00:00:06 Sana: Most people believe there are only two ways. Two ways to start a business. Either you quit a job and jump, or you stay where you are and keep wondering what if. But there's a but what if there's a third path, a quieter one, probably. You know, one where you keep your stability, you keep your paycheck, your routine and still build something that could eventually replace it. Now, this is not a hack or any kind of, you know, miracle episode for your listeners. Today, we are talking about something that surprises a lot of people when they first hear it, that helping companies hire the right person can be a very profitable business. Sometimes paying twenty thousand dollars or more for a single placement. And what's even more surprising, some people are building recruiting businesses on the side while still working their regular jobs. But then, is it actually realistic? How do I get the clients when I'm unknown? And what are the risks? People really talk about.

00:01:27 Sana: So welcome everyone to another very, very interesting episode on the Biz Blend podcast. and to explore what I just said. Honestly, I'm joined by someone who's lived this journey. By the way, I'm Sarah, your host and listeners. My guest. He has spent fifteen years in the recruiting industry. He built a recruiting agency from scratch and eventually sold it. Through that experience, he developed a system for finding clients, placing candidates, and building a profitable recruiting business, even for people with no recruiting or business background. And today, he teaches that process through his program recruiting launch, helping professionals start recruiting businesses quietly alongside their jobs, with some clients making their first placement fee within sixty to ninety days. And you know, something that I find very interesting in this idea is, um, the incognito approach. Building a business quietly until it's strong enough to stand on its own. And that's that's not bad, right? I mean, it's a safe risk. So today we are going to unpack what that really looks like. And listeners, let's welcome our guest John. So John, welcome to this blend and I'm really excited for this one.

00:02:56 Jon Chintanaroad: Thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here.

00:03:00 Sana: Awesome, awesome. Um, okay, before we begin, John, I mean, I must say, I must tell to all the listeners, yes, this is possible. I have seen a very few people. The only kind of, um, caveat that I would like to share here is I've seen only a very few people trying this out. Um, one of my friend also, uh, he did a kind of a recruiting business on the side actually, like a complete B2B transaction, uh, transactional based And then he sold that business. But then from there, he actually got a very good idea about running a business in there. So I think it's a very, very interesting and very relevant right now in this day and age. You know, when there is no stability when it comes to your nine to five jobs. I mean, it's a very viable, uh, you know, option or maybe channel to look at.

00:03:55 Jon Chintanaroad: Mhm. Yeah.

00:03:58 Sana: Great. Okay, John, uh. Let's begin. Um, when you tell people that a recruiter can earn twenty thousand dollars or more from a single placement, I mean, the reaction would be usually disbelief. So how does that actually work? And why are companies, um, agreeing, willing to pay that much just to hire someone?

00:04:21 Jon Chintanaroad: Sure. Happy to unpack that. And definitely a lot of people who aren't in recruiting when they hear about these big fees, they get surprised. Uh, and the reason why companies are happy to pay these fees, it's typically twenty percent or more of a candidate's first year base salary. So if you place somebody or recruit somebody with one hundred thousand dollars salary and your company, your client hires them, then twenty percent of one hundred thousand is twenty thousand. So that's where that number comes from. That's the industry average for a, what we call a placement fee. When you place your candidate into your client's organization. And the reason why hiring managers and companies are happy to pay those fees is because they usually have one of three really big hiring pains. Uh, one is they've had a position open for far too long, three, four, five, six months or more. And it's usually because the role is very specific. It's very unique. They've exhausted their search. They've posted jobs everywhere. They've asked their network and their employees for referrals. Uh, they've, they've done everything on their own to try to find this role, but it's so specific and, uh, narrow that they just exhausted their search. And so now they kind of are desperate, they're giving up. They just want to throw money at the problem and hire a professional recruiter to go and find them. This person. So one is when the role is open for too long and it's creating problems in the organization. The second, uh, usually case is when somebody has quit unexpectedly. So for example, if a senior manager or director leaves a company unexpectedly with very short or little notice, then little to no notice, then all of a sudden that company is scrambling, right? Every day that goes by where this position is left unfilled creates lots of problems for the company. And so they need to they need to have the role filled quickly. So when speed is an issue, that's where recruiters can come in. And lastly, if, uh, the person they want to hire is for a role that's already filled. For example, if they have a director of sales and that person is underperforming and the C level suite C suite, the board of directors has decided to replace that individual. Well, obviously they can't post a job or create a lot of noise and it might affect company morale. So they have to do it discreetly. And so that's why they might reach out to recruiter and engage with them to quietly build a list of candidates. They can kind of interview discreetly and then make the switch quickly and seamlessly without causing a big scene. So when it's a situation needs to be, uh, discretion is involved or speed or the role is very specific and needs a specialized headhunter recruiter, that's kind of where we come in. Again, this is not always easy to do, but that's why we get to pay the big bucks because we're solving big hiring pains, if that makes sense.

