I wasn’t enjoying recruitment the way I used to. I remember sitting with that feeling and not knowing what to do with it. Was this it? Was I done? What was even next!?

I had clients to see while I was there. People I would normally jump at the chance to meet in person. I love that part of the job. I’m an IRL girly through and through.

Oddly, I didn’t want to go.

It felt so weird. I couldn’t pin it. So I sat with it. Really sat with it.

I finally got to the root of it: mismanagement.

Not mismanagement of my time or my pipeline. Mismanagement of my client list. I had let the wrong clients stay too long. The misaligned ones. The ones that drained me instead of fuelling me.

That was the moment I knew this wasn’t about recruitment. It was about who I was doing recruitment with.

So I made a promise to myself. Swap them out. All of them, eventually. Keep only the clients I was genuinely aligned with.

It took about 12 months.

I look back now and I can’t believe the difference. I am obsessed again. Obsessed with the work, obsessed with the people I get to work with. The version of me in that Miami hotel room would not recognize how good this feels.

The insight

If you ever hit that wall, the one where you start asking “Is this still for me?”, don’t assume the answer is the industry.

Ask yourself one question first:

Is it the work, or is it who I’m doing the work with?

Those are two completely different problems with two completely different fixes. One means a career change. The other means a client list change. Confusing them is how good recruiters talk themselves into quitting an industry they actually still love.

Why this only works when you’re solo

I could feel the misalignment, and unlike before, I could actually do something about it. I could name it, and I had 100% control over who was on my roster.

At an agency or internally, you don’t get that. You take the accounts or hiring managers you’re given. You inherit clients/hiring managers from a departing colleague. You don’t get to just... let someone go because they’re not aligned with how you want to work anymore.

Going solo means the moment you diagnose the real problem, you’re also the only person who can fix it. Nobody above you to convince. No account list assigned by someone else. Just you, deciding who earns your time.

So next time you feel like giving up, don’t quit the industry before you’ve asked the harder question. Is it the work, or is it who you’re doing it with.

If it’s the second one, you have more control than you think.

Christine
Founder, Remote Recruiter

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One is a university friend, now a Partner at an accounting firm. The other is a candidate I placed back in 2019, now a Chief People Officer at a global software company.

Easy story to tell: “See, relationships matter. Stay in touch and business comes back around.”

Except that’s not actually what happened.

Both of these people already knew me. That was never the variable. What changed is that I’ve been posting on LinkedIn every single day for two years. These aren’t viral posts. I don’t get crazy engagement. But I’m seen.

Here’s what that daily posting actually did: every time either of them opened LinkedIn, they saw my name or my face. Over and over. Month after month.

So when a hire came up, I wasn’t a contact buried in someone’s phone from 2019. I was top of mind. Present. Still doing this. Still visible.

The relationship is what sealed the deal. The visibility is what got me the call.

That distinction matters more than people think. We love the relationship story because it’s warm and it flatters us: “people work with me because they like me.” True. But if they can’t remember you exist, liking you doesn’t matter. Out of sight is out of mind, even for people who genuinely rate you.

The same thing applies to cold outreach. Cold prospects need to see you before they'll ever consider you. Warm contacts need to see you or they'll forget you. Visibility is what keeps relationships from going dormant.

Let me make this clear. Visibility doesn't require viral posts. It requires showing up consistently. Not for the algorithm. But for the moment, months from now, when someone you already know needs exactly what you do, and your face is the one they remember scrolling past that morning.

Stay visible, my friends! The relationship will do the rest.

Christine
Founder, Remote Recruiter

If you know you need to post more but freeze the second you open LinkedIn, that’s exactly what the LinkedIn Starter Kit fixes. No more staring at a blank post box wondering what’s worth saying.

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You don’t need a business plan, a website, or a big leap. You need one placement.

Start small.

If the idea of going independent terrifies you, stop trying to solve the whole thing at once. Don’t think about building a firm. Don’t think about replacing your salary. Think about one deal.

Find a partner you already know and trust, someone already out on their own who could use an extra set of hands. Split a placement together. Work it on the side, nights and weekends, without touching your day job.

That’s it. That’s the whole first step.

Why this works

A side placement does something a business plan never will: it makes independence real.

