288 - Best of 2025! The New Rules of Recruiting: Why You Need US "Killers" Over Overseas Talent with Connor Gross

0:00Like I make up fake reviews on my e-commerce businesses when I first started e-commerce businesses, like call it unethical. Sure. Everyone that I've seen on social media is launching their favorite overseas business. I think people are getting a little romanticized around the idea that somebody in Honduras is going to be able to do the same job. I don't care about any of the companies that I run. I'm not passionate about self-storage. I'm not passionate about the niche that we sell in the e-commerce space. I'm not passionate necessarily about recruiting. The thing that I am very passionate about is building companies that can scale, make money, and finding ways to solve problems in ways that other people cannot.

0:36Tell me about your business. What is your business name and how do you make money? Yeah, we launched Constant Hire earlier this year. It's pretty simple. We're a recruiting business meant to get you the top talent in the U.S. across sales and marketing roles. When you say in the US, is that the talent is in the US or companies in the US? Both. The talent is in the US. Everyone that I've seen on social media is launching their favorite overseas business, hiring from Sri Lanka, Latam, Philippines, wherever. And that's awesome. We hire overseas people as well for a couple of our different companies.

1:08But lately, I've been taking more of a strategy of, I think when everyone's going overseas, I want to find who is the best, who are the killers in the US? I think people are getting a little romanticized around the idea that somebody in Honduras is going to be able to do the same job as a killer in New York City, LA, Dallas, wherever else. And the reality is, I think that you're always going to need the really ambitious, high-level US cultural talent. So I wanted to build a company that was going to help companies find that talent. So are you placing these individuals in the United States and are they remote or are they on-site?

1:43A combination of both. So we've hired on-site COOs for manufacturing companies in Miami. We've hired on-site creative strategists for a D2C business over in San Diego. But we also hire remote sales reps in Canada. I said US earlier, we also do Canada and sometimes the UK. But we'll do a combination of everything. My overall goal is how can we get people really high-level talent? Okay. So I know you just launched this business. So it's new. You're on pace to do like 200 grand this year, 200, 300 grand. Tell me, just give people a quick background. You have other businesses as well, right? This isn't the first business that you started.

2:24So just give a broad overview of size and scope of the businesses that you own and operate. Totally. Yeah. So this is one of my latest obsessions. And I tend to find that I love going from that zero to 1 million scale and then asking my business partners and will say that I get very bored after the 1 million part because a lot of getting there is just inventing new stuff. And after 1 million, it tends to be like just hammering and doing all the scalable things and the boring management stuff, which I start to hate really fast. But all the other companies, 30 second background on me, launched an Amazon FBA brand when I was 19, scaled it up to a couple million in sales, sold that when I was in college.

3:02And after we sold that, I got really bored, COVID hit, And I was sitting in my apartment thinking, what do I do? Started two different companies from there. One was me taking all the money that I made from the Amazon FBA business and buying the self-storage facilities throughout Texas, Arkansas, and soon to be New York. And we've been doing that for about three years now, learned the ins and outs of real estate, learned how to take a building that's worth$500 ,000 and make it worth$1.5 million. And we've done that a couple times. The second business that we launched was a Shopify business. I love e-commerce.

3:36I think it's a hard business, but one of my most fun businesses to run is you can flex the analytical and creative chops. And so launched that business. We actually launched the first version of that business in 2020. Got some product market success, but it wasn't entirely where we wanted it to get. Pivoted the business idea a little bit towards the end of 2020, early 2021. and it took off from there and I've scaled that up. The e-commerce business will do around$7 million per year at this point. And the real estate business does about$42 ,000,$43 ,000 per month, but we are leasing up two buildings.

4:13So I think with our current size and scale, we should get that closer to like$50 ,000 to$55 ,000. So the e-commerce business,$7 million top line, can you give me an idea of what's bottom line performance? Yep. $1 million. Okay. Okay. That's awesome, dude. All right. So you've got some real chops. And gosh, who does that sound like to me? Someone who loves the zero to 1 million phase and then just loves to hand it off. I don't know where I've heard that before. Oh yeah. That's Chris, my business partner. So you're accomplished. You operate well. You're smart. You have a marketing mind. Why are you getting into the recruiting space?

