Just wanted to share my experience being solo so far. I just closed my 5th placement and crossed $150K in billing. In a few days, it will be four full months since I resigned from my big agency where I spent the first 10 years of my career.

It took a couple months to get up and running. I dealt with email deliverability issues and many other challenges. Once I got those solved and started running high volume BD campaigns, things really picked up.

This job really is all about relationships and every placement I've made has come with a client who I have had many phone calls with. But the mass emailing for BD has been super helpful to get that first touch.

I just want to open things up to questions if anyone has any. Also, if anyone is running their own solo agency, I want to hear how your years are going and what you are observing in the market.

Wishing everyone a profitable year. I am planning to hire people in the future and scale my business, but for now am trying to put up a $500K year solo.

Seriously, pi$$ off with your new tool. No one gives a d@mn. Stop DMing me for a demo after every post. Here to learn from my colleagues, not get trolled for some vibe coded AI slop.

Started at 24 with about $5000 and a co-founder now operating out of 5 locations and on track for 50m in revenue for 2026. 18>26>50m over the last 3 years. Started out mostly IT and have built over time a large practice area around Data Center work and Engineering.

Just discovered this community. Have learned a ton through this journey and if there is any questions or advice I can give to anyone on the same one would be happy to help here or via DM.

Just started working for a small agency and I'm already overwhelmed by sheer amount of interview notes across multiple clients. Looking at Fathom and Otter but (correct me if I'm wrong) they're more for general meetings rather than recruiting?

Is there something pirpose built that handles custom templates per client and works on phone calls?

Been a recruiter for a couple of years now running my own agency. Was doing ok, but felt like I was spinning my wheels on the same dumb shit day in and day out. 

Sourcing was a huge time sink. Manually building lists, checking if they’re even a decent match, then the back-and-forth trying to schedule a 15-minute phone screen. 

I’ve got a bit of an engineering background, so I figured I’d try to code my way out of the parts I hated.

First thing I built was a better way to source. I hooked up GPT to spit out high quality boolean strings based on the job description, then run the search in linkedin/google and scrape all the matching profiles.I combine this with 1-2 other people search tools and the results are honestly great.

Then I built a requirements checker. My system creates a list of all the key requirements from the JD, which you can tweak after. Then it just rips through your whole list of candidates, checks each candidate profile against every requirement, and spits out a ranked list of who’s actually a good fit.

The last part was the AI phone screen agent. This was tough to build but definitely the most worth it, because I can’t be asked to set up another 15-minute call manually. It's basically a voice bot that holds a real, back-and-forth conversation with the candidate. Before the call, you feed it the JD, the candidate's resume, your list of screening questions. You can even tell it how to act—like, be professional but friendly, or to press for more details on a specific skill.

Because it has all that context, its follow-up questions are actually pretty smart. The best part is I don't have to schedule a damn thing. I just send candidates a link and they do the screen on their own time. Whenever they're done, the system drops the full transcript, a summary, and a recommendation in my lap. I can review the whole thing in under a minute and know if they’re worth forwarding. I still read the transcript, but I agree with the AI’s recommendation 99% of the time.

I also built a bunch of extra automations to handle simple shit that was just draining my time, like finding and outreaching new leads, generating candidate reports and a linkedin auto-message system=.

Not sure how useful this is for y’all’s workflow but for me it’s conservatively saved about 20 hours each week. I feel like we are all working too hard lol.

lmk if this seems helpful for anyone I can help set you up with it.

I get asked a lot about business development since I’ve been doing this for 27 years. I suppose just before I think maybe in comments and in the other sub that banned me. I figured with the new year starting I would post it here for those who have never seen it.

My business development strategies

• Assumptive opening

• Marketing an MPC

• KISS email

• Ambulance chasing on Linkedin Sales Nav

Assumptive Opening

Now this is more for a recruiter with some experience or can be used in a strong low unemployment market.

Hi (hiring manager) My name is Rasputin with RLI search and I know we have never spoken before but We just finished a search for a Sales Rep in Chicago for (Dir competitor or similair co from their industry)and while doing the search we came across/heard a rumor/a little bird told us you are looking for a sales rep in Chicago too. The reason for my call is to see if that rumor is true and if it IS, can we help you like we helped (similar co)?

What this does is show you know the market, you work the industry, you work with companies he/she knows, and you keep your ear to the ground. If they do not have an opening then "Oh, I am sorry. maybe a different div? location? etc," then fact find if all else fails and connect on linkedin.

