36 min
The Modern Recruiter #69: The recruiting agency recipe to hit 70K€ revenue per month with 70% recurring revenue in 18 months, Samuli Salonen, CEO @ TalentBee The Modern Recruiter
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- Entrepreneurship
Hey everybody!
Robin here, and I'm back with another episode of The Modern Recruiter, diving deep into my latest obsession: the inner workings of recruitment agencies. This week, I had an awesome chat with Samuli, the brains behind TalentBee, a Europe-based, fully distributed recruiting agency created in August 2022, that's now booking ~70K€ of revenue per month. Not bad after 1.5 years! (and to have a comparable for the US, you can probably ~double those numbers)
We did a bit of a podcast exchange — first, I jumped onto Samuli's show, TalentBuzz here on Spotify), where I shared all my secrets on getting candidates to actually reply to you, amassed after 8 years of working on candidate engagement and recruiting CRMs. If you follow me on LinkedIn and like what I usually say, you're gonna love this episode. Remember to leave a good Spotify review on Samuli's podcast if you enjoy it!
Then we flipped the roles, and I got to grill Samuli on The Modern Recruiter. He didn't hold back, sharing the good and bad of his TalentBee adventure, complete with the cold, hard numbers. And let me tell you, he was super, super transparent about it all.
What grabbed my attention:
1/ How Samuli applied sales best practices to recruiting
You know I can't resist comparing sales/marketing with recruiting.
Samuli's got a background in sales and marketing, not your typical recruiter backstory, so he wouldn't disagree. What's his secret sauce and how did he apply all his previous learnings? He puts a heavy emphasis on branding and engaging candidates in unique ways — he will for instance share videos of the engineering team describing the role they're hiring for.
He also walked us through the playbook he used to get his initial clients.
2/ How TalentBee thinks about productivity
Because TalentBee is fully distributed, they absolutely have to think about productivity. We talked about hours worked, time-audit (one of my favorite productivity techniques), revenue multiples, transparency about business operations, including profitability and employee contributions, etc.
3/ How they managed to build recurring revenue
That's the Holy Grail for a lot of agencies - yet very few manage to build true recurring revenue. Most recruiting operations are transactional by nature, which is why TalentBee's approach to locking in 70% of their revenue through recurring streams really intrigued me.
It led us down a rabbit hole of pricing strategies, delivering value, and all that good stuff we'll dive deeper into with Jon Brooks in a soon-to-come episode (promise, it's worth the wait!).
So, what do you think? I’d love to hear your take on TalentBee's journey and the insights shared by Samuli. Just hit reply and let’s chat!
Wishing you an inspiring week ahead,
– Robin Choy
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit themodernrecruiter.substack.com
Hey everybody!
Robin here, and I'm back with another episode of The Modern Recruiter, diving deep into my latest obsession: the inner workings of recruitment agencies. This week, I had an awesome chat with Samuli, the brains behind TalentBee, a Europe-based, fully distributed recruiting agency created in August 2022, that's now booking ~70K€ of revenue per month. Not bad after 1.5 years! (and to have a comparable for the US, you can probably ~double those numbers)
We did a bit of a podcast exchange — first, I jumped onto Samuli's show, TalentBuzz here on Spotify), where I shared all my secrets on getting candidates to actually reply to you, amassed after 8 years of working on candidate engagement and recruiting CRMs. If you follow me on LinkedIn and like what I usually say, you're gonna love this episode. Remember to leave a good Spotify review on Samuli's podcast if you enjoy it!
Then we flipped the roles, and I got to grill Samuli on The Modern Recruiter. He didn't hold back, sharing the good and bad of his TalentBee adventure, complete with the cold, hard numbers. And let me tell you, he was super, super transparent about it all.
What grabbed my attention:
1/ How Samuli applied sales best practices to recruiting
You know I can't resist comparing sales/marketing with recruiting.
Samuli's got a background in sales and marketing, not your typical recruiter backstory, so he wouldn't disagree. What's his secret sauce and how did he apply all his previous learnings? He puts a heavy emphasis on branding and engaging candidates in unique ways — he will for instance share videos of the engineering team describing the role they're hiring for.
He also walked us through the playbook he used to get his initial clients.
2/ How TalentBee thinks about productivity
Because TalentBee is fully distributed, they absolutely have to think about productivity. We talked about hours worked, time-audit (one of my favorite productivity techniques), revenue multiples, transparency about business operations, including profitability and employee contributions, etc.
3/ How they managed to build recurring revenue
That's the Holy Grail for a lot of agencies - yet very few manage to build true recurring revenue. Most recruiting operations are transactional by nature, which is why TalentBee's approach to locking in 70% of their revenue through recurring streams really intrigued me.
It led us down a rabbit hole of pricing strategies, delivering value, and all that good stuff we'll dive deeper into with Jon Brooks in a soon-to-come episode (promise, it's worth the wait!).
So, what do you think? I’d love to hear your take on TalentBee's journey and the insights shared by Samuli. Just hit reply and let’s chat!
Wishing you an inspiring week ahead,
– Robin Choy
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit themodernrecruiter.substack.com
36 min