4:49so i tried to spend some time earlier this year figuring out what do i want to do next like with the e-commerce business we got it to a point where that was taking up a good deal of my time previously and i wanted to figure out okay how do i get out of this so we hired a director of marketing we hired you know a head of cs we hired uh overseas agents to do all of the ops works and like we eventually hired a ceo for that business and i got to the point where i was like all right I'm not really doing a whole hell of a lot at this point. Like what's the second business to start? And what I was telling you before we pressed record here is like, I actually don't, this is gonna sound bad, especially if you're a customer, but like, I don't care about any of the companies that I run.

5:31And what I mean by that is like, I'm not passionate about self-storage. I'm not passionate about the niche that we sell in the e-commerce space. I'm not passionate necessarily about recruiting. The thing that I am very passionate about is building companies that can scale, make money and finding ways to solve problems in ways that other people cannot. That gets me excited. That gets me fired up. And I love doing that consistently. So the actual first idea that we wanted to start after we placed the CEO in our e-commerce business was saying, hey, there are, you know, you always hear this silver tsunami, baby boomers retiring narrative.

6:04And the crazy stat that I read somewhere is that there are 12 million baby boomers retiring, but like only 1.4 million of them are going to sell their companies. You know, some of them just shut it down because they don't know how to sell it. others are have in sellable or unsellable assets and so like is there an opportunity to approach these guys and say hey listen your roofing company is awesome you make eight hundred thousand dollars a year your kids don't want it you know you're probably just going to wind it down because somebody told you that you probably can't sell it because there's too much key man risk can i go up to these companies and can i say hey for the next 18 months i'm going to teach you how to replace yourself by hiring a ceo to do your job you're going to pay them a lot you're going to pay them$250 ,000 a year, but we're going to find you a killer.

6:47We're going to give you the systems and operating procedures to phase yourself out of the business and make this a sell worthy asset where you can keep the cashflow for a little bit and then make the$2 million and retire. That was the first idea. And I love that idea. I thought it was like a huge market trending opportunity, something that probably sounds fun. Talk to a lot of people about it. Seemed exhausting. Seems like I was going to have to learn so many new different businesses all the time. And like entertainment wise, that's fun. But like as far as building the systems to create a scalable company, I think that sounds so hard.

7:25Yeah. So we scratched that idea. And like the CEO placement, like there were companies that do that. They typically niche down into like very specific like tech, e-commerce, you know, agency types of sectors. and that exists. But I wanted to build CEO to owner.com and build out a whole playbook and system. And I think... The problem with that is for the traditional staffing companies, if I'm a company looking for a position, I'm going and I'm like, I need this position. They know that they need that position. You don't have to convince them they need that position. When you're cold contacting owners who are like, I'm just going to shut this business down, you have to convince them that finding a CEO to replace them is the best way to go.

8:03So you've got a huge education problem with your target demographic, with your target customer. There's an education problem. And then the other side of it too is like, I was riffing on this idea with some guy that I met on X the other day. He does a lot of like exit planning for founders and helps them there. And I was like, man, how cool would it be to start like the YC for exits, right? Like, you know, you have this whole program where you're helping people start companies. You're giving them mentors, resources, fund day, whatever. like what if that existed for exits and it was better than just a business brokerage and he was like i thought of this idea i agree not entirely the problem is that by the time that you're truly ready to like sell your business not when you first think about it but the time that you're actually ready you're tired man like you know you're beat up you're like coming out of the trenches and you're like just either shut this thing down or give me 20 grand cash and i'll just call it a day.

8:56So I think that's the other problem with it. And there's an education thing. There's a motivation thing. There's, you know, a systems to scale thing. So there's a lot of pieces there. And maybe there's a world where it makes sense in the future, but that wasn't going to be it today. And so, so we took that and we're like, all right, well, I still like the idea of hiring. We got really good to hire in our team. Maybe I can hire for other people's teams. So let's launch d2chire.com. Got the seven letter domain name. Actually kind of clutch$9 for the seven letter domain name. So I was pretty happy about that.

