From Side Gig to Thriving Recruitment Business: The Journey of Jon Chintanaroad

Speaker 2: 0:11

Welcome to Side Hustle City and thanks for joining us. Our goal is to help you connect to real people who found success turning their side hustle into a main hustle, and we hope you can too. I'm Adam Kaler. I'm joined by Kyle Stevie, my co-host. Let's get started, all right. Welcome back everybody to the Side Hustle City podcast. Kyle Stevie not with us today doing some family stuff, but John Santana Chintana wrote you are with us today, special guest, talking about recruiting.

Speaker 3: 0:44

Hey, thanks for having me, Adam. Yeah, we appreciate it.

Speaker 2: 0:47

We appreciate you being on the show. This is awesome. So this is something a little different. I always tell people like hey look, you know, there's these old tried and true side hustles that have been around forever, the real estate agent stuff we were just talking about insurance agents, financial advisors, like these are all things that people have done. I would say, definitely, real estate agents have been a side hustle forever that people turn into a main hustle. But nobody's ever come on here talking about creating your own, you know, recruiting accelerator, your own recruiting side hustle and you own an accelerator program, right?

Speaker 3: 1:23

Exactly right. So our program recruiting accelerator we help people who want to start their own recruiting business, basically become an independent recruiter, and usually people have a nine to five, whether they work in a corporate recruiting role or an agency recruiting role or the non-recruiter at all, and they want to kind of just test the waters, do it on the side, independently, after they make a couple of recruiting deals. And for those who don't know, the average fee for a recruiter is 20% of your candidates' base salary, their first year base salary. So if you're placing engineers at 150k a pop, then that's a $30,000 fee, right, so really high fees. And once they make one or two of those placements, right, we call them. Then usually they're all in and they'll just go full time because they get a taste of making that type of money. So that's kind of what we help with. That's been my personal journey, going from a recruiter to recruiting business owner and now helping people who kind of want to do the same thing.

Speaker 2: 2:19

I love it, man. So tell me about your background. You know how did you get into recruiting and then how did you pivot from being a recruiter into this idea that, hey, I'm going to create a recruiting?

