Try and keep it moving, and also help the next generation of people that are coming through.

Benjamin Mena [00:46:12]:
There's not too often where you see that many people turning around and reaching their hand back out, and I love that. So you did with your community when you started your own company as a recruiter, just going back to your childhood and your early career and even mid career, all the way up to the leadership level. What do you think to your core, was one of the reasons why you were successful?

Marcus Sawyerr [00:46:34]:
Because I believed I could be, always.

Benjamin Mena [00:46:37]:
Did you have to develop that?

Marcus Sawyerr [00:46:39]:
Yeah, I was doing Taekwondo as a kid for a long time, and it's all about indomitable spirit, so that inside of you that you believe that you can do, and then you take the action and actually go and do it. And that's why I think that book, that secret, had resonated with me and always believing that if you treat people well and you have positive interactions, it's gonna come back around. So I've always feel like, doesn't matter how bad the chips are, how, like, you can do something. And so I just. I never die. Attitude greatly determined. Somebody called me from Psoria. He says something to me.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:47:14]:
It's quite funny. I was like, I didn't know that had happened. And he said, do you still have, like, this crazy, crazy work ethic? Like, were you just like, crazy? I thought, what do you mean? He's like, yeah, you just used to. I just remember watching you used to pop, and I never thought about it. And people call it hustle culture and all that stuff. They try and rubbish it. And if you don't have anything and you have to come out of something, you have to work hard in order to create as many opportunities for yourself as possible and then be smart enough to distill that information, dissect it, and then decide what you do moving forward. The reason I made 120 phone calls a day was so I could build AI, because I don't want to do that again.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:47:52]:
So I'll go through the hard work and the hard pain to figure out what it's like to then build a better solution. And that's just how my mind works and how I think about it. I don't think that everything should be set in stone. And that's why I think you should continuously be learning and looking at a better way to do things and a better way to live. Wow.

Benjamin Mena [00:48:12]:
I'm sure, like, you have such a positive mental attitude. Like, you had charged. You know how to grind it. The grind in the work is what's gotten you here on top of, like, being smart. But even with all that, like, I'm sure you've had some bad months, you've had some bad weeks. You've had some days where you're just like, this absolutely just sucks. How do you get through those and how do you get back in the game again?

Marcus Sawyerr [00:48:33]:
So my brother is 21 years old. He was playing a football match and he headed a ball when he was 15 and he had a brain aneurysm and a blood vessel burst in his brain, and he hasn't been able to see or walk since. My problems are nothing. He's my inspiration. Like the way he deals with situations, how positive he is, and I speak to him. He's my inspiration. And so I've always known that I've been fortunate to have two arms, two legs, and then that was like a real, like, so if things aren't going that well, just know somebody else has got it worse. And that's how I get through things.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:49:16]:
Everyone's different. And there are days where like, ah, feel a bit lethargic, but then you've got little mechanism. Have a cold shower, right. I've got kids, they're driving me nuts. I'm with them every single day. Like, taking school, taking it, it gets a lot. You've got to take them there and you've got work. Go run a business.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:49:32]:
Are we going to earn enough money? Is our business going to fail? Is it going to be all these thoughts that run through your mind? Go for a walk, take a few deep breaths. So, having coping mechanisms. Look at my brother for information. Go for a walk, take a cold shower, speak to a friend, talk to, hey, Gucci, my new AI as well, right? Like just different ways to deal with those situations. And then before you know it, people come back with positive stuff and it's not, it's not easy. Life is not easy, but somebody has got it worse.

Benjamin Mena [00:50:01]:
Feel like I don't want to ask the next question. After I found out about your brother, man.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:50:06]:
No, he's cool and he's good. It's a very, it's a tragic situation. But I feel like I do it justice where I talk about it and I mention it. I don't see him as often as I would like because I'm in the US. I don't even speak to him as often as I. But it's all, it's a, it's a constant inspiration for me. And then I've got two sisters. One's at Google, Deepminden killing it.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:50:25]:
One's an actress, she's doing really, really well. One's at Oxford. So it's just when you've got a bigger family, you kind of see like, people have always got stuff going through. And that's one other thing I actually learned with the community. When you speak to a lot of people for a community, someone's always got something going on. So just ask them how they are. Oh, I love that.