00:07:21 Sana: Absolutely. Absolutely. John. I mean, the reasons that you gave It makes sense for for someone even coming from a non HR or recruiting background, someone like me. I mean, yeah, I've been a part of, um, recruitment, but it's kind of an inside job that I've done as a, you know, for a specific team, but then somebody who has no idea of, you know, recruiting zero recruiting experience. Uh, let's say if I want to attempt this, um, what's the first thing that I would need to understand before?

00:07:55 Jon Chintanaroad: Sure. Well, I think the first thing, uh, you know, because we work with three types of people, uh, the first are people who have a corporate recruiting background. So they work for one company. They're an internal or in-house recruiter, and all they do is fill roles for that company. So if you work at Google, right, or meta, you'd be only recruiting for that company. So it's a corporate job. Uh, those individuals tend to like recruiting, but they feel stuck with the limited pay, a limited salary. There's no upside potential, very little room for growth. And they're always afraid of a layoff. Like if the company goes on hiring fees and they don't need more people, the recruiters are the first to get cut. So they're always living in some type of anxiety or fear. Uh, the other type of person we work with in recruiting is an agency recruiter. And the agency recruiter works at a recruiting, a recruiting firm that serves many clients. And so they, uh, and of course, as a firm, they get fees for placement. So a, someone that works at the agency as a recruiter, uh, understands clients and candidates, understands commissions and fees, but they usually don't know how to get their own clients, how to do it while they have a day job without their employer finding out. And, uh, and so, you know, that's where they get stuck. And the third category is, I think someone like you and a lot of other what we call working professionals that don't have a formal recruiting background, uh, or done it officially, but they can see themselves doing it. And it's usually because I guess you ask, what's the first thing they need to understand is really understanding that they don't need to have prior recruiting experience to succeed at this. What they do need is, uh, people skills, right? You have to enjoy talking to people, enjoy helping people. Uh, these are people who kind of consider themselves as connectors or people, persons. They like connecting people. And oftentimes they've already gotten people jobs through the network. They refer people within their LinkedIn network and gotten them jobs, only to realize later on that they just gave away a they're professional recruiters charged twenty thousand dollars for the exact service they've been giving away for free. And that's when like the light bulb goes off. Like, oh my goodness, I've been doing these twenty thousand dollars favors for these hiring managers. Why don't I look into monetizing this and making this a real business? So the and now what? What a working professional or a non recruiter lacks in recruiting skills. They can often more than make up for with industry experience and expertise in their field. So for example, if somebody we work with a lot of people who, although they don't have a recruiting background, they have maybe five or ten plus years as a product manager or software engineer or a healthcare professional. And because of their industry, their basically their subject matter expertise. When they said when they, when they meet with the hiring manager, that hiring manager knows very quickly that, oh, this person gets it. They understand the world, my project, they understand the nuances of the positions, the requirements. And so then they're uniquely qualified to basically help companies find people like them. So once they get that, once they understand, oh yeah, I, I can help companies find people like me because I am someone like me and people and I know people like me. And then they can just they just need to learn some of the underlying skills and processes to turn that into a real recruiting business that they do on the side.