Speaker 3: 2:30

accelerator, sure. So I like most people recruiting. I kind of fell into it. You know, no one ever, you know there's no like college major for recruiting, right Like you don't have a real plan of doing it. Yeah, I actually walked into a staffing agency just looking for a job and they ended up recruiting me to go work for them. So like, well, I was thinking of that, but sure, let's, let's give a shot. You know, and I thought, I thought, I thought to myself, interesting, I never thought about a career recruiting. But you know, like I like people, I'm a fairly extroverted and and I I think I always connect friends with other friends who are looking for stuff. So I think I've ended up accidentally like helping people recruit, but it's never got paid for it. So I thought, why not, let's take a stab at it? And I really liked it. And you know, a lot of times I was helping out people who are who needed a job, right, like hey, I need to work, really kind of just low level, entry level type of stuff. It was really rewarding. Like hey, john, thanks for finding me this, this three month contract or two week contract, I can pay my bills, I can pay my rent. So it was like morally satisfying, right, it was good karmic energy. The bad part is I wasn't making any money right? Because, like, when you play someone on an hourly basis, it's more in the world called staffing. You staff hourly people. Then you have to decline or tell you okay, here's how much I'll pay, here's my bill rate, I'll pay this bill rate, you can bill me, and then we'll. We'll take that like say it's 50 bucks an hour, then we'll find the person who could work for the lowest amount of pay so we can keep the difference with the margins and because we're paying as low as we can, it's high turnover. And then my commission was a percentage of those really thin margins. And so my comments is a lot of work for not a lot of money, right. So then that's where I kind of found out about recruiting. So staffing is the hourly worker thing. Recruiting is where I mentioned earlier. You place full time salary people, you get a commission of you know a commission of from their salary and those are much. It's higher ticket, it's a high ticket type of payday, right. So I got into a boutique firm doing a technical recruiting and I was excited because I placed one person at 100 K salary, the agency makes 20 K and my commission my percent. That will be decent, a few thousand dollars. It's way better than what I was making before doing the hourly staffing. But the problem was I had no technical recruiting experience. Like I, you know, I have zero technical background. Like JavaScript or code looks like the matrix to me, or it's all just a jublish. Yes. So like how the heck am I like? I think I tricked them enough to trick them into hiring me. I was able to convince them to hire me and I found out that if you have a good Just people skills, recruiting fundamentals, you understand how to kind of qualify a person to figure out if they're a good fit for One of your clients positions. It doesn't matter which niche you do. Right, you can be like hey, how many years of JavaScript you have? How many years of sales experience do you have? Or tell me about your proficiency and mechanical engineering. It's all the same type of box you check. So that kind of gave me confidence to learn new niche. I did well there. But the problem in that role is that in recruiting you are really focused on the candidate, the people looking for career opportunities. We don't have exposure to the client side. That's like a salesperson or the owner of the agency will get clients where they'll convince VP level hiring managers to use their services right and pay their fees. So we're very insulated. But the problem was I was always dependent on them. I would find a really good candidate, submit them to the account manager and I'd be waiting for them to. Yes, show them to the client's time to delay. Sometimes you forget and they get feedback. Sometimes they wouldn't get any feedback for me, like, hey, no, they don't like them. Try again. I'm like well, what exactly don't they like? I thought this person spot on. So it's very frustrating, especially when my paycheck was directly tied to this. Like middleman, I had to like go through, right. So I thought you know what? All right, no, no more, I'm not going to do any more recruiting unless I had exposure to both the candidate and the client. I can work with the client directly, so that way I can get direct line of feedback. You know, it's much faster, right? So I actually took a break from Agency recruiting because I heard the world of corporate recruiting was cushy. So I actually got a job at Google, right? So I'm here in the area, yeah. So I thought you know like, yeah, actually I was trying to recruit somebody for this like Sales role, and they're like oh no, I don't do that anymore. I'm actually a recruiter. So, but they recruit you. I'm on your LinkedIn profile, like what? I'm like I'm not interested, sorry. Well, I work one of my clients, google. I'm like tell me more, right, this is back Google. Google. Was that shining, yeah. So yeah, it's a six. It's a six figure salary, john, unlimited food at their gourmet cafeteria, super fun. I'm like, oh my gosh, why am I spinning my wheels over like deals and commissions where I can just like play like, ride this little multicolor rainbow Bicycles around campus and play volleyball all my breaks right and and makes six figures like that's a win-win right. So I did that for a while and it was really fun, except after a while it wasn't all funny games. It was like really high stress, very demanding. They make you work for every every dollar they pay you and it's competitive. I think in the corporate world, you know, my client is just that one company, google. So I only recruit for a Google within a specific department. I always had this fear that if I did a good job, I'd like work myself out of a job, like whether I filled all the positions you asked me to fill and like you had no more to give me. So I always had that looming fear. And also, I think eventually I started kind of keeping tabs with my friends who stuck with the agency world and because in recruiting agencies it's uncapped commissions, they're making way more than me, right, and I was, so I was being so us feeling stressed. I was worried about, you know, working myself out of a job or them going to hiring freeze and there's no other clients to like support. So if, if your company goes on hiring freeze which is what's happening right now, right With, with all the layoffs you see the news, all the tech layoff you know Google, netflix, right, facebook doing mass layoffs the first people to Let be like, go our recruiters, because if they're not hiring, why the heck do they need all these internal recruiters Right? So, right now, there's a lot of laid-off recruiters. I was one of them at some point, which I'll get to in the moment. It's really frustrating because you're doing a good job but if your company you work for just happens to stop hiring like you're gone, right, and now you're you're on the street looking for I never thought of that. That's true, yes, yeah, so we're recruiters are very strong. Recruiters are very sensitive to the economy. Well, at least corporate recruiters are very sensitive to the worst. Right now, if tech is on the slowdown and your technical recruiter used to working for Amazon's and Netflix and Facebook's of the world, good luck. And now it's tough, right.

Speaker 2: 8:51

So they're not gonna like move you into like HR or something, they're not gonna like move you around and you're just expendable at that point Exactly. So here you are with like a $6,000 a month, friggin rent in Silicon Valley somewhere, and now you have no job.