Benjamin Mena [00:50:45]:
Well, the next question I'm going to ask this two different ways. I'm going to ask this at the very, very beginning or earlier in your career, like when you got into the wonderful world recruiting, then secondly, at the start of EQ, buddy, if you can go back in time with everything that you've learned, the ups and downs, the pain, the success, and have a talk with yourself and give yourself advice. At the very beginning of your career in the recruiting world, what advice would you give yourself?

Marcus Sawyerr [00:51:12]:
I would say things could always be worse. Keep a positive attitude at all times. And I would say help more people earlier because I thought at one point even I was doing your deco stuff and I was a crew builder, I was doing pretty okay. But I didn't realize because I've just head down and I think if I could have maybe like put on a few more people earlier. I did quite help quite a lot of people, but I was just so on it. And some people had seen that as me being arrogant seen, but I needed to get out and I would just continue to help more people. I think that your legacy and your impact is around not you, but the people that you impact and how they then continue to carry that on.

Benjamin Mena [00:51:55]:
Same question, Yvette. With all the success you've had, you're now working with tons of agencies and tons of recruiters. If you can go back in time and have a conversation with yourself at the very beginning of your entrepreneurial journey, what advice would you tell yourself?

Marcus Sawyerr [00:52:07]:
Do it earlier. And I don't think that's necessarily true. That's like a reaction because I learned a lot of the deco. I think, yeah, it's. I'm not necessarily here for the destination. I'm actually here for the journey. So I see, like every part of it is a learning. And I believe that we're gonna get there one day.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:52:28]:
So for me, it's just enjoy it and work with people that you want and have a smile on your face because life can be much worse and it is much worse for other people.

Benjamin Mena [00:52:37]:
That actually goes into my last question. What kind of legacy do you want to leave on the recruiting community?

Marcus Sawyerr [00:52:43]:
Somebody that tried new things and brought joy to the lives of everybody in the industry. And also beyond that, just creating. I'm a creator probably at heart. I think that's really where I am. And I want to help people be successful, and also I want to be successful myself. I don't really think about it that much. I more think about the legacy of my kids versus the industry per se. I think about just giving them the tools that they need in order to be successful so they can help their kids and their people in their community and their networks.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:53:12]:
I think about that a lot.

Benjamin Mena [00:53:13]:
Well, for anybody that wants to follow you, how do they go about doing that?

Marcus Sawyerr [00:53:18]:
LinkedIn is really simple. Just Marcus Sawyer with two rs on LinkedIn, that's an easy way. And also EQ app. If you go to EQ app, there's like a contact us. You can reach out to me there and anyone for your listeners actually, that I'd be super open to. I'll give you my email, my personal email, and you can reach out to me anytime. So maybe we put that in the show notes or I send it to you however you want to deliver that. It's basically first name Marcus community.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:53:47]:
Just marcus@eq.com. that's my personal email come directly to me.

Benjamin Mena [00:53:51]:
I'll have it in the show notes. So you could like flip down to the show notes, click on that, send Marcus name out.

Marcus Sawyerr [00:53:56]:
Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:53:56]:
Before I let you go, is there anything else you'd love to share with the listeners?

Marcus Sawyerr [00:54:01]:
May look fifthly, thanks for the platform and thanks for the question. I appreciate you and appreciate us getting to know each other and having these types of discussions. I think for the listeners, I'll go back to the AI piece and just look, I know if you've done the same thing over and over again and you've had success, you're like, why do you change it? But remember that if you're in sports, you're in science, music or technology, you've always got to learn how to play new instruments, learn how to generate a new experiment to get the new discovery, and also in the same way, learn how to recruit better and more effectively. So just continuously learn, please. It will help you. Awesome.

Benjamin Mena [00:54:43]:
Well, Marcus, I want to say thank you so much. Like I said, the very beginning, there are so many ways and avenues and career options in the recruiting world rather than just back in the day where many people start the recruiting journey either at a desk, banging out phone calls, banging out sales calls. I love that you shared, how you grew, the things that you did to make those moves, the relationships that you built, and how you developed and cultured those relationships. So, man, talk about an awesome episode. And on top of that, the world's changing. AI's coming. But for the recruiters out there, I want you to keep crushing it. I want 2024 to be your best year yet.

Benjamin Mena [00:55:16]:
And we are coming to the tail end of 2024. So whatever you do for the rest of this year is going to be setting yourself up for 2025. So let's make it happen, guys.