In this solo presentation, Mohammed Adris outlines a no‑glamour, relationship‑centric strategy for building a profitable recruitment agency. He first critiques the common “shiny tactic loop” where recruiters chase the latest LinkedIn hacks, AI tools, or outreach formulas, only to see short‑term results that quickly fade. He argues that sustainable, high‑earning recruiters instead focus on boring but powerful work: developing deep, personal connections with business‑owner clients. By consistently reaching out (e.g., a personal call or meeting every three months) and truly understanding a client’s business, culture, and hiring cycles, recruiters become the trusted go‑to partner, leading to long‑term contracts that can generate $100K+ per year after years of patient relationship building. Adris shares concrete daily actions: audit all contacts not spoken to in the past three months, re‑engage them via the same channel, and keep the conversation client‑focused. He also discusses how AI should be used only to amplify these proven activities—speeding up script writing or candidate outreach—rather than replace the core relational work. The video concludes with a promise of a step‑by‑step guide to scaling a recruitment business to $100K, linking to a “school group” where he shares his ongoing restructuring and AI integration.
Chapters
I'm going to share the exact strategy that's helped me build my own recruitment agency, and I'm warning you, it's boring. There's no secret funnel hack, no secret formula, and no complicated tech stack. It's genuinely one of the most unexciting strategies you'll ever hear, but it works, and it keeps working month after month while people out there are chasing the next big thing, wondering why they're not making much money. So in this video, I'm going to show you exactly what it looks like so you can apply it to your own recruitment agency, whether you're doing it for years or if you're just starting out. So let's dive in. The first one is literally the shiny tactic loop almost every recruiter gets stuck in. Now, if you've been following along on YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, then you'll probably know that the recruitment space is absolutely flooded with the exact same kind of content. Claude killed everyone. If you don't post on LinkedIn, this will happen to you. And it seems like every day there's just this new outreach hack, there's a new AI tool that's going to change everything, and then a brand new recruitment model. And all it does is it traps recruiters in the same way every single time. I know because I've been doing this for over a decade now. I've seen the cycles. Because what actually happens is that You hear about a new tactic, you try it for about 100 days, but when you don't make money from it, you assume that it just doesn't work. And then you go into the next hack. And that's the loop most recruiters never break out of because the platform keeps feeding you the next thing to chase. But the recruiters who are quietly making 6 and even 7 figures, sometimes in a month, aren't in that loop at all. Speak to any high-performing recruiter. They're not chasing the new tactic because they've already figured out a long time ago that making good money in recruitment is actually pretty boring. Which brings me onto the next point, is that the boring part is making connections with rich people, i.e., the business owners that are going to become your clients. You pick the people you want to work with and then you connect with them literally on a personal level. And when I say personal, I don't mean a LinkedIn message or an automated email going out to thousands of people at once. I mean that you want to make a phone call, set up a private meeting even, or even get them into a situation where you have their undivided attention, obviously with them agreeing to it, not against their will, but ultimately a meeting where on the table the only thing to discuss is them, their business, and their problems. I know it's boring. You're not necessarily making money straight away, like money money's hitting your bank the moment that you do it. It's just showing up for the people consistently over a long period of time, doing the unglamorous human work that nobody selling a course is talking about. And here's the thing about doing it that way. You start to actually understand their business at a much deeper level. And then you begin to understand things like when they start to look for new hires and what type of candidate suits them, their culture. And this knowledge is way more valuable than any AI tool because it turns you from just another recruiter to someone they genuinely want to call. And once you actually start building those relationships with clients, you're going to notice that instead of you having to chase them for new work, they actually start calling you first. Because now if they want a recruiter, they have a personal contact in that field, i.e., you. Now it's a completely different decision. It's no longer about comparing you to 5 other agencies who are sitting on a spreadsheet, which is effectively what some people might call a PSL. They already trust you, which means pricing conversations are just shorter, briefs are clearer, and the whole process just moves a lot faster because the relationship is already sold to them before the work even existed. And there's a simple guarantee in business that every potential client you are targeting will hire someone at some point. And that's where showing up counts. Because look at it from their perspective. When a spot opens up on a Monday morning and they've had a recruiter checking in with them every few months for the past 2 years, why would they even think to go on LinkedIn and start from scratch? You already passed their tests and are now the path of least resistance for them. That's exactly where you want to be. In fact, the 2 biggest accounts in my recruitment business right now, each one pulling in over $100K a year, both came from the exact approach. Neither of them said yes instantly. The first one took 3 years of constant contact and the second one took 7. This patience game is where tactic chasers lose because even though we knew both clients had enough suppliers, they didn't necessarily need another recruiter on their list, we didn't walk away to find an easier target like most recruiters would do. What we did instead was just stay around, by reaching out and calling or sending them an email once every 3 months. And in these follow-ups, the conversation was about them, not us