Speaker 3: 9:06

Yes, exactly, and so that's what I think. A lot of times people come to us with that because they're like, shoot, like now, what do I do? Like I can't like any other corporate job of finding this with some like much smaller, no name company is not compare me nearly what Google paid me and they don't want to go into the recruiting agency world because they don't have to start the bottom effectively and, like you know, learn the ropes. So they're kind of this limbo place and so we can help a lot of people like that. But toward the end of my Google time I thought you know what, like I do miss the world of the agency, like having multiple clients, of the variety and the freedom and flexibility. But I knew that I didn't want to get back to the world unless I had client control right. You know client facing opportunity. So sure enough, as luck would have it, I got hired to be the first new hire of a tech division in San Francisco where I would be trained on both getting the client and and I already know how to recruit. So it's getting the client and then recruiting on the client's roles on my own. So it's like double dipping and when you find a client and you actually find the candidate, then you make like the most commission record. You did the whole deal yourself. So I was at that job. I was making 50% commission. So for every, you know, 150 per 150k, per second place, the agency will make 30k and I will make 15k. I'm like, wow, that's great and I was doing well and that's getting paid well and life was like really good, right. But after a while, I think, just as a logical human being, I was like wait, I'm doing all the work. I'm prospecting for clients, doing sales calls, you know if, negotiating the contract and then going out there and you know, headhunting the candidates, nurturing them, managing the whole interview process, making sure the salary expectations are aligned, make sure the offer gets due, they actually start work, they show up to work. And then I was the client, like I'm doing all the work, I'm still giving half to the house. So eventually I'm like this doesn't quite make sense. And a lot of people we talk to are like agency recruiter people. They're like, hey, I'm kind of sick of like comparing what I bill for my agency and when I take home a paycheck, that discrepancy becomes like soul crushing, right, oh yeah. And so I wish I could say that I had like the guts to kind of pull Jeremy Gwyer to storm out there and grab the goldfish and grab like you know your box and leave yeah exactly. Yeah, who's coming with me? I wish I could say I did and like most people I thought about for years like I'd be nice one day if dot, dot, dot, if all my ducks are in a row, or if I had more money saved up or if the stars were one. I know a lot of people probably listening that you've mentioned can sometimes end up in that kind of someday maybe yes game where their goals end up actually becoming dreams that they end up forgetting about and years later they're still kind of in that little cage of their engendered servitude right up that you get stuck man, you got a mortgage you got a car payment, maybe you got.

Speaker 2: 11:56

Your kids are in school, you got to pay that. Yeah, you get stuck in. The more you wait and postpone your dream, the more stuck you're going to get.

Speaker 3: 12:06

Yes, absolutely, which is why I love the idea of the side hustle, because it allows you to kind of test it out safely and validate it right. But for me, I didn't have the opportunity to side hustle because what happened was one day I walked in there hey, bad news, john, we are laying off your tire department. Yeah, we're priming to be to be acquired and we're going to focus on our bread. You know our breadwinner, our sales division.

Speaker 2: 12:31

So another reason people get fired from these jobs One is they stop hiring, and two is acquisition, and they want the acquiring company that is doing the acquiring wants you to get leaner, and that's what happened in your case is they wanted to go lean. They didn't want these expenses, so before they bought the company, they wanted the current company to do all the dirty work and fire everybody.

Speaker 3: 12:56

Yeah, right, Because I was profitable, but not. You know, everybody on my team was because we're still a young department. Yeah. So I was like, okay, we'll shoot, can at least call my clients, let them know that. No, don't worry about it. No, we'll, we'll notify them for you. So I was like, well, that's kind of weird. When I got home, actually, I stopped by a bar, first, had some drinks to like lick my wounds, suck a little bit, and then, when I got home, I know a few, a few drinks in me, I mean, you know what I forget. I'm just gonna call my clients, like they should hear from me. So I called my, my top two clients and broke the news to them, say, hey, sorry, I won't be able to send you any more engineering resumes. You know they lay off the tech division, including me. And what happened was kind of crazy and surprising, where both of these clients said, hey, john, like that sucks, but like screw them, why don't you just start your own thing? And like we'll sign with you, like we want to keep working with you. So I'm like, wow, so that's the first one. Like okay, well, can I think about, I'll tell you on Monday. And I call my client number two and she said the exact same thing. So now I'm like, okay, well, should I have, like, I think, a few months of unemployment coming. So I can live off that not very well but I can survive. So let's give us a shot. So literally over the weekend through the, through the website, I took the old contract from my employer, took out their names, put in my name, just just a quick editing on Microsoft Word and just like, sent it over. It came back signed by the client. I'm like, oh, I guess I'm in business now. Let me give this like 90 days. I'll give it 90 days. If it doesn't work out, I can always go find a job. I think that's the thing, too, that I wish more people kind of realized who are thinking about doing their own thing or branching out on their own is that there is a safety net, right? People think I'll have no safety net, but your safety net is you can actually go back to and then a five job like that's always going to be available, yeah especially now.

Speaker 2: 14:42

I mean it's like unemployment, so low people are struggling, especially tech people. I mean tech people are just I mean, I think, even what's his name? Zuckerberg shot out a tweet that said there's not enough engineers.