You feel what it’s like to run a search without a company’s process behind you. You feel what it’s like to close a fee that goes to you, not to a firm that takes their chunk before you ever see it.

And when that fee lands, 30, 40, 50 thousand dollars, split with a trusted partner. It’s no longer a theory, its real. You’ve done it once. You can do it again.

The taste changes everything

Once you close that first placement outside the system, you find out the most important thing: YOU CAN DO IT.

From there, the fear changes shape. It’s no longer “what if I can’t do this?” It’s “how fast can I do more of this?”

One placement. That’s it.

You don’t need a five-year plan. You need one deal with someone you trust.

Do that once, and you won’t need me to convince you to go independent. You’ll already be halfway out the door.

Christine
Founder, Remote Recruiter

Come hang with the gang learning to go solo, each and every week.

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Somebody quit a stable job. Somebody maxed out a credit card. Somebody sat across from a spouse and said trust me, and then spent years finding out if they were right. That person built something. And then they hired you to help run it.

You took the safe seat. They took the risk. This is the exchange.

I’m not saying that to shame anyone. I took that seat too, for eight years. Built someone else’s business, hit someone else’s numbers, cashed someone else’s checks.

Then I realized I could do it on my own terms, DUH! Freedom. Flexibility. Clients I hand select instead of clients I’m assigned. The ability to walk away without a KPI hanging over my head. Charge what I want. Work when I want. Choose how I do it.

Ironically, the safe seat was never actually the safe one. You are one reorg, one bad quarter, one new VP away from finding out exactly how much say you have over what you earn, when you work, where you work, and who you work for. Someone else took the risk, and your destiny has been sitting in their hands ever since.

I left agency in July 2015. No safety net, no severance, no plan B. Just a vision of a life that was more free. My way, my terms, nobody who could stop me. Did people think I was crazy? Absolutely. Was I scared? Hell yes. But now I look back and I am the one who took the risk and built the life most people only dream about.

I’m not here to brag. I’m here to show you that you can too.

Over the years I’ve coached individuals to take that leap, and every single one is thriving now. No regrets. Some still can’t believe where they’ve ended up. We still celebrate it!

Helping people take that leap is what inspired me to build the products I wish I’d had when I made my decision, the exact tools you need to make the transition.

If you already know deep down you want this and you’re just circling the decision waiting for permission you don’t need, stop waiting. [Grab the full product bundle here] and start building the exit that’s already made up its mind.

Some of you genuinely don’t know if you’re built for this yet, and that’s a fair place to be. [Take the quiz here] and find out exactly where you stand in the decision.

Either way, stop asking permission from people who took their risk already and are hoping you never take yours.

Christine
Founder, Remote Recruiter

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I want to preface this by saying I am not afraid of accountability. I never have been. But there is a difference between backing what you deliver and absorbing 100% of the risk for outcomes you no longer control.

Here is what I control:

I hunt, I go out and get the candidate. I assess against what the client actually needs, not just what is on the job description. I push on their motivation. I run a real process. I manage expectations on both sides. I keep transparency between both parties. I negotiate. I help the candidate through their resignation and any counteroffer that comes with it. I give honest advice even when it is not what the client wants to hear. That is the work I am paid for, and I stand behind every part of it.

Once that person accepts the offer and walks in the door, the job shifts to the client. Onboarding. Management. Culture. Whether the role matches what was promised.

None of that is mine to control. All of it belongs to the employer and that is simply not my risk to carry.

No recruiter should ever agree to a full refund clause. Not one. Not ever.

Let’s break down what you’re really signing

A refund clause says give the client their money back, in full, for work that was completed and delivered. It says everything you did, the sourcing, the vetting, the offer management, was worth nothing the moment something outside your control went wrong.

You are agreeing that your work has no value once the candidate leaves your hands. You are agreeing to be the only party in the transaction with zero protection.

That is not a contract term. That is zero self-respect.

What signing it says about you

If you agree to a full refund, you are telling your client something true whether you believe it or not.

You are telling them you do not trust your own process. You are telling them your fee is negotiable down to zero the second they apply pressure. You are telling them you would rather take a bad deal than risk losing the deal.

Sit with that for a second. That is what is actually on the table when you sign.

And it does not stop with you. Every recruiter who agrees to this resets the floor for the next one. They teach clients that unlimited liability is what a "good partner" looks like. Clients do not invent that expectation. It gets handed to them, one signature at a time.

