Tom Kelly scaled EVONA from four bootstrapped founders in a tiny Bristol office to eighty recruiters in three years. Then he made the call most agency owners never make. He cut the team back to thirty. And in doing it, per-head revenue doubled.

This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation that pulls apart exactly how that happened.

Brought to you by Atlas. The AI-first recruitment platform that captures every candidate conversation automatically. Atlas customers report 40%+ EBITDA growth and 80%+ increase in monthly billings. Get your exclusive listener offer at recruitwithatlas.com.

Tom came up on the inside track at one of the biggest STEM recruiters on the FTSE. He spotted space as a high-growth vertical before almost anyone, pitched it internally, got shut down, and walked. He linked up with three other recruiters in the same office — Jack, Rich, and Ryan. They sketched the company out on a whiteboard at Tom's place: no KPIs, no fixed working hours, no fixed location, brand-first, give back to STEM. Eight years and over $40 million in fees later, they've stuck to every line of it.

Their first placement was a chef in a Bristol restaurant for £2,000. Hire number two was a head of marketing — a decision every advisor said was crazy. By Tom's read, recruitment and marketing are the same thing. Brand pull beats spam. That bet became the operating philosophy of the entire company.

Then COVID hit and the space industry — recession-proof, Tom argues, because satellites don't get sick — tripled their revenue and headcount. They paid LinkedIn a fortune ahead of a planned scale to three hundred people. They flew the whole company and their partners to Monaco after a million-dollar month. Tom calls that trip the moment the wheels were about to come off.

By 2021 the cracks were showing. Five account managers, thirty fillers, two RPO teams, a full operations and finance bench. Tom describes the peak as a hot mess. So the four founders sat down and made the hardest call of their careers. Contract team first — running $20K a week with no real strategy. Then perm cuts. Then operations. Then the advisors. Tom and the other three didn't pay themselves for six months. He moved his family to the US in the middle of it.

The episode ends on the moment the four founders agreed one of them had to lead, and that person would be Tom. Without ego. The single reason, Tom says, the business is still standing.

Part 2 drops Wednesday — the 25-interview rule that defines elite recruiters at EVONA, and the segmentation that explains why most agency owners are quietly losing 60% of their team.

What You'll Learn:

- Why scaling to 80 recruiters nearly broke the business, and the moment the four founders knew they had to cut to 30

- The pre-COVID hire every advisor told Tom was crazy, and why it became the engine of the company

- How EVONA tripled in COVID while most agencies were frozen

- The £300,000 company trip Tom now calls a warning sign

- What it actually costs to let 50 people go — emotionally, financially, culturally

- Why the four founders agreed one person had to take the wheel, and how they made the call without breaking the partnership

Connect with Tom Kelly:

LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/evonatom/

EVONA — https://evona.com

🎙️ Resources:

Atlas — recruitwithatlas.com

Elite Recruiter Community — https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community

AI Recruiting Summit 2026 — https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/

Newsletter — https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

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 order, fires off templated outreach, and hopes.

You'll also hear how he turned strategic referral partnerships into a steady deal source, why persona-based messaging quietly outperforms everything else in the inbox, and what he'd tell a recruiter trying to go from average to elite right now.

If you've ever watched your desk go to zero and wondered if there's another side to it, this one is for you. There is. The recruiters who reinvent now are the ones crushing it in 2028.

This episode is powered by Atlas, the AI-first recruitment platform built to eliminate the admin that eats your day. Atlas captures every candidate conversation automatically and turns it into something you can actually use. Ask it who mentioned wanting a four-day week or who's open to relocating next year, and Magic Search pulls the answer from your entire database instantly. No keyword guessing, no digging through old notes. Atlas customers have reported over 40% EBITDA growth and over 80% more monthly billings after switching. Unlock your exclusive listener offer at recruitwithatlas.com.

Also brought to you by Millee, the AI deal strategist that turns the gut feel of big billers into real-time guidance on every live process. Millee preps you before every call and drafts your high-caliber follow-ups so you lead from the first minute. Try it free at millee.ai.

🎤 See Riece speak at the AI Recruiting Summit 2026: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ 🔗 Join the Elite Recruiter Community: https://elite-recruiters.circle.so/checkout/elite-recruiter-community 📬 Get the newsletter: https://eliterecruiterpodcast.beehiiv.com/subscribe

👤 Connect with Riece Keck: https://www.linkedin.com/in/riecekeck/