Speaker 3: 14:54

There's always. So that's the thing about recruiting, that I'm glad you mentioned that, because you mentioned these age-old, like trying to true industries real estate, insurance that's been around forever. That will continue to be around forever, and recruiting is kind of what we call like an evergreen industry as well. It's been around forever. As long as there's a demand for talent, the best talent and people a couple of them are fighting over hiring the best people there's always going to be a need for recruiters to go actually find those people right. Because a lot of what we do is not just like we don't post job ads and like hope the perfect person will apply and then we can just forward our resume over to our client and get paid 20, 30k. If we're that easy right, everyone will do it. The clients already have their own job posts right. So our job is actually go ahead and, like headhunt, usually go into like their competitors' companies and say, hey, these are our top three competitors, we'll go in there and we'll try to basically poach people from their competitor and bring them to our client and because of that's much value, they have industry experience, competitive knowledge and they're very, very valuable and because of that person's value we're paid a premium because that company isn't comfortable calling to their competitors and trying to headhunt them themselves, right, they have, like agencies, do that type of dirty work, right, so to speak. But yeah, so I actually saw, I did my own thing and it just took off. I made a placement what we call a hire within like the first month and in recruiting you get paid net 30. So 30 days after your can starts work will the invoice be due. And I remember the first time that paycheck it actually mailed me the physical check of $16,000. I was like, oh, my goodness, like I've never seen this much money and it does a common here. Like it's crazy. I was like just jumping up and down my bed.

Speaker 2: 16:39

I'm very excited there was two numbers before that first comma, like yeah.

Speaker 3: 16:43

I never had two days before a comma ever before, and so that's like, well, okay, now I made another deal after that we'll have to wait another 30 days. So that just kept going for like five years, right. So we kind of grew it. I brought on an old coworker as a partner and eventually kind of sold it to him. We want to take it in slightly different directions. And I kind of felt like after five years it was like rinse, rinse, wash, repeat over and over find a client, find a position, fill a position, find a position, fill a position and it's fine. But it just kind of like after five years I think I just created it to do something different. And then you asked me earlier kind of what got me inspired to like do an accelerator, do a coaching program was one I saw. What happened was I had some old coworkers reach out to me from the same place I got laid off from and they're like hey, I saw, by the way, john, you're doing well, I saw that you had a branch on your own. Like I'm thinking about doing it too, like could you give me some pointers, right? And even some people who are in recruiting say, hey, it seems like recruiting is not rocket science. You're just, you're just talking to people sending emails and I'm like, yeah, it's not rocket science, it's really just connecting people together. They're like Do you think you can show me like a thing or two? I'm like Sure, and then I just kind of, you know, like fell in love with coaching and so I started one on one helping people that wasn't even sure people wouldn't, wouldn't want to pay me or this value enough for the pay me to do it. I was in for free for a while. Then start charging, you know, few bucks an hour here and there, and eventually it grew into kind of our program now where today we've helped like over 200 people like starting grow their own agencies. Wow, we've been fortunate enough to wear on my LinkedIn profile. People can see like just dozens of testimonials of people who no experience coming in with the 60, 90 days, making their first, you know, 15, 20, 25, 30 K or more placement fee right and keeping all of it. And it's allowed people to go from having to be a side hustle to their full-time hustle and then give them the flexibility to travel and they have that lifestyle business they've always wanted and it's been very, very rewarding. And now, you know, luckily I have a team of coaches. I have, you know, a full blown team, and so now we can really support people at a very high level. We give people dedicated account managers. They can, you know, hold their hand, help them with any part of the business. So, yeah, it's been really a fun ride and I'm really excited to kind of see where this goes.

Speaker 2: 19:01

I love it. So you went from in-house recruiter at Google. You flipped that into like a job at like a Robert Haff or something like that kind of place. Because I had two friends we actually started an app called Vanda and our whole idea was is that you make the profile the exact same, as kind of like the. Or actually somebody comes into like a company like, say, google, right, they have to fill out a wizard and it says what's the title of the job, this and that, and they put a whole bunch of stuff in there. Well, the applicant does the exact same thing and then we just match up those fields and that's how they get. You know, you end up getting like 10 resumes instead of 1000 resumes, right, and you can just get rid of all the crap resumes that actually don't qualify. So they were both my two co-founders in that were both from Robert, they had originally worked at Robert Haff and they were like doing the same thing where you know they were getting a percentage of that. I think Robert Haff's is a little bit higher. I think they're like 25% or something crazy. But they're the big dog, they're the 500 pound gorilla kind of thing in the industry. But you know, nobody ever really thinks like, hey, wait a minute. And this takes a special type of person, a special type of brain to be like, wait, why am I doing? Like, why don't I start my own thing? And you actually had your clients tell you you should start your own thing, because they probably already had that mindset. They were already like, well, dude, what are you doing? Like what do you want to look for a job? Like we can pay you to help us because we know you did a good job?