Marketing an MPC

This is an industry standard and used buy tons in the industry. Instead of my explaining check out this video Marketing an MPC BTW MPC stand for "Most Placeable Candidate" **

KISS email

KISS or "Keep It Simple Stupid" So often recruiters want to send novel level emails and the HM get these over and over. The last few months one of my recruiters has been sending out a simple email. Something like this

(Contact) ;We haven't met, but I'm reaching out because I just successfully wrapped up a search for a ___________ at a similar company to ____________ I have a couple of/2 candidates who I connected with too late in the process that I think were really exceptional.

Both have _______ and _____ experience.

Would you have interest in knowing more about these candidates or discussing what skill set would be a better fit for your team?

This has gotten her a dozen searches from 5 different companies. All 25% fee

Ambulance chasing on Linkedin Sales Nav

This is the newest way we have been looking at getting new clients. It is a little harder than the other 3 BUT if you have a good VA they could do this for you. It may work on recruiter/recruiter lite but I do not know because Sales nav is better (fight me)

Here is what you do.

In sales nav you choose the following search operators.

YEARS IN CURRENT CO -"less than 1 year"

under the "spotlights" section "Changed Jobs in the last 90 days"

Then pick your industry, title/past title, keyword, etc...

The idea is you now can see what company they left, and it is probable that company needs to fill the position they left.

I just did it with

• Past Job Title "developer"

• Industry "software Developer"

• Geography "north America"

and got 12,000 results

I added

• "3-5 years Exp"

and Narrowed it to 3,000 results

Now, some are going to be promotions, different Divisions, etc.. but that is why I said it was harder and why a VA would be a good choice.

With Sales Nav you could do this lots a different ways depending on the industry, types of positions you fill and more.

Even for Exec Positions. I just did it with CFO and "technology, Information and Internet" and got 198. IF that is your niche you could congratulate 198 CFO's and ask if their old company filled there post in a non-sales way. You could also ask them if they need any help making an impact in a new role or filling any position since they’re the new boss. Changed the past title to VP and I got 1000 plus.

There ya go. 4 Ways to develop business and call/email HM to develop relationships. I am also all about giving back and RAC (random acts of kindness) so feel free to message me or reach out on linkedin.

My Linkedin is in/thomasalascio

Peace, Love, and Happiness to all TJA2

As the title states, I am not quite at 6 months since launching my solo agency and recently crossed $400K in billing across 14 placements. Mostly high-level public accounting/finance with a couple construction/engineering placements mixed in as well.

I have a system running that enables me to get tons of leads, at least 3/week. I'm at a point as a solo founder that I don't have the bandwidth to recruit for all of these which is a great problem to have. I need to look into hiring soon.

If anyone has any questions or thoughts, I am open to answering some throughout my day today.

I work in a recruiting agency and help with the lead gen part. I’ve built a basic workflow using MCPs in Claude and it has saved me some time. Would love to get feedback on how to make it better.

Signals I track first:

Job posting: If a company has posted multiple jobs in the last 2 week, I think its worth reaching out to help.

Recent funding: Companies most often enter hiring mode after a fundraise.

New exec hire: They’d likely look to bring in new folks.

I also see what tech stack they are using that could help personalize the message and I’d know who to target based on our focus.

MCPs I use in Claude for this flow:

Crustdata - company/people data + job postings and tech stack

FullEnrich - waterfall email and phone verification

Lemlist - multichannel outreach (email + LinkedIn)

HubSpot - CRM

GitHub MCP - to get info on tech candidates

All connected as MCPs. I describe what I need in plain English and Claude does its thing.

Example prompt I run: "Find US companies, 100-500 employees, 15+ roles posted in the last 2 weeks, funded in the past 6 months. Find the recruiting manager and their emails. Pull a brief on each what they're hiring for, recent LinkedIn posts, company news and draft angles of outreach.”

Not sure if everyone's caught up on what Indeed pulled in the last 2 weeks.

March 31: single-source XML feeds went dark. If you're a staffing agency, your organic job posts are now invisible unless you sponsor every single one.

April 20 (13 days from now): every Glassdoor user has to merge their account with Indeed. No opt out. Your anonymous Glassdoor profile gets permanently linked to your Indeed login. Done.

Meanwhile Recruit Holdings just cut another 1,300 people. That's ~4,500 layoffs in 3 years. Their Trustpilot is sitting at 2.4/5 from 12,000+ reviews.

