{"podcast":{"title":"The Elite Recruiter Podcast","slug":"the-elite-recruiter-podcast-3517796","podcast_index_feed_id":3517796,"rss_url":"https://feed.pod.co/the-elite-recruiter-podcast","website_url":"https://www.eliterecruiterpodcast.com/","image_url":"https://images.pod.co/iB3nwE3qWlvCFrCJ5yhPnj0wo5JDbioPnrCyk-MyVyA/resize:fill:1500:1500/plain/artwork/6d300282-23d8-47b4-aa15-3772d4a0520b/the-elite-recruiter-podcast-1770643823.jpg","author":"Benjamin Mena","episode_count":344,"summary":"Real stories, tactics, and tools from the top 1% of recruiters and agency founders.","last_synced_at":"2026-07-27T18:19:10.918377+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-elite-recruiter-podcast-3517796"},"episode":{"title":"$800K From Zero in 1 Year. AI Ran the BD","slug":"800k-from-zero-in-1-year-ai-ran-the-bd","published_at":"2026-06-05T11:10:19+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-elite-recruiter-podcast-3517796/800k-from-zero-in-1-year-ai-ran-the-bd","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-elite-recruiter-podcast-3517796","url":"https://pod.co/the-elite-recruiter-podcast/800k-in-year-1-ai-ran-the-cold-outreach","audio_url":"https://downloads.pod.co/5825fd83-9e96-44b3-9cb7-112a46ad1e1b/d65770f2-cca2-4840-a4a4-75d3f155e8f7.mp3","summary":"Most recruiters think AI is coming for someone else's desk. Riece Keck isn't so sure. Two years ago he said AI wouldn't replace great recruiters, but it would replace the mediocre ones sooner than anyone wanted to admit. He still stands by it, and he thinks we're a lot closer now than we were then. He's also taking the stage at the AI Recruiting Summit 2026 to go even deeper on this, so if today's episode lands, that's where you see it built live: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ This conversation is the proof. Riece built a tech recruiting agency to a $1.2M year, then watched it nearly die twice before it folded into a merger for a token amount. He stepped away during a brutal personal stretch, then cold-started the whole thing again in early 2025, and billed roughly $800K in his first year back without leaning on his old client list. The difference the second time wasn't more hustle. It was systems. Riece walks Benjamin through the no-code BD engine he built end to end: scraping job boards on a daily auto-run, identifying the right hiring managers, enriching the contacts, drafting the outreach, and dripping it out, all while he sleeps. He breaks down how he uses funding signals, new-hire signals, and backfill signals to reach companies at the exact moment they're hurting, and how he's now rebuilding the entire stack inside Claude Code with MCP connections so an agent runs his ATS and his sourcing for him. But this isn't a go-all-in-on-tech sermon. Riece is just as direct about the other lane: if your zone of genius is relationships, build the offline communities that pull you out of the LinkedIn noise everyone else is drowning in. The one move he says gets you crushed in 2026 is staying in the middle, the undifferentiated recruiter who takes a job ord…","meta_description":"Most recruiters think AI is coming for someone else's desk. Riece Keck isn't so sure. Two years ago he said AI wouldn't replace great recruiters, but it w…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":4105,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-elite-recruiter-podcast-3517796/episodes/800k-from-zero-in-1-year-ai-ran-the-bd/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-elite-recruiter-podcast-3517796/800k-from-zero-in-1-year-ai-ran-the-bd.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}