Speaker 3: 20:35

Yeah, exactly Like we'll pay you what we paid your agency. I'm like that works for me, right. And then, yeah, so yeah, I went for 50% commission to 100%. So I was so grateful that like I ran to them later with the people who laid me off with thank you so much, like they basically doubled my income, right, I didn't have to pay 50% commission. And also I was like well, I'm paying, like paying half for like an office. I don't really need these recruiting tools that you know just cost a few hundred bucks a month. I can just pay that myself and like a brand, like you know, like it's not that it wasn't that big of a deal, because I thought that I think a lot of the careers have this misunderstanding that it's really important to be able to say hi, this is John from Robert Haff. And just by magically saying John from Robert Haff, that just kind of the red carpet rolls out and you can just take down new clients easily, right, like on autopilot. But at the end of the day, I found that companies who are hiring, they don't care Like when I would do prospecting calls, they didn't care like not just like what the name of my business was or the name, but which agency I'm calling from. They didn't care what my name was. They're like hey, like, what do you have for me? Like, remember that scene in Wall Street? Like the original one with, like Gordon DeGeco, right, and I'm Charlotte. She walks in and he's like what do you have for me? And you guys like, oh, like, what do you mean? Like, like, my time is valuable. Like what do you? Like, do you have a deal for me? Like, what do you have for me? And I think hiring managers are the same way that you have a. Do you have a candidate for me? Otherwise, like I don't want to hear your whole pitch about how you can help me, you know, with your recruiting services. Like, do you have anyone for me right now that we can talk about? Right? So then I kind of like you know I had this. It's funny you mentioned Robert Haff, because I was actually really afraid of like, how am I going to be? Like Dave is going up against these Goliaths of the world like Robert Haff and these Nelson, and it was like all these big, well-known recruiting agencies that have tons of resources, armies of recruiters, right, but at the end of the day, if I could find one guy that like or one gal that my client wants, then they're just as good as the Robert Haff's candidates like and they hire them. That's all they care about. They only care like do you have the person? They only care who and how big your agency is and that, or even how many years of experience you have with recruiting. People say I have zero recruiting experience, so how am I even qualified to get a client? Why would they work with me? Like, well, if you show up to the sales call saying, hey, I added a prior to our call, I actually did some initial search and I have two people I've identified that are proficient in exact requirements you mentioned in the job. Obviously, I'm just kind of shooting in the dark here based on that description, but if you like, we can review them and they're like Whoa, like these people are actually really good Like. If I could, if I give you more context, you could probably find me better people Like that's all they care about. They don't care that you've been doing this for zero years. Can you show up to this the initial call with the hiring manager with some resume's in hand on a silver platter and do a little bit of legwork If you're, if you find good people and our coaches help make sure that you find good people then they're not going to really grill you like. Well, how long have you been doing this thing? Just based on the quality of people you bring to the table, they know that you can deliver right.

Speaker 2: 23:39

When it's good that you're in California because they're going to pay, you know, a lot more money that that 20% or whatever you're getting is going to be a bigger, bigger chunk of. I mean because those guys, those engineers, are making $250,000, $300,000 sometimes.

Speaker 3: 23:52

Yeah, like out of college, right. Well, what's interesting is you don't have to be in California to make that California money, like most of what we have. Most of our members are like not in California there. So there, you can be in the Midwest and get a client in California. That's right, and they'll hire local candidates. And that's another thing I thought too, like, oh, I can only service companies in my geography because, you know, back in the day you would kind of show up with a little three-ring binder and have a client meeting and walk around to see the office. And that was like the old standard of parole where a student tied nowadays like they don't care, it's a Zoom call and you can be based anywhere in the country and they don't care either. Right, as long as you can find them a candidate, they don't care how long you're recruiting, how big your agency is or where it is. As long as you know you can deliver a resume of somebody who's in the show to work, who's ideally local for them, it's fine. So, yeah, we have people in Florida making like San Francisco placement fee wages for a three-in-the-k salary, right.

Speaker 2: 24:53

When any more Miami. Like look how much money people are making in Miami now. Like it's crazy the way things have changed and with all the finance companies and everything moving down there, you definitely have higher salaries than what you had, you know, three or four years ago, because now you've got the Goldman Sachs of the world, you've got that New York money coming down, you've got Chicago people moving down there and it's just changing the game in Florida. And yeah, I mean, if you can base yourself here in Cincinnati or something and do work for a company that's paying guys $300,000, $400,000, you know you sell two of the. You place two, three candidates a year and you're doing okay. You're leaving your full-time job, you know.