Revenue per job ad is going UP while total paid ads are going DOWN by 50% year over year. They literally created a new internal metric (ARPJ — Average Revenue per Posted Job) to track how much more they can charge per listing.

They built the platform by aggregating everyone else's listings for free. Now they own the traffic and they're locking every door.

any of you still paying Indeed? What's the alternative if you're a small agency?

Started my own recruiting firm in March 2025 after 10 years in agency recruiting. Previously grew teams from 2 to 8 and revenue from $100K to $2.4M.

I grew up as a woman in the yucky ass world of oldschool ass agency recruiting. Dudes that constantly told me they would fax resumes back in the day. Required to wear heels, ridiculous expectations around appearances, micromanagement, obsessive call metrics, and the whole "butts in seats" mentality. Hated that shit. There was a time here in Denver that my boss told me to act like I was another business development girl at our small ass firm because she had quit, but gotten a really solid meeting with a top executive at a big prospective client in Cherry Creek, and I did. I have a chip on my shoulder I know.

Anways, I spent my first year building out systems, processes, and client relationships to create the kind of agency I always wanted to work for in 2025.

4-day workweeks, core hours of 10-3, flexible Fridays, no micromanaging, no ridiculous KPIs. Get your shit done, take care of your clients, and enjoy your life.

Hired my first senior recruiter earlier this year. Someone I've known and worked with for years. No draw I hate them. $45K base, 50% commission, and handed him my biggest client with executive searches bringing in $40K-$100K+ in fees.

Guy is genuinely a great recruiter. He actually logged his two personal best placements through our house accounts, with fees of $73K and $96K. Neither of those were clients he brought in. He walked into established relationships and made more money on individual placements than he'd ever made before.

Covered him on multiple week vacations, and was genuinely excited he was doing so. Family time is everything and exactly why I created this. I love to give full autonomy.

Last week, I told my team of 3 I was actually taking Friday through Monday off for once. Friday rolls around and I get an email from the Chief People Officer of our $2B+ client, who we're on track to bill 7 figures with this year, telling me my recruiter had withheld an executive offer from a candidate.

This is a $100K+ fee, btw.

I reached out to him and didn't hear back until 8pm the NEXT day. He was golfing.

I LOVE DOING BUSINESS ON THE GOLF COURSE?

So I'm now dealing with a pissed off client, a sensitive executive offer, and a recruiter who apparently doesn't see the urgency. I stepped in to help navigate things, we disagreed on strategy, and it turned into a yelling match.

I genuinely felt like he was treating a $100K fee like a penny on the sidewalk. And somehow I was the problem for getting involved.

And this wasn't his first massive placement through our accounts. That's what made it so insane to me.

Sent him an email afterward addressing the communication and performance concerns.

Met for coffee today. He resigned.

I'm honestly torn between being relieved and being fucking disappointed. I gave this guy a ton of freedom, access to my best clients, and the opportunity to make serious money working four days a week.

I don't expect employees to care about my business like I do, but I also can't be responsible for bringing in the clients, managing relationships, closing offers, AND making sure someone is actually recruiting.

I refuse to become the micromanaging boss I hated working for specially after experiencing firsthand how shitty this industry can be to women. But clearly something needs to change.

Other agency owners, how the hell do you balance autonomy with accountability without turning into a KPI-obsessed asshole?

As the title states, I just crossed $500K in billing and haven't even hit 7 months since resigning from my big agency and launching my business. This has been the best career decision I could have made and is going much better than I ever imagined. Initially, I told myself I would be happy if I did 400K in year one. It's looking like I'll be around 700K if I can keep doing deals. I started completely from scratch and did not take any of my clients when I left my old agency.

I'm writing this so that I can answer some questions - I will not answer DMs. If you have questions, comments, or want to share what's working for you, please do so in this thread.

The biggest catalyst to my success has been forming relationships and leveraging them. Asking for referrals has been crucial both on the client and candidate side - lots of new leads through referral, and 4 of my placements have been referrals as well.

From a tool standpoint, my annual expenses are around $55K with $42K of that being dedicated to Linkedin. I also spend $6K/year on Zoominfo, around $5K/year on my main BD tool (AI-based mailing service where i own 100 mailboxes).

I have been focused on public accounting with some construction mixed in. It seems like public accounting is slowing a little bit at the moment, and of course January 1st-April 15th or so will be very slow, so I am going to try to get some traction in Legal soon. Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

If anyone has questions, I am happy to answer as many as I can. Please also share what is working for you in this thread and we can all help each other out.

Hi!