trying to force money out of them. We talked to them about people that we were representing, not filler CVs, but people who we believe would genuinely impact their business. And sometimes we'd even send over someone that would probably help them expand their business either into new markets, new territories. And we were only able to do that because we had a deep understanding of the market, the niche, and their specific problems and their growth plans. And considering the size of the payoff, every recruiter should be following this, but they don't because They want to make a lot of money without putting in the time. But another reason this works is because most employed recruiters, they just don't stick with it either. The agencies that they work for want them to focus on what makes money the quickest over a relationship that might actually start paying tenfold, but a year down the line. And this is why you should start doing it. Again, it's not a side hustle. It's built on reputation, which builds over time. So if you want to earn well in recruitment and you want the big paychecks and commission checks, then you have to be patient and look at the bigger picture. And on the other hand, recruiters who don't play the long game, eventually they just run out of dorts. That they can possibly knock on. That's why you might have conversations with your peers who say, "I don't have any more clients to call. I don't have any more candidates." Or, "My lead list is not big enough," or, "My lead list is not long enough." It's because they've exhausted their contact list and their tactics are copied. And one day the phone stops ringing. The worst part is that they don't even see it coming because revenue feels fine just until it doesn't. And they've been living off short-term wins rather than a concrete foundation underneath them. And if there's even a single change in the algorithm or the hiring market suddenly slowing down, then there's nothing to fall back on. And that's why it's important to understand this. How reputation works is that it's not always your direct connection that calls you. When you've built real trust with 20, 30, put as many zeros at the end of that, people over the years, those people talk, they mention you in conversations and you start getting calls from companies you've never approached, all because someone you showed up for 3 years ago still has you in their contact list. Now I'm not suggesting that these are the things that you should absolutely bank on, and that doesn't mean that you shouldn't approach clients and candidates who you believe you can genuinely help right now. That's not the point here. The point is how much juice can you squeeze out of the work that you already have going on right now? And just before I move a little bit further, I've put together some details below. I'll put the link to my school group. I'm basically restructuring my entire recruitment business at the moment, and I'm making a list and basically sharing everything about what I'm doing in my recruitment business given AI and everything else as well. So I just don't want to be one of those recruiters that's drowning in AI slop and then sharing AI slop as well. It walks through a few different strategies, so just check the description of this video and there'll link there. Now, just keep in mind, you might be okay thinking, okay, that's nice, how do I actually build these relationships? What are the actual practical steps I need to take? So here's what I want you to start doing tomorrow, or even today, to make sure that you're getting everything done. The first thing you're going to do in the morning is open up your contacts and write down every client and every candidate, whether on the CRM or on LinkedIn, or wherever you store your data, on Excel spreadsheet, that you haven't spoken to in the last 3 months. That's your list. Now, you have to re-engage them in the same way that you last spoke to them. So if it was a phone call, call them again. If it was an email, email them again. And if it was a WhatsApp or an Instagram message, do that again. There's no new system or special tools, just a transparent conversation because the message itself is the simplest part because you just want to send a personal check-in from someone who's interested in how they're doing because we want that personal connection. That's it. That's the first step. It won't make a difference in a week or it might. I've seen it happen a few times, but if you do it consistently every 3 months with whichever new contacts you might have by year 3, You will have something tactic chasers just can never ever catch up to. The reason why I shared this is this is one thing that we've stayed almost religiously consistent with, and we've been doing it since 2016. Been 10 years of running the business. The result that's happened now is yes, we are literally holding on to our dear lives for everything that's happening with AI because it is just accelerating at a monumental pace. But at the same time, we're integrating everything as much as we possibly can. But what we're not doing is forgetting or letting go of the most basic level activities that we can possibly do. In fact, we're using AI to amplify what we know works. And in my experience, from what I've seen from people who have worked with me and people who don't, the biggest differentiator for the impact and success that you're going to have with using AI and automation in the modern day is nothing to do with what model you're pitching, how you're pitching it, or your price points, or your niche, or anything else. What matters the most is how good you are as a recruiter, and then amplifying each one of those activities which makes you good at what you're doing. Now, if you can use AI to do that because you don't have the time to write out candidate scripts when you send out an PC campaign. And now what used to take you 15 or 20 minutes takes you 30 seconds. That's an amplification. Anything that can help you do the same job you're already doing with significantly less time, or increase the total number of output by multiples because you can't literally sit there pressing enter multiple, multiple times, that's where the amplification exists. Now, knowing the one boring thing, this is actually step one. Now, putting the rest of the business around it is the harder part, and that's why I made this video for you to watch. It's a step-by-step guide on how I'd build a business up to $100K a recruitment business, because the interesting part is that's exactly what I'm doing right now.