Speaker 3: 25:33

Yeah, absolutely, it's funny. So, yeah, you're 100% right and I think what I find you know, what I found are the people who do well in this is like could? People might be thinking like why? Or listeners might be thinking like, okay, this is interesting, like, but why recruiting? Like, especially if they've never been exposed to it. But you know, there's pros and cons to everything, right? I think the pros to recruiting is that it doesn't require any technical skill, right? Like, if you run an ad agency, like you do, or like a marketing agency, you have to know a lot about technical things, and so a lot of people just don't have the technical, technical activity or they don't want to learn it, so they don't want to learn about. You know how to run social media marketing. So, like that's, you know. They might kind of just say, okay, not those. Nor do they want to do anything that's like, maybe like real estate, okay, maybe, like they don't want to flip homes or like like. I always thought like I was a good people person, so I thought real estate will be good for me, but I just never really got into like square footage and plumbing and I thought that stuff was kind of boring, like I'm not a handyman so I don't even know like these, like technical. You know home things right, like sightings and drywall.

Speaker 2: 26:37

When you get hosed by contractors if you don't know how it actually works, like they don't have any respect. They won't have respect for you and they'll be like, oh, they'll try to screw you over.

Speaker 3: 26:47

Right. So like that, like I'm not really I don't know about that. I'm kind of like I don't want to get into that, or sure it seems complicated to, but recruiting just felt like easy. I'm just talking to somebody is, hey, I'm looking for this type of job. And I find someone saying, hey, I'm looking for this type of person. I'm like, hey, you guys should meet, let me just set that up and coordinate that, and I'll even coordinate the interviews. And they hire them like cool, well, here's an invoice for $30,000. And they're like, okay, I'm like that's it, that's the pros. It's simple, easy, as people who do well are people who are, I think, fairly extroverted or at least able to just pick up the phone and kind of, you know, move the ball forward. You know, move the interview process forward, someone who can listen.

Speaker 2: 27:29

I mean you think about it, be an empathetic and sort of compassionate for this person and their talents and you know being able to understand where they want to go. You don't want to place anybody in a job that you think they're going to hate, like a company that's not going to treat them correctly. You know, just treat them like a number or they're going to be booted out after. You know, like this situation has happened to you a couple of times like you don't want to put somebody in a situation where the economy turns and all of a sudden, bye-bye recruiters. You know, I mean it's. You know there's other industries where that could happen, but I mean they. You know, as I listen to you, the more hyped up I get because I'm thinking of all the people that the turnover in ad agencies and this is, you know, just coming from my perspective, it's crazy. Like this isn't like engineering, where a guy will go become an engineer at a company and stick around for 20 or 30 years. It is very incestuous in agencies. Like people will go from one agency to another agency, back to that old agency to another agency and everybody knows everybody and everybody works for everybody else. In the only way to make money is to leave and go to a new company. Otherwise you're going to get that like inflationary raise. Even if you get that, like you might not even get that, but these people, I mean they're flipping jobs every one or two years. And if you've got a network like I do I mean just owning an agency I know so many freelance designers and developers and all those people it's like all you got to do is turn this on and then take advantage of your initial network and then eventually you're going to build that network and you're going to and I get people on LinkedIn hitting me up all the time about hey, you ever thought about working in insurance or you ever thought about working in this, and that I mean I don't know how many messages I get every. I've just stopped it. There could be legit messages in my LinkedIn thing, but it's like I don't even pay attention to anymore because it's like I've been trained not to look at those automated messages that people send out. But you know, being able to take advantage of your network, especially if you're I mean, I'm in my 40s, so I've got a pretty big network of people. But If you have a network or if you're in an industry long enough. You're going to build up your network and it's almost like this is almost the perfect side also for somebody like that, because you could have a nine to five job and just turn this on you know place three or four people a year maybe, and that's good money. I mean that could help you pay your mortgage, pay off your car, pay for your kids, college, and then eventually you just turn that on full time and you're killing it maybe. I mean this is great. I mean I didn't even know this was a thing. And the fact that you've been able to come up with this and say, look, I'm just going to create a recruitment accelerator program and teach people how I did it, and you just kind of stumbled into it in a way. And now you've got this thing where you're helping other people 200 different people start their companies. I mean that's congratulations. I mean you're helping people actually change their lives.