00:11:29 Sana: MM mm. Actually makes sense. I mean, first of all, I think, uh, yeah, if as a professional, I am, uh, I have realized that yes, I'm good, uh, being a connector in there, like some my, my referrals have worked. Yeah. It's, it's kind of, you know, you're losing out on, on a huge opportunity in there. It is true. And secondly, it's interesting because, um, I mean, you do need a substantial amount of experience because, you know, here, you're not just, uh, uh, looking for people who are, um, you know, looking for jobs online or forwarding resumes, but then it's, it's solving a very specific business problem, like companies struggling to find the right person fast. The speed factor that you mentioned, or maybe at senior levels. You know, when you do not you, you you are approaching this, uh, discreetly. And when a higher can impact revenue or productivity or leadership inside a company. I think, uh, being a recruiter doesn't seem so strange or not reasonable or not reasonable.

00:12:44 Jon Chintanaroad: Exactly. Right. And the twenty thousand dollars plus fee is tiny compared to the cost of making a bad hire, right? If they hire the wrong person, months go by and they have to let them go and start from scratch and they lose all that opportunity cost, right? It's a very expensive, uh, mistake. So companies will gladly pay somebody to help make sure that they don't make that mistake and they hand-select the right person for them. So yeah, so I think, um, but in addition to really the belief that it can be done, really the idea of, of recruiting as a side business, it's really not so much starting your own recruiting business, but really doing independent recruiting or being a freelance recruiter. But the idea is you're just playing a professional matchmaker. You're, you're matching a company that has a hard time finding talent and then finding a talent that would be a good fit for that company and introducing them to each other and managing the relationship, making sure the interview process goes smoothly. And then when your client makes the offer to your candidate and your candidate accepts, that's when you've made a deal, the hire is completed, and then that's when you invoice the company, twenty percent of your clients or your candidates first year base salary. So you're really just playing a matchmaker.

00:14:06 Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right, that's right. Okay.

00:14:10 Sana: John, uh, something also very interesting that I kind of, uh, Found when I was doing the intro is, uh, you follow the you talk about what you call the incognito approach, building a recruiting business quietly while still working your nine to five. Now that is something very interesting because, um, it sounds appealing, but then it's kind of complicated maybe. So like from your own journey or from your own lived experiences, what does that actually look like in practice?

00:14:45 Jon Chintanaroad: Sure. Um, I'll break it down for you because that's the biggest concern a lot of people have is they'll say, hey, I can imagine as a recruiter, you would reach out to hiring managers on LinkedIn, but I use my LinkedIn profile for my employer. So I can't put on my experience in LinkedIn like CEO of a recruiting firm. Otherwise, my boss would give me a call and be like, hey, what's this thing? Right? So I can't, I have to do it quietly. So there's two ways to get your own clients and run a recruiting practice. If you have a nine to five, one is if you use your profile on LinkedIn or the other is you use someone else's profile. So I'll give you examples of both. So if you use your profile, the benefit is that when you reach out to a hiring manager, they can quickly look at your experience and say, wow, this person has deep a deep background in my field. So you have a lot of credibility to leverage. If you use your profile, then you have to you can't be that direct with your messaging. You can't say, I have my own recruiting business. Do you want to work with me? Because if that message accidentally went to your boss's old college roommate and then they forwarded it to your boss saying, I think one of your people said this to me, you would get in trouble. It would. You'd be stressed out about that. So the message needs to be somewhat vague, like, hi, you know, first name. I understand that you're looking for a Python engineer. And that just happened to come across somebody who, uh, is, is it from your industry? I worked for one of your competitors and is looking for new opportunities. Uh, unfortunately, I don't have anything for them on my team, so I thought I would just make an introduction. Let me know if you have any interest. Right. So if that came along, your if that was your boss, right? I don't think your boss would care because you're saying, I don't have anything. We don't have a role for this person. So I thought I would just help them out. So it has to be kind of vague. Then when you jump on the call with that hiring manager, at some point, that's when you would say, by the way, I do a bit of consulting on the side and this candidate is confidentially looking. So they asked me if I can represent them. So do you work with recruiters? Like do you work with agencies? And that's when you would segue into like a business conversation, basically letting them know that if they want an interview and hire your person, they would be a fee attached. But you do that discreetly on the call. No electronic, no message trail. And of course, before you take that call, just check out the hiring manager on LinkedIn. Make sure they're not connected to you or anybody on your team or your company, and make sure it's a clean opportunity. Not stepping on toes. So that's if you use your profile. The second option is if you use what we call an avatar profile. So an avatar profile is someone else's profile that you put that you manage, that you put under your company as a team member. So oftentimes it can be a spouse, a cousin, a friend, somebody that either doesn't have a LinkedIn profile or doesn't use it, maybe someone who's a nurse or in healthcare and they don't really need LinkedIn and they give you permission to take over their LinkedIn. And then at that point, you can really be. You can brand their profile, be very clear. The messaging can be a lot more direct and specific. And then when the hiring manager is interested in taking the call, then you just have that person send or you just use that profile and send your own calendar link and say, oh, you should talk to John, our founder. He can help you out. Here's his calendar. And so you just put calls and use that person as like a BDR or an appointment setter to book calls. So that's the workaround. Usually one of those two options works great. And over the last five years, well over four hundred people we've worked with, we've never had a single incident of an employer finding out because we're like overly protective to really separate the world of your recruiting job or your day job and the world of your recruiting business separate. So the two worlds never come close to touching.