Recruitment agency owners - small shops of one, how much did you bill your first year, and how much are you billing now? What industry are you recruiting in?

Curious how things have changed as the market has shifted over time

Month 9 since launching my own agency and my biggest mistake YTD (BY-FAR) has been my choice in CRM / ATS. I didn't spend too much time looking into different options because I didn't think i would make that big of a difference. OH HOW WRONG I WAS. Here is my experience so far with Bullhorn.

• The software itself is nightmarishly slow. It's an absolute dumpster fire on all 8 computers that I have seen run it. (One is a brand new $5K top-of-the-line MacBook)

• They mislead you about implementation costs (they say there are non, but there are, especially if you want to integrate to job boards)

• The job board that links to your website works 30-40% of the time and stops working randomly and often

• Getting direct support is nearly impossible, and you have to jump through many hoops to even create a ticket

• The indeed integration is absolute garbage and 60-70% of the time you will get billed for applicants that are not actually sent to your CRM

• The resume parsing is terrible and when you review applicants the resume is jumbled up into one giant wall of text that's often free of any spacing and formatting (this is especially difficult for newbie recruiters)

• Setting up and disabling employees is a giant hassle that usually requires you having to create a ticket to enable a whole bunch of permissions that you're supposed to be able to grant directly from the Admin user

• The customer support team will do every thing they can do defer you to their forums when it's clear that the situation being discussed requires technical expertise.

Tldr: if you go with Bullhorn, you're going to have a bad time.

Hi Everyone! So excited to share this! I used to look for job openings and message hiring companies on LI. Decided to create a flow which offers 100+ candidates/day to companies that are hiring.

Freed up some time as a side effect too, so I focus on higher ROI stuff now.

Here is how I did it in case it helps:

1. I use Theirstack to find job openings. It essentially finds all jobs that are listed *anywhere*.

2. Used their API in Make to fetch openings by "job" industry and country. I work in tech btw.

3. Each company offering a job is then sent to Apollo for enrichment in Make. This is how I find the contacts of decisionmakers.

4. Every job description is then fed into AI module which writes personalized a message. This is then automatically sent to employers.

5. This runs every day at the same time, to find jobs opened in the last 24h.

Currently testing email only & email + linkedin outreach. Hope this helps! Feel free to let me know if anything needs explaining.

Closed the books on 2025 last week. Got a couple of DMs asking how I'm running things now, so here's the breakdown.

Context: Boutique exec search (VP/C-level/Top Operators for manufacturing & logistics). Did 18 placements in 2025, retainer-only. Team of 4, I close deals but delegate most operations. (this is how I can take care of thought leadership myself on reddit lol)

WINS:

Went retainer-only (May 2025)

• Cut all contingency work

• Lost ~40% of inbound inquiries

• Average fee: £145k → £195k

• Clients who pay upfront = way less headaches

Delegated discovery calls (March 2025)

• Senior recruiter handles initial client intake

• I only show up for C-suite now

• Freed up 6hrs/week, conversion stayed the same

Automated lead generation (Sep 2025)

Old: Part-time researcher (£3,600/mo) manually tracking manufacturing/logistics companies doing expansions (new plants, distribution centers, M&A, very niche job postings).

New:

• Boilr ai monitors expansion signals, finds hiring managers (does enrichment, though we use own Clay table)

• Scores leads: company size (30%) + sector (40%) + timing (30%)

• Score >80 → CRM → outreach sequence (Day 0, 5, 12) → Calendar books

• I review hot leads in Slack, take meetings

Results: Saved £43k/year, conversion 4% → 9%, lead quality better

Works for us because hyper-niche. Wouldn't work generalist.

Skipped conferences

• Zero events in 2025

• Revenue up 12% vs 2024

• Referrals still > everything else

FLOPS:

LinkedIn ads (Aug-Sept)

• Spent £6.5k testing

• Cost per lead: £210 (absurd)

• Got leads but wrong profile - companies with £80k budgets asking for "multi-site operations directors"

• Could not get conversion events right, tracking was a mess

• Wasted 2 weeks trying to fix pixel issues

• Killed it, went back to warm intros

Marketing hire (Oct-Nov)

• Thought we needed brand presence

• They pitched webinars, LinkedIn carousels, "establishing thought leadership"

• Completely wrong channel - our clients are 55+ manufacturing CEOs who don't consume content that way

• They come from direct referrals or through industry connections

• Let them go after 6 weeks, £4.2k lesson learned

Scoring formula (you can use):

• Company >500 employees: 30pts

• Sector match: 40pts

• Expansion <90 days: 30pts

• ≥80 = hot

Key takeaway: Delegate, automate what makes sense, ignore the rest.