Speaker 3: 30:20

Yeah, thank you, it's very rewarding. I guess you know, like as a recruiter, it's rewarding to help people find like a dream job. And now you know, I'm kind of helping people find their dream like hustle, right, the dream business. So it's been really rewarding and I think, yeah, like if you have a, we have the people that come to us who are not recruiters kind of like what you mentioned. They do have some type of industry experience, right. They're like hey, I've been doing project management for 10 years, or I've been doing QA engineering for eight years, or I'm in IT, I'm in IT specials or I'm in healthcare, and they work with recruiters and they realize like, well, this recruiters kind of dumb, like they don't know, like they kind of know what I do but not really. And so they're like I can do their job way better than they can and they're making 20% of my salary just off, like saying my resume over, like I should be doing their job, like I can make more money and I know how to find people like me better than they can. So then they come to us saying, hey, I want to start a niche recruiting business in my area of expertise in my industry and help other companies find people like me. And because they can go and they can compete against recruiters, like you know they can if you're an engineer or you're a software developer specializing in mobile games for 10 years and you, but you have zero experience. But you can talk to a VP of VP of mobile game development and say, hey, I'm a mobile game developer. I can help you find people like me Cause I know exactly what to ask him. I can look into their code, I can see their code samples. They'll hire you over me with 10 years of recruiting experience because you know the industry is so deeply, because you are one of them, so having that type of industry knowledge is so valuable. So those people do really well, plus people with recruiting experience. Of course, they have a shorter learning curve as you're getting into this. But to address your thing about like like you will be what will we call a passive candidate? Right? There's two types of candidates in the market active and the passive one. Active ones are people are. They're posting their resumes everywhere looking for a job, actively looking for a job, right. A passive candidate will get someone like you, like they have no interest in really looking for a job. They barely read LinkedIn messages, right, because they're heads down, they're doing great work and so basically our job as a recruiting agency person is to go out and owner is to go out and actually recruit passive candidates. People may be not unlike you who are not looking they don't, they're hard to find their resumes on everywhere and they're very hard to engage. Like they don't take phone calls with recruiters, but if we can get a hold of them, engage with them, pick the curiosity, build up the opportunity so that they're you know what, john, initially I wasn't even take this call, but now that we've spoken, yeah, I'd be happy to talk to your, your client, and that you know that person is worth such a premium to the company, because otherwise they wouldn't even they wouldn't be on the radar, right?

Speaker 2: 33:11

So that was the thing about doing the app too. It was. You get passive candidates. You just say to people look, put your thing on here, somebody might reach out to you at some point. You know, if you match for a job, somebody's going to reach out to you. If not, you're not on here looking. You just put your resume on there and then every once in a while, we're going to match to you and somebody's going to shoot you. Just keep the app on your phone. Somebody's going to send you a notification that says hey, if you're looking for a job, these guys are hiring. 250 a year. What do you think?

Speaker 3: 33:39

That's it, yeah. So, yeah, LinkedIn, yeah, LinkedIn serves kind of like a similar, a somewhat similar function with people who, just, you know, naturally by being on LinkedIn you have exposure, you know you'll be on the radar of recruiters. But, yeah, we had the same type of issue maybe about six months ago where, you know, we were writing automations really, really well on both LinkedIn automation and email automation very, very effective, easy, scales, very well. But over time we started getting, you know, lower and lower response rate because, as more people started doing automations, people like you, you know, get bombarded right by recruiting messages. So it's funny enough that, like a few months ago, we launched our 3.0 version of our program. The 1.0 is all manual, like smile dial, traditional, like insurance agency, real estate insurance, the type of work just pick up the phone and dial. So that was the 1.0. The 2.0 was automation on LinkedIn email. The 3.0 that we have now is we're able to leverage AI software to send hyper personalized video messages to clients and to candidates with, yeah, with their LinkedIn profile in the background, with their name in the video, because you have to kind of keep innovating to stand out from the sea of other recruits, and that's really the you know. Earlier I talked about the pros of this. Right, lots of money, you know 20 to 30 K plus fees. Costs are just a couple hundred bucks a month for tools and. But those are pros and it's not rocket science. You're just connecting people together. But the cons, to be realistic and fair for everyone, is that it's important to know that it's very competitive. Right, there's this so many recruits out there because there's a low barrier to entry and so, because it is competitive, the margin of error or the wiggle room you have is very small. One little mistake like it's it's hard to. You have to do it really right. It's kind of like dating, right, like dating is competitive If you want, like the best available part is out there, it's competitive, and so you kind of have to have solid like your game has to be solid Any weird mistakes social football, like you're, you're blown out, right? Similarly, in recruiting, like, yeah, any type of miscalibration, mistake, doing something that you know you're more supposed to do, or showing signs of a weakness or signs of insecurity to a hiring manager. If they doubt your confidence and able to help, in your ability to help them fill the role, let's go with someone who seems more confident in helping them right so?