00:18:40 Speaker 4: HMM.

00:18:41 Sana: That's very interesting. That's creative. It is creative. And it is, it is, um, it's kind of creative. It's not wrong. There is no ethics pattern here because, you know, many, many of the people would probably think that. Oh, so you're asking me to moonlight, uh, which is technically it's not actually. And, uh, one question that comes to my mind, John, I know we have a time constraint here, but I think it's a very legitimate question that what if the recruited himself, you know, would ask, you know, let's say I've done the initial conversations and I started with the referring thing in a, in a goodwill. And then we segue into the business conversation. Um, have you had any scenarios where the recruiter themself pretty much got interested into, um, the person, you know, person's background? You know, why are you into this? Or, uh, does your company know something like that?

00:19:40 Jon Chintanaroad: Oh, yeah. Oftentimes people will ask this, well, um, won't they could confuse if I reach out to a company, like if I'm, you know, why I, why, why is this person reaching out to me? They're not working at a recruiting company. Right? So the idea is, oh, and usually the question I get is like, hey, why would someone work with a independent recruiter like me? Like a one person business versus a big multinational, like one of the big. Robert half like those big companies out there. And that's exactly why we recommend using a, uh, candidate, uh, approach, a candidate focused approach when it comes to business development. So rather than because most recruiters will talk about themselves, Hasan, like, uh, here's why you should work with me. I'm a recruiter. I'm the best I can find you, the best people, the fastest. Like let's jump on the call on Monday or Tuesday work for you. Like that's what they all say. And that's really pitching their services instead. What we found works better is to approach it by not talking about you, but talk about your candidate. So something like, hey, Santa, I understand you're looking for a director of I t in the e-commerce space, and I have somebody who comes from eBay does this. Here's their background. They live two miles from your headquarters. When I asked him which opportunities, which companies they admire in the space, your name came up first on a short list. And anyways, they asked me if I could help make an introduction. Let me know if you like more information. Happy to send over their resume to you, right? So that's not me talking about me at all. It's talking about my candidate, which is all the hiring manager cares about because every hiring manager, they only care about one thing is, do you have a candidate for me? And so you lead with a candidate and that then that takes the focus away from you more on the value and the person that you're offering to them.

00:21:29 Sana: And you know that that creates a very fundamental difference in there because then your approach doesn't sound like salesy or, you know, just as a random pitch, it's more like this understanding the need of that, you know, business or the hiring manager, what exactly they're looking for and projecting yourself as a credible person who understands their requirement and they have probably the right candidate for them.