I did not build an independent practice by discounting my worth to keep a client happy. I built it by knowing exactly what my fee represents and refusing to negotiate the parts of it that were never negotiable to begin with.

If you know your worth, you already know the answer

Ask yourself honestly why you would sign it. Because the terms are fair? Or because you are afraid that if you push back, the client walks?

If it is the second one, that fear is not about the contract. It is about whether you trust the value of your own work enough to defend it.

A replacement guarantee protects the client from a bad match. A credit protects the relationship when something genuinely goes sideways early. A full refund gives away all of your power. At that point, you might as well ask yourself if you want to work for free.

You do not know your worth if you are willing to hand all of it back.

Weak recruiters sign it. Confident ones don’t.

For the sake of yourself and the industry as a whole, DO NOT sign a full refund clause.

Christine
Founder, Remote Recruiter

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I moved on. That’s the job.

A year later, I was recruiting for a different client on a similar role. There was one person who was perfect for it. I went to reach out to him and found out he was already working at the company I’d submitted him to. Yup, you got it, the one that told me they didn’t want to meet him.

They hired him. Directly. No call to me. No fee.

I reached out to HR to figure out what happened. My original contact had left. The new head of HR told me the contract I’d signed with her predecessor didn’t count, because that person “didn’t have signing authority.”

I’d worked with that company for years. I’d made multiple placements through that same contact. And now I was being told it was INVALID, conveniently, the moment it stopped being convenient for them.

I called a lawyer.

She told me straight: a company doesn’t get to retroactively decide an HR representative wasn’t authorized to sign, especially after honouring contracts from that same person for years. That’s not how representation works.

We took it to court. We won. $40,000, paid out.

Recruiters going solo need to know this.

It wasn’t luck and it certainly wasn’t a sympathetic judge.

It was because my search requisition was bulletproof from the start.

They were a billion-dollar company. I was one recruiter, running my own desk, alone. On paper, that’s not a fair fight. But I wasn’t scared, because I knew exactly what my contract said and exactly what it protected.

When I coach recruiters who are going solo, there’s one thing I tell every single one of them they need before anything else. A bulletproof search req. Not a template you found online. Not something drafted by ChatGPT or Claude. Something built to actually hold up.

That’s exactly why I built the Execution Toolkit and made it available to everyone.

The contract itself is a lawyer-drafted agreement that protects your fees, your terms and your scope, with none of the grey areas that lead to disputes like mine.

Plus a bonus. The candidate outreach template, the submission template and the take-a-candidate-to-market template I still use to run my own desk today. No AI voice, no generic prompts. Simple, human templates, at a time when everyone’s outreach sounds exactly the same. Because let me tell you, everyone sounds the same now.

The client who tried to walk away from my fee wasn’t some fly-by-night operation. It was a company I’d worked with for years. I’d made multiple placements through that same relationship.

They looked at little Christine, solo, no legal team behind her, and figured she wouldn’t put up a fight.

I did. And I won.

Protect yourself. Get the toolkit.

Get the Execution Toolkit

You’re one contract away from a very different outcome.

Christine
Founder, Remote Recruiter

Come hang with the gang learning to go solo, each and every week.

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“What’s your exit plan?”

I don’t have one. I’m not building toward an exit. I’m building toward more days that look like this one. Waking up without an alarm. Not answering to anyone. Choosing a slow morning or diving straight into work, or not working at all, depending on what my energy has to give that day.

The math everyone accepts without questioning

Work hard for forty years. Save. Sacrifice. Wait.

Then, somewhere around 65, start actually living.

That’s the deal most people sign up for without ever reading the terms. Grind now, live later. Except later isn’t guaranteed, and neither is the energy to enjoy it when it finally arrives.

I stopped signing that deal in 2015.

What I built instead

I didn’t build a bigger agency. I built a smaller, freer one.

No office. No team to manage for the sake of managing them. No ladder to climb because someone told me climbing was the goal.

Just me, my clients, and a laptop that’s worked from more cities than I can count.

The business didn’t get smaller because I lacked ambition. It got smaller because I finally knew what I actually wanted, and it wasn’t scale for its own sake.