Speaker 2: 35:58

yeah, but the cool thing about it is is like multiple people can recruit one open position. So if you can find that somebody's hiring for a specific position, you know, I mean they'll, they'll listen to, they'll see anybody's candidate Like it's not just like I mean you're not, you're not necessarily an exclusive recruiter for this company. They're like look, you got a candidate, send it to me. I got five other recruiting companies sending me candidates too, so you better send me somebody, good.

Speaker 3: 36:24

Exactly yeah, so right that for that reason it's not that hard to get a client, as long as you know how to like run the sales call, because you know they're also sensitive to like. They don't necessarily want to juggle like two dozen relationships with agencies who email them every day. They want to be selective and just have, like, their favorites. But, yeah, if you know what you're doing, give the right skill and the process, the right strategies and everything else, then it's very doable, right? So we tried to do our best to kind of give them an easy button. Right, press this easy button. Here's a blueprint to show the exact templates, the script. Don't deviate from it in the beginning, get a control baseline. Later on you want to play jazz like you can, and so I think the people who who do well with our program are people who are just like ready just to do this and are open to just following our proven roadmap and just get the results. And so, yeah, it's been a lot of fun. Then I think it's a great. I mean, I love it. It's been great for me and so for people. If you're listening out there and you are a, you know, fairly social person like you know you're a natural connector. You like to connect friends with other people you know in your network. This is basically doing that, but getting paid for it.

Speaker 2: 37:29

So which is a lot of people. So let's, let's yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, this is awesome, john, I really appreciate it. I want to respect your time. I know you got jumping here in a couple of minutes. Tell people how to find your reach out to you. We're going to have info in the description of the podcast episode too, but if anybody's listening, just tell them quickly how to reach out and get started with you.

Speaker 3: 37:49

Sure, so you can just Google the word recruiting accelerator we pop right up. You can go to my LinkedIn profile as well, check out my background, check out the LinkedIn recommendations and I kind of welcome people to check out my LinkedIn recommendations and try to find one or two people who have a similar background. We have so many people now that like find someone that looks like you and you can kind of see their journey, and we have on our website, our testimonials page, videos of me interviewing everybody and them sharing their own unique process about how they start the side hustle and maybe their full-time hustle and hopefully that inspires you. And if you want more information, we have a training video you can watch on our website as well.

Speaker 2: 38:28

I love it. Well, you got a great domain name. Yeah, thank you. I'm surprised you were able to get that, but I had to buy it from somebody.

Speaker 3: 38:34

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 38:35

Oh the bastards, I hate them. Yeah, the cyber squatters. Well, john, this has been great. I love this. I think this is a really, really good idea. I've actually got a couple of people I'm going to reach out to after this and tell them I think I found a side hustle for you.

Speaker 3: 38:50

Yes, yes, it would be perfect. Yeah, we should watch the LinkedIn. We'd be happy to give them some free advice and however I can help them, we know Happy to be a resource.

Speaker 2: 38:58

Oh yeah, Run you through the program, man yeah.

Speaker 3: 39:02

Or at least point them in the right direction. If they have any basic questions, I'm happy to help out.

Speaker 2: 39:06

I love it, john, awesome man. Well, thank you very much and you're doing good work out here helping these people out, helping them find a side hustle. So congratulations and congratulations to you, just for getting out of the 9 to 5 world and doing your own thing.

Speaker 3: 39:20

Thank you so much. Can never go back and not looking back, Never can go back.

Speaker 2: 39:24

I'm telling you Never can go back. Yes, sir, well, I appreciate it, thank you.

Speaker 3: 39:28

All right, thanks, adam. Have a great day, appreciate it.

Speaker 2: 39:31

Recording stopped. Boom, cool man. Well, yeah, I will chute out all the stuff. We're going to have embed codes and everything else to send you that you can just pop the player essentially on your website so people can just listen to it right there on your website, if you wanted to do that, and links and a 30 second little video clip you can put on social and all that stuff.

Speaker 3: 39:52

Awesome, cool. Thanks, man, appreciate it. Yeah, and again, if we reach out, if you have a question for recruiting, happy to just chat with you. Love it, john, I'll be out there.

Speaker 2: 40:01

All right man. Thanks, dude, good luck. See you man.

Speaker 3: 40:03

Talk to you.

Speaker 2: 40:05

Thanks for joining us on this week's episode of Side Hustle City. Well, you've heard from our guests, Now let's hear from you. Join our community on Facebook, Side Hustle City. It's a group where people share ideas, share their inspirational stories and motivate each other to be successful and turn their side hustle into their main hustle. We'll see you there and we'll see you next week on the show. Thank you.