00:21:57 Jon Chintanaroad: Exactly. You're you're leading with value. You're offering something on a silver platter to them. And then also, you know, because a lot of concern people have is I don't have that much experience, you know, would they are they going to pick me apart or grill me? But if you think about it, if you if you lead the conversation by offering and dangling this incredible candidate that you have, then they're probably going to assume that you know, that you know what you're doing and that, wow, if this person just sent me, uh, this level of individual talent right away, uh, then they can find me more because then you can say something like, hey, Sana, like I have somebody in mind for you. Uh, by the way, I just took a, this is an example profile of somebody I've identified that could be a strong fit for your, you know, for your engineering team. And, uh, if, uh, I did a quick search off your careers page based on the job description, if I'm anywhere close to the mark, then I'd love to have a brief chat to really understand more of what you're looking for. So I could send you even better candidates. And so again, it's all about them, not about you, because no one cares about, you know, you, your business and name of your business, how long you've been doing it. All they care about is do you have somebody for me?

00:23:09 Sana: Exactly, exactly. And that's what I think most of the hiring managers biggest pain point, you know, they they have a time they have I mean, the need for speed and they want the right candidate because they're also getting pressure from the leadership. And anyway, if you are directing, you know, let's say you are interacting with a, um, leader of a small or medium business company as well. I mean, they'll have similar pain points in there.

00:23:31 Jon Chintanaroad: So exactly. And what's interesting is a lot of, uh, because if you target, like you said, small to medium sized companies, they usually have a unique, uh, growing or hiring pain because they're growing, they're profitable, or maybe they got funding, but they only have maybe one HR manager, one HR person doing all the jobs of HR, plus trying to recruit and fill these roles where they can't keep up with growth. Uh, yet they're, they're not big enough where they have an internal team of recruiters yet. So they're kind of in this in-between phase. And that's where a lot of times they rely on outside recruiters to fill these hard to fill positions because they don't have the resources internally yet.

00:24:12 Sana: Thanks.

00:24:14 Jon Chintanaroad: Mhm.

00:24:15 Sana: Brilliant. Um, John. Um, we have explored the the possibility and the benefits here. So of course, our listeners will be now curious, you know, on how to do this. So of course, if they would like to reach out to you and getting wisdom on how to start with this, irrespective of their experience, or maybe they are completely new to recruitment, how they can reach out to you.

00:24:40 Jon Chintanaroad: Sure, they can find me on my website recruiting launch dot com or look me up on LinkedIn. Um, happy there's links to content, uh, a video explaining the process of how this works. Um, and you know, we do, we kind of provide a done for you build where we build the recruiting business for people, we optimize their niche, we build their branding so they look professional. We write the messaging for them. That stands out from other recruiting agencies reaching out to those companies. We installed the automation systems to leverage. So that way their message goes out on autopilot in the background. Instead of them manually spending hours per day prospecting for clients. We coach them through sales recruiting, give them contracts like there's nothing that anyone could need that we haven't developed and offer over the last five years of doing just this one thing of helping people start their own recruiting business. So basically, you know, for the listeners out there, if you feel like this could be something that you would enjoy, that you would succeed in, that you would like to do as a business, but you feel like you'd need some support or help getting it going and having the systems kind of, um, installed for you. That's kind of where we come in. So yeah, feel free to reach out to me on recruiting calm and happy to answer your questions. Just book a call and we can chat.

00:25:57 Speaker 1: Awesome.

00:25:58 Sana: Awesome. Listeners, as you all know, I'll make sure to have all the links mentioned in the show notes. Find them attached along with this episode on whichever platform you are listening to this podcast right now. And, um, John, um, thank you. Thank you so much because, uh, you really brought the practical side and then the honest reality of building a recruiting business. So thank you so much. This was really, really amazing.

00:26:24 Jon Chintanaroad: No, this is fun. Thanks for having me. Sara.

00:26:27 Sana: Awesome. And yeah, before we wrap up, listeners, a quick note for all of you. If you enjoy conversations like this, honest discussions about business leadership and the ideas that sit behind successful ventures, make sure you follow this blend. And, um, yeah, join us for the next conversation because sometimes one idea heard at the right moment can change the direction of what you build next. Until next time. This is Sana on this blend. Stay tuned and thank you so much.