Here’s what I’m here to show you

Fewer clients. Better ones. Deep relationships where clients refer you business instead of feast-or-famine placements. Three months off if you want them, or none, because you actually like the work.

You don’t need permission to design it this way. You need to stop assuming the only two options are agency burnout or corporate ceiling.

There’s a third path. You get to choose. That’s the whole point.

Why retirement was never the goal

I don’t dream about quitting. I dream about doing more of this, I love what I do and have no desires to stop.

When the business fits your life instead of running it, you stop counting down and you get excited about building forward.

Why would you chase early retirement when you can just find a better way to work?

Design it now. Don’t wait for permission, and don’t wait for 65.

Are you ready to build a recruitment business you don’t want to retire from?

Take the quiz to find out

With love,

Christine
Founder, Remote Recruiter

Come hang with the gang learning to go solo, each and every week.

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On July 14th 2015 I had no idea what I was doing. But I did it anyway.

All I knew at the time was that I felt restricted and I wanted freedom.

Freedom to work remotely, freedom to choose my own hours, freedom to work with whoever I wanted, however I wanted.

It was unconventional, unheard of. People thought I was crazy.

I had no plan. I just knew I wanted something different and I had to go out and create it.

I had no roadmap. No mentor. No guide.

I didn’t know a single recruiter who had gone independent. Not one. There was nobody to call and ask “Does this actually work?” or “How do you get your first client?” or “What happens when you fail at this?”

So I built it blind and I learned as I went along.

A decade later, I’m still here. Still independent. Still building this life on my own terms.

Going solo isn’t a personality trait. It’s not something you’re either born with or not. It’s a set of decisions, made in a specific order, usually while scared. (I was terrified, btw).

I can’t hand you the eleven years. But I can hand you the thing I never had: a way to check if you're ready, instead of guessing like I did.

I built a quiz that does exactly that: 10 questions to help you get honest with yourself.

Take it. Find out.

Are you ready to go solo?

And remember, I’m rooting for you!

Christine
Founder, Remote Recruiter

Come hang with the gang learning to go solo, each and every week.

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A few weeks ago I was deep into what looked like a strong mandate. Great company. Interesting product. Executive-level search. The kind of engagement I would want to take on.

I sent my contract. The same one I’ve been using since 2007. They sent back redlines. Nothing crazy, but enough to get me thinking. One of them wasn’t unreasonable on the surface. If a candidate had previously interviewed, applied directly, or come through an internal referral, they wanted ownership. An unwritten rule in recruitment that most of us understand. I agreed. My only ask was a five business day window for them to confirm whether a candidate had been in process, to avoid any confusion down the road. They agreed.

But that clause told me something. You don’t put an unwritten rule in writing unless you’ve had problems before. My spidey senses were officially on.

Things were moving forward. But I was paying attention.

Once we agreed I was told the final terms would be routed to me for signature.

Instead I got an email. “Please see attached. We had a few business revisions based on other agreements with similar firms. It will be routed for signature.”

I opened the attachment.

They had agreed to five business days for candidate confirmation. It was now ten. They had agreed to standard representation terms. It was now six months from submittal. And a refund clause that had never been discussed at all had appeared out of nowhere.

3.5 weeks in and this is what you come back with. Ten days to tell me if a candidate has been in process. If you can’t answer that question in five days you don’t have organization and efficiency, you have chaos. Six months of candidate ownership from submittal. If it took you this long to get a search agreement signed, what exactly is your interview and offer process going to look like? I could already see month eight on the horizon. And a refund clause. In what world does an exceptional recruiter working on contingency offer a refund? We take all the risk. Every hour, every search, every candidate conversation. On us, until we deliver. To ask for a refund after that is not a negotiation tactic. It’s insulting.

This wasn’t a negotiation anymore. It was a blueprint. Every clause was designed to find a way to beat me rather than work with me. You don’t build a search partnership on a foundation of gotcha clauses. That’s not a foundation at all, at least not one I am in alignment with.

And then it clicked.

This is exactly why their current recruiters can’t fill their current mandates. No great recruiter would ever agree to these terms.

At that point it stopped being about contract language.

It became a simple question: is this a partnership or is this exploitation?

I’ve learned something in two decades in this business: how a client negotiates before the work starts is usually how they’ll treat you throughout the engagement. Respect, communication, trust. They all show up early. So do red flags.