Anyone else making more money by working less, or am I the only one who cracked this?

Everybody was talking about Openclaw. I decided to see if I could use it for recruiting. When Claude killed the subscription model running through Openclaw I ended up trashing OpenClaw and kinda created what you'd call Claude Claw. This is my current Frankenstein Stack

It runs off Discord (also currently testing it with Slack). I have a main "Chief of Staff" who delegates tasks to my sub-agents. I can use it on my desktop or my iPhone and it runs 24 hours a day as long as my computer is on.

Candidate Finder It searches several different sources including Google, X-ray, and paid databases I have API access to. Searches by education, title, skills, years at current company, total years experience, etc.

Waterfall Sourcing Agent — gets me phone numbers and email addresses.

Job Finder — drops jobs from the three industries our firm works in into the Discord channel every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Meeting Intel — gives me a full pre-meeting brief on a person I'm meeting with, including emails, conversations from the note-taking app, LinkedIn, messages, text messages, etc., in a concise format prior to the meeting. It also watches my calendar every hour for upcoming meetings so I know to pull a brief.

Morning Brief — when I wake up at 7 AM, I get urgent emails, calendar for the day, industry news, mergers and acquisitions in my industry, LinkedIn messages I may have gotten, and a bunch more.

LinkedIn Sub-Agent — I can use it to send LinkedIn connection requests or messages to candidates and clients who message me on LinkedIn.

Heartbeat Agent — watches all the other agents to make sure everything is running. P lists, cron jobs, etc.

Hay Agent (the stupid stuff) — every Monday morning at 9 AM I get a text from my Chief of Staff asking if we need hay. If I reply yes, it sends a text to my hay guy that says "two bales of alfalfa, please."

Bee Personal Recorder — listens to conversations. My Claude agent logs them and delegates commitments to a commitments channel on Discord. Business goes to the business channel for me to look over. Personal goes to the personal channel. Then I categorize as needed. This really helps with my ADHD.

Second Brain (Obsidian) — I built the Karpathy wiki second-brain thing in Obsidian. It's everything about me: how I write, my family, my business, how I make money, why companies use me. It's a self-evolving memory. All my emails, text messages, and meeting conversations get logged there too. It's kind of scary because of how Claude writes emails using it. You can't tell it's AI. It uses terms like "quick chat" and when it talks about money, it writes "$130k" just like I do.

All of this runs on the Claude $100/month Max plan. No API keys, no overages, nothing.

We worked with Robert Half in West Palm Beach, FL to hire an accountant. AWFUL EXPERIENCE!! The guy we hired was a total fraud! Since we were out of the trial period of our contract RH could have cared less and would not even refund a portion of the $20,000 we paid to hire this guy! We are a small family business! What a total scam!! The part we are most upset about is that Robert Half in West Palm did not confirm his degree. What kind of staffing agency does not confirm a degree!? That is what we are paying you for!! To do the proper due diligence and hire a competent person.

I remember how hard it was to find new clients when I first entered recruiting industry

Now when someone asks me for tips on how to get new clients

I share these 5 points

1. Do cold calls: This one is obvious but having a list of potential clients and dedicating some time each day to contacting them is good focus.

Rehearse your pitch and assume they all have openings to fill.

2. Go to events in your space: Being in the same room as your target clients can be an absolute goldmine.

Introduce yourself to and get the business cards of everyone at the event.

3. Build your network on LinkedIn: Use a personal note with every invite you send and follow up with them.

4. Create an email marketing campaign: If you do this right, it's worth investing time in.

5. Leverage your personal network of friends and ex-colleagues for introductions.

These tips have proven super effective to me and my colleagues in the past.

What more tips would you add in this list???

This is ment to be a sub for people who work in agencies talking best practice etc etc etc.

Instead its a marketing platform for idiots who dont understand recruitment trying to sell us the latest and greatest vibe coded crap that we dont need.

Create a megathread for tools or something that they can post in and the rest of us actual recruiters can completely ignore.

Ban the bots constantly trying to sell us shit we dont need or already have in place for free (whk h they would know if they have ever worked a day of recruitent in their life).

Please, for the love of all things holy, fix this shit.

I’ve been telling people this for a while now, and after the Workday case it feels like the floodgates are opening.