9:28But then we ran into problem number two. Problem number two was that e-commerce companies don't need to hire a lot. You know, that's kind of the beauty of the model is that you can use a lot of overseas hires, contractors, agencies, and you can build a$100 million brand realistically with 20 employees. And so we're like, all right, maybe there's a big enough market here, but I don't love the fact that I can't get one client and hire 20 roles for them. Like I need those economics. And so then we rebranded to constant hire. We do the same thing. We just position ourselves differently. I still think that we are the best at hiring sales, marketing, e-commerce, digital marketing style talent.

10:05The only difference now is that we try to target a little bit more of growing companies that need more headcount. It's a pretty cool story because I think that's the exact way that many entrepreneurs who are starting businesses, not necessarily buying them, but that's, that's the progression is, are you freaking just downing a San Pellegrino bottle? Of course. Yeah. You're just drinking it straight from the bottle. Oh my gosh. I tried to get the mountain Valley from the bodega, but he's got like, he's got like a two liter for those who can't see, he's got a two liter sample of green and he's just freaking hitting it.

10:36Like it's a champagne bottle. This is amazing. Do you pour these things out before you drink from them? Yeah, typically. I've never done that. Well, you probably live by yourself. I didn't. Nope. I got a girlfriend and no critiques yet, but also I don't know if she sees the deed being done. Yeah. Yeah. You're a psychopath.

11:00That is freaking hilarious. Anyways, it's the iteration process, right? You're like, you start with one idea. And then by the time you get to the idea that's actually making money, it's just, it's very different than the original idea. staffing is like pretty hot right now. If you go on to a lot of social media platforms, Nick Huber bought his company, Support Shepherd and turned it into somewhere.com. And then you've got lots of people who are starting their own staffing agencies, but they're focused on overseas talent and placing them locally in these admin roles. You're not though. It sounds like you're focusing on stateside talent and focusing them and placing them in roles.

11:40In my mind, those economics are very different, right? Like if I'm a business owner, SMB, I'm much more interested in the cheaper solution to my problems. So is your target, is your ICP different than most of these overseas talent staffing companies? Yep. So great question. I had, I think we had like eight or nine sales calls this week, just because we had some content go out and I got good traction. And every time that somebody jumped on a call with me that was under 10 employees, like I started the call saying, hey, I want to be really clear here. We might not be a good fit to work with you.

12:15Because what I've learned about hiring is that it's largely a strategy question. Okay, should we invest and hire a sales rep? Should we hire a quality engineer? Should that be a role that somebody in this other position that is a project manager actually does? Like, unfortunately, the people that have less than 10 employees probably just don't actually know what their business needs. And so when you're hiring, it's actually really easy to say, let me hire somebody that I can pay$1 ,500 a month to, because that's no skin off my back. And like, I can kind of be a shitty manager when they're overseas, and they're not going to really notice that much.

12:52Tell them like, I mean, it's the truth, though, like, I mean, I have plenty of overseas hires as well. Like, I'm not even knocking it. Like, I think that the barbell approach of hire the killer in the US and then support them with as much low cost talent as possible overseas is a really winning playbook. But the truth is, is that like when you're hiring a lot overseas, you're not getting strategy out of that. You're probably also not even getting people that are willing to like work the 50, 60 hours a week. And we have really talented overseas people. I've hired people from nearly every overseas staffing agency that you can think of.

13:28and I would probably, I don't know, 20, 30, something like that overseas hires at this point. And like, certainly more than that over my lifetime, I can confidently say three have been good. Like, like maybe not even like because there are people that do their job, but where I'm just like, Oh damn, like there's, there's alpha here that I'm getting more output than what I'm paying. Whereas everyone else, you know, you pay them$1 ,500 a month, you get$1 ,500 a month worth of worked on. Like, I'm not criticizing. It's just, just the truth. Whereas like the other roles, like there's one ops person, there's one designer and there's one CS person that I can think of off the top of my head who do more than the work that I'm paying them for.

14:08Whereas what I found in the U S is that there's certainly a level of entitlement on the middle market levels of people. Like if you're making anywhere from like 65 to$90 ,000 a year, like I would be terrified to be an employee in that salary range. Honestly, like, I think that you, you're probably better off finding a good amount of people overseas in that range, depending on what the role is. But overpaying 20 % to 50 % of market comp can legitimately get you somebody who adds millions of dollars to your top line. And I've seen it several times. So here's my question. I understand the difference in the business model of these overseas staffing recruiting companies.

14:48It's cheaper, right? And they're doing a lot of administrative to function. So it's like, it makes sense to me. It sounds like you're just doing a traditional staffing company. Like, is it, or am I missing something? So what the first thing you're missing is, is, and I had to learn this when starting this business too, because someone was like, are you recruiting or staffing? And I was like, hold on a second. My internet's super laggy. I'm Googling it. I was like, what the hell is the difference? Yeah. So we do recruiting. So you don't, you don't pay me on a recurring basis. You manage all of the HR and the admin stuff.

15:18Um, my take on it is that for the average bootstrap founder, hiring a recruiter based on the economics of how a recruiter charges today is impossible. And frankly, what I've learned being in this business is that people hate recruiters. Um, they hate them so much. Like employees, employees, people being who business owners. Yeah. So if, if I turn to you and I say, Hey, I can find you a great, like you run a digital marketing agency. You hire account managers who are$75 ,000 a year. You hire creative strategists, you hire director of marketing, whatever. And I say, Nick, you hire somebody for$85 ,000 a year.

15:57I'm not going to charge you anything. Let me go find you the best talent possible. And only, and if you hire them for me, pay me$20 ,000. Like that's the typical recruiter pitch because they charge 25 % of first year salary. People hate that. Small businesses are not prepared to spend $20 ,000 on a fee. And honestly, most recruiters like just don't know shit about shit. Like they're basically like a tone down from sales reps. And so like they typically will just spray and pray and just get people in front of you hoping that you just need to hire bad enough that you pay them the big fee and sign on.

16:35My approach on it and the way that we're trying to change the economics lately, and sorry, actually one more really important part on the traditional recruiting piece. The reason that they do such a high fee from my understanding and the people that I've spoken with is that when you're recruiting for several people and they are entirely contingency based, if you recruit for three people, you probably only actually fill one of those roles, which means you did a ton of work for two clients and you didn't get paid anything for it. So you need to make up for it somewhere else, right? Now, I think that that's bad for the client.

17:09I I think it just doesn't make sense all around. Here's my updated approach on it. We are trying to get hyper niche on the roles that we serve and focus on. So if you turn to me and you say, can you hire me a director of operations? I want to say, no, I can't because it's going to take me way too long to relearn that role. And I'm going to have to learn your business and I'm going to have to learn what's important about this, whatever. Whereas roles that we've hired a lot of so far, copywriters, account managers for digital marketing agencies, Sales reps for both software and account and digital marketing agencies and creative strategists These three roles or sorry those four roles.

17:42I know extremely well. I have deep talent pools I can now charge you substantially less because I know that I already have really good people in those roles That are ready and actively looking for jobs today and I know how to recruit for them and I know what to say And so as a result now instead of charging you twenty thousand dollars I charge you six thousand dollars and it still is contingent based on me placing it So like you pay me nothing up front. I think it's that we do a 10 % non-refundable deposit. And then only if you hire that person, you pay me six grand. Everyone that I've spoken with that is a small business owner at this point, they are way more comfortable paying on that style of compensation versus the, you know, pay basically a quarter's worth of a salary and just hope that they're good enough.

18:26I mean, it sounds like you're just charging less. We charge less and we do way more specific types of work. Yeah. So you niche down on the roles, but you're also charging far less than a typical recruiter would charge. I mean, I hate recruiters because usually they promise you the world, they send you a bunch of candidates. And then I don't have any more success with them adding value in my companies than if I had just hired somebody. Like I fire them within three months and it's like, cool, now I freaking just paid 20 grand to place this person. And I think so the other thing, too, on the charging less part is if you think of the market as somebody the willingness to pay.

19:03Right. So the people that typically use recruiters, private equity firms, VCs and very large companies that just have a ton of cash flow. Those those are the people who typically use recruiters. Anyone who's running a smaller business and smaller being defined as like under 200 employees typically does not as much unless they are one of those first couple of categories because they don't want to pay the fee. Now if the fee becomes less and they're more willing to pay it the market gets way bigger and the volume can go up Which means that we consistently scale and our cost to fulfill consistently drops Um, so yeah, so we charge less but we can sell to more people.