Too many people in sales believe success means getting every deal across the finish line. I don’t. Sometimes the biggest win is the one you walk away from.

Walking away protects your time, your reputation, and your standards. More than that, it creates room for the clients who are actually worth working with.

We spend our days advising companies to hire selectively. We should hold ourselves to the same standard when deciding who we represent.

Not every signed contract is a good partnership.

Sometimes redlines are just redlines. And sometimes they’re the first signal that you should close your laptop and move on.

Christine
Founder, Remote Recruiter

Knowing when to walk away is one part of it. Building a business where you can afford to is the other. Subscribe for weekly insights on making the leap to solo recruiting.

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Maybe it shows up on a Sunday night before the week starts. Maybe it shows up mid-call, when you close a search and realize you didn’t need anyone else in the room to do it. You did it. Alone. In your head, quietly, you think: I could just do this myself.

Then Monday comes. And you don’t.

You tell yourself you need more experience. A bigger network. A cushion. A sign. You wait for the moment where going solo feels safe. That moment doesn’t exist. It was never going to.

I’m here to show you what’s up

Recruiting is not complicated. It looks complicated because the industry has spent decades wrapping it in layers it doesn’t need: KPIs, dashboards, sales scripts, managers managing managers. All of that exists to control people, not to close searches.

Strip it back and the business is this: you bring a candidate and a client together. That’s it. That’s the whole model.

If you can do that, you already have the only skill that matters. Everything else, the branding, the tech stack, the fancy title, is decoration.

Two things. Only two.

Here’s what you actually need to go independent.

1. You know how the business works.
You know how to source. You know how to qualify a client. You know how to manage a process from intake to offer to start date. You’ve done it a hundred times, just under someone else’s name and someone else’s fee split. The mechanics don’t change when you remove the logo.

2. You have a network.
Candidates who trust you. Clients who’ve worked with you. People who take your call because of who you are, not who employs you. If you’ve been in this business more than a couple of years, you have this. You built it already. It’s sitting right there, waiting for you to use it for yourself instead of for someone else’s P&L.

That’s the whole list. Two things. Both of which you already have.

So what’s actually stopping you?

Everything else you’re telling yourself is just fear. I get it. I was there too.

“I need more savings.” Fear.
“The market’s not right.” Fear.
“What if I lose clients.” Fear.
“What if nobody takes me seriously without a big brand behind me.” Fear.

None of these are business reasons. They’re stories fear tells you to keep you where it’s comfortable. And they’ll keep sounding reasonable for as long as you let them, because fear is patient. It doesn’t need to win the argument. It just needs you to keep waiting.

The business is simple. People just make it complicated.

People make real money every single day doing exactly what you already know how to do, on their own terms, with none of the overhead you think you need. They’re not smarter than you. They didn’t wait for certainty. They just kept the business as simple as it actually is and started.

You don’t need a tenth reason to go solo. You had your two reasons the moment you had a network and a working knowledge of how a placement gets made. The desire you keep having isn’t random. It’s you wanting more, because deep down you know you can.

The only thing left to figure out is how long you’re willing to let fear keep the answer from you.

Christine
Founder, Remote Recruiter

If you're done waiting, subscribe to Remote Recruiter. I write about what it actually takes to go independent, no filler, no fluff, just what worked and what didn't.

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No pitch deck. No “I’ve been recruiting for X years.” No “I have access to top talent in your space.”

Just the right person for a problem they already had.

Here’s what happened.

I spotted a job posting. VP-level role. I knew exactly who fit it.

I had a candidate I believed in — someone with precisely the experience that opening required. So instead of sending a generic pitch to the CRO, I led with him.

I tracked down the CRO. The person who would actually feel the pain of that seat being empty. Reached out with one message: I have someone who can fill this gap.

No response.

I followed up a week later.

He asked for a redacted resume.

I sent it.

He wanted to meet the candidate.

That search is now on my desk. Fifty to sixty thousand dollars. Three weeks from first message to engaged client.

Here’s what I want you to hear.

Everyone has LinkedIn. Everyone has a database. That is not your edge anymore.

Your edge is showing up with a solution before someone has to go looking for one. A job posting tells you someone has a problem. Most recruiters respond to that posting with a pitch about themselves. The best move is to respