I started my recruiting career with no computer, a Toshiba 20-line phone, and a shoebox full of business cards that nobody had bothered to date. I showed up at a recruiting firm in the Loop in Chicago, walked into the loudest office I had ever seen, watched twenty-five people in suits shouting into phone receivers, and immediately thought: I want this job.
The pitch was simple enough to sound almost embarrassing. You call people. You find out who is looking for work and who is hiring. If you make a match, the company pays you twenty-five percent of the salary. I asked what the salaries looked like. They told me $150,000, $200,000. My jaw almost hit the floor.
A week later, I was on the phone for nine hours a day with a script my boss handed me and the instruction to read it until I believed it.
That was over twenty years ago. I have made more than 10,000 hires since then, survived two major market collapses, built and rebuilt teams from scratch, and eventually raised five million dollars to build the AI recruiting platform I wish had existed back then.
If you want the clean version of that story, it is not this post. What I want to share here is what I actually learned, because the lessons that shaped how I think about this career are not the ones that show up in recruiting handbooks.
The only two rules that ever mattered
On my first day, my boss Ann Johnson gave me one rule that I have never forgotten: make money on every call.
That did not mean close a deal on every call. It meant leave every conversation with something that moves the needle. A candidate worth representing. A company that is hiring. A referral. A piece of information about the market that is not publicly available. Something.
The second rule was simpler: if someone wants to keep talking, keep talking.
Those two rules, together, are actually a complete philosophy about how to run a recruiting desk. You are not just making dials. You are building a network of information, one conversation at a time. The recruiters who figure that out early are the ones who still have careers ten years later.
The mechanics behind it were straightforward. You were expected to make over a hundred dials a day and connect with fifteen to twenty people. Out of those, maybe one or two conversations were actually going to move your business forward. The math was not glamorous, but it was honest. And once you understood that ratio, you stopped treating every call like a lottery ticket and started treating the process itself as the job.
What a bull market hides
I spent the first few years of my career thinking I was genuinely exceptional. We were the top team in the country. I was twenty-three years old and felt invincible.
Then 2008 happened.
The financial crisis did not arrive with a warning. One quarter we were on top, and the next the phone went quiet. Our clients were mortgage companies, and they were collapsing. Within months, I went from running a team I was proud of to sitting in an office that had shrunk by sixty percent overnight.
Laying off that many people is not something you forget. It also has a way of clarifying things very quickly. When the market was pulling everyone forward, I had no real way to know how much of my performance was mine and how much was the tide. That reckoning comes eventually for every recruiter. The good news is that it only happens to you once. After that, you are permanently suspicious of easy success, which is exactly the right way to think.
The recruiters who do not survive a downturn are almost always the ones who took their foot off the gas during the good years. They confused momentum with skill. The ones who survive are the ones who recognize that a bull market is not the goal. It is an opportunity to build something that does not depend on it.
Effort divorced from results
After we made those cuts, I spent the better part of a year generating almost no revenue. The customers had disappeared. The market had seized. I had debt accumulating on a credit card and an office I was not sure we could keep the lights on in.
What we did during that time was go back to basics. We talked to job seekers. We played therapists. We told people it was going to be okay, that the software market would come back, that there were still opportunities if you knew where to look. We referred people to companies that were not paying our fee because it was the right thing to do.
That instinct, going back to the candidates when there is nothing else to sell, turns out to be one of the highest-leverage activities in this business. Your candidates know things. They hear about companies that are starting to hire again, technologies that are getting traction, team leads who just got budget. If you have spent years building real relationships with top performers in their fields, they will tell you things before those things become public. That is the actual product of a recruiting agency. Not the placements. The relationships.
When the market did come back, I was one of very few people positioned to take advantage of it. Over the next eight years, I got five promotions and went from managing five people to running a sixty-person office in New York.
I did not earn that by being smarter than everyone else. I earned it by not stopping.
The 20 percent who always win
In every team I have ever run, the same distribution shows up.
About twenty percent of people will figure it out no matter what the market is doing. They have a motor and a tolerance for pain that does not come from training. You can teach someone to handle objections or run a more efficient intake call, but you cannot teach someone to keep making a hundred dials a day when nothing is converting and there is no immediate payoff in sight.
The middle of the bell curve will follow the right conditions. When things are going well, they build on momentum and produce solid results. When things get hard, they struggle. And then there is the bottom twenty percent, who are not going to be consistent performers regardless of the circumstances. Sometimes that is a skills problem. More often it is a mindset one.
The best recruiters in the world take a hundred shots a day whether they are making half of them or none of them. The process is the job. The results are the lagging indicator.
— Sloane Barbour
The separator, every single time, is effort that does not depend on results.
How to train someone versus how to lead them
Running a large team taught me something that I think gets lost in a lot of conversations about management.
Training, managing, and leading are three different jobs, and most people who get promoted into management do not realize that until they are already failing at one of them.
Training is tactical. It is explaining why the questions you ask are the questions you ask, role-playing calls, giving someone a framework like feel-felt-found so they have a tool for the moment a prospect starts to push back. It is specific, it is repeatable, and it is the foundation everything else is built on.
Managing is about performance over time. It is the difference between saying “great job today” and saying “I heard that call and I want to tell you exactly what you did well and why it worked.” Lazy feedback is one of the most common and damaging habits in sales and recruiting organizations. If someone cannot trace your feedback back to a specific action, it does not change anything.
Leadership is something different entirely. Leadership is about defining reality for the people on your team. What is actually happening in the market right now. How it affects the work you are doing. What the plan is. In an environment where information moves fast and anxiety runs high, the most valuable thing a leader can do is give people a clear picture of where they are standing.
Combine all three and you also need a fourth thing: you have to be a therapist. Recruiting is an emotional business, and the people who do it well are the ones who have learned to carry a lot of that weight for the people they work with.
The farmer and the horse
There is a Chinese proverb I come back to more often than almost anything else.
A farmer’s horse runs away. His neighbors say, what terrible luck. He says, maybe. The horse comes back with two wild horses. His neighbors say, what great fortune. He says, maybe. His son breaks his leg trying to tame one of the new horses. His neighbors say, what a tragedy. He says, maybe. The army comes through recruiting young men for war. They pass the son over because of his broken leg. His neighbors say, what incredible luck. He says, maybe.
I was in my mid-twenties when my team collapsed in 2008. In that moment, it felt like the worst possible thing. It took a few years to understand that everything I built afterward, the promotions, the offices, the network, the eventual decision to start engin, ran through that exact period of failure.
You do not know, in the moment when something is happening to you, whether it is a good thing or a bad thing. That is not a reason to be passive. It is a reason to keep working, stay close to the people and relationships that matter, and resist the temptation to decide what something means before it has had time to show you.
That perspective is, I think, what separates the recruiters who are still at this twenty years later from the ones who disappeared in the first downturn.
Not talent. Not timing.
Just the willingness to keep going when you do not know how it ends.
Written by
Sloane Barbour
Founder + CEO, engin
Sloane Barbour is the Founder and CEO of engin, an AI-powered recruiting platform built for the modern staffing firm. He spent over twenty years in tech recruiting before launching engin, working across startup, mid-market, and enterprise hiring.