19:37How do you all right? So if i'm sitting at home and i'm like, all right, how would I start one of these? How do you acquire customers? Uh, you turn to everyone and you say i'll do your recruiting for free as long as you can do a case study And then like give me a shout out that I do a good job. Okay, cool. That's good messaging, right? But like, how do I, who do I go to? Am I, am I just going to my network on Twitter? Am I doing pay-per-click ads? Am I, you know, do I have a programmatic SEO optimized website that is directing people to my services? Like, how do I even just get in front of them to say, this is my offering and this is what I'll do.

20:09Cool. Yeah. So, uh, what I would do is start niche, figure out the one, one rule, not even four or five, six, whatever. Like I, and make it very specific, kind of like newer role. What I've learned from doing this is that the role that we're having the most success with right now by a long shot are creative strategists. Because it's a newer role. It's a role that didn't really exist prior to three plus years ago. What's a creative strategist? Do you do the e-commerce stuff with Chris? Are you in the e-commerce world? Yeah. I mean, Chris has like 20 years worth of e-commerce experience. And I have maybe five as an investor.

20:45You know what I mean? So no, I'm not nearly as knowledgeable as he is. So creative strategist is, they are the people who design or come up with the concepts for ads, specifically video ads. Oh, okay. Yeah. So if you've ever seen like, Dollar Shave Club is a bad example, but like go to any of your favorite, like, you know, larger, faster growing DTC brands. And you've probably seen like, if you follow, I'm sure. Pillow Q is one of them are like. Yes. Like Dr. Squatch, you know, the soap. Yeah. So they'll start with like, you know, a scroll stopper of like us cutting soap up or like, you know, a soapy bathroom mirror.

21:21And then we'll say like, do you suffer with Andriff or like, you know, some kind of like, like call out there. And then they'll like turn it into, you know, a whole flow from there. So the creative strategist is somebody who creates the brief and the script and then, you know, subs it out to the creators, make sure post-production scene effectively, whatever. But reason that we do a really good job there is because that's a newer type of role. It's something that people have realized is more important in this business. And so now they are recruiting for it and it's really hard to find good ones.

21:50And we've gotten very good at finding good ones. And so I would start with a hyper niche role and say, we recruit for this role. Then tactically, I would go on LinkedIn. I would buy a LinkedIn recruiter seat. You can start with LinkedIn recruiter light. It's$170 per month. And I would find everybody on LinkedIn who is recruiting for that role. And I would send them an email. And also, I would also make a job posting for that role and start a recruiter search and just start interviewing people. Say, hey, I run this agency. I've got a ton of clients who are constantly doing it. If you want to lie, like I make up fake reviews on my e-commerce businesses when I first started e-commerce businesses.

22:27Like, call it unethical. Sure. Like, it all evens out at the end. And so if you want to say, like, hey, we recruit for a ton, like, let me just screen you and go into 40 hours a week of interviews. and like these are 15 minute long interviews. You're taking notes. If you want to keep it cheap, do it in a spreadsheet and like tactically interview a hundred potential creative strategists and rank them top to bottom. Simple enough. Now reach out to all of these companies that are ideally fast growing companies and don't just want a singular creative strategist, but multiple like ideally digital marketing agencies, whoever else and say, John, I have a killer creative strategist.

23:02I know their classic recruiter pitches. Let me give them to you for free and you charge 20%. I want to start a really great relationship here. Like, let me send you some people. If you hire them, pay me nothing. And if you like them, maybe we can do business together in the future. There's no catch, not pulling your leg. So LinkedIn is kind of your platform that you would start with. Oh, 100%. Yeah, there's a billion people on LinkedIn. No exaggeration. I think it's like 980 million or something. What are the margins on a business like this? All right, so top line, you get$6 ,000. What's your bottom line?

23:34So it depends on how many people that your recruiter can handle at once. So like a typical, this is where it gets really beneficial to niche down and do a singular role. Let's say that I have one recruiter and I pay him$80 ,000 a year and I pay him$1 ,500. And I don't know, let's say, that's what we do. It's$80 ,000 a year,$1 ,500 commission for placement. We charge$6 ,500 per junior role and$10 ,000 per senior role. And so for a junior role, like a creative strategist or an individual contributor role, will charge that$6 ,500. And if I have this one individual placing creative strategists across 10 clients, okay, so that's 65 ,000, typical placement time under 60 days.