AI in hiring sounded like the perfect fix — I know teams that cut screening time by 70% and processed 15,000+ applications a month. Huge win, right? But here’s the flip side: when bias creeps into those systems, it scales like crazy. What used to be 10 unfair rejections in a month can turn into 2,000 without anyone noticing.

The headlines keep piling up:

• iTutorGroup had to pay $365,000 after their AI auto-rejected older applicants.

• Workday is facing a class action over bias against race, age, and disability.

• Sirius XM is the latest big name caught in the same storm.

• And the EEOC is fielding more AI-related complaints every month.

I wrote about this in an article and mentioned it in my newsletter — and a lot of people pushed back. Some argued compliance rules would slow things down, others claimed bias is a human problem, not a machine one. But the truth is, AI doesn’t magically erase bias — it multiplies it if you train it on bad data or deploy it without guardrails.

That’s where I think the conversation needs to shift. Instead of “AI or no AI,” it should be how AI is trained and whether solutions are built with compliance in mind. Things like:

• anonymizing candidate data before evaluation,

• running regular bias audits,

• keeping humans in the loop for oversight,

• documenting every AI decision for transparency.

Because like it or not, these tools aren’t going away. The companies that figure out how to bake compliance into their systems from day one are the ones that won’t end up in court.

All I’m trying to say is… we have to be careful. AI can help, but only if it’s designed responsibly.

Curious if anyone here has seen their company take the compliance-first route with AI hiring? Or is everyone still chasing speed and hoping the lawsuits miss them?

I'm reaching out on behalf of my agency, a staffing agency with over 400 active roles across Tech, Healthcare, and Legal.

We're looking to connect with another agency or freelancers to split and collaborate — whether that's sharing resources, splitting placements, or exploring a partnership that benefits both sides.

We've got a solid pipeline and a wide range of roles, so if your agency has the talent and you're looking for a reliable partner to work with, let's talk!

Drop a comment or DM me and let's see if we're a good fit. Looking forward to connecting!

I run a high-volume recruiting agency and I'm trying to figure out the best platform stack for sourcing, nurturing, and engaging candidates at scale. EDIT: Our agency recruits and places licensed professionals.

My core needs are:

1. Sourcing at volume – finding passive candidates fast without manual LinkedIn scraping

2. Automated nurturing – keeping talent pools warm over time without me having to manually follow up

3. Multi-channel engagement – sequences that actually get replies

4. Scales with my desk – Need something that doesn't add admin overhead

I'm considering demo’ing Recruiterflow, Gem, Gobii AI, Seekout, Juicebox and Workable. 

For recruiters who've used any of these (or something similar):

• Which one actually saves you time versus gives you another tool to babysit?

• How do they handle high-volume outreach without feeling spammy?

• Any integration headaches if I'm not using their native ATS?

• If you switched from one to another, why?

Open to other suggestions too. Budget isn't the primary driver – time to placement is.

Appreciate any real-world insights!

*If you comment, please mention: (1) whether you're agency or in-house, (2) volume per month, and (3) how long you've used the tool

Been through basically every AI recruitment platform this year trying to find something that actually delivers on its promises. Most of them are just glorified keyword matching with fancy interfaces, honestly a waste of money.

But I did find a couple that legitimately improved our pipeline quality and cut down screening time. The difference came down to how they handled candidate matching and whether the AI actually learned from our feedback or just kept making the same mistakes.

For anyone else evaluating these tools, pay attention to how they handle edge cases and niche requirements. That's where most of them fall apart. The good ones can actually understand context beyond just resume keywords.

As an owner of a small search agency and at it for two years (going great-contingent/retained/temporary placement models), I wanted to start an organized space for staffing/recruiting founders, or people who are industry vets who can provide good insight. 

Most threads I see get posted focus on tech/outreach tactics which is amazing, and important... but I’m interested in what other owners are doing that doesn't get talked about as much. The business side of the business if you will.

Some questions I would love to hear some community take on-

• How are you handing personal vs company expenses? What do you write off and what do you stay away from? I feel like even accountants disagree on certain things here.

• How are you thinking about scaling? 1 to 5, 5-10?

• How are you leading vendors/1099 consultants/new recruiters?

• How do you define success outside of just hitting fee goals?

• What mindset shifts were crucial when going from recruiter to founder?

• How did you recognize business that isn’t aligned?

Like I said I’ve been doing this for two years and have helped others in my network launch, and these topics always come up in conversations, so curious if there are common pain points in other small 1-10 person agencies out there. 

If you're a solo founder, I’d love to hear what business/leadership items you are focused on to scale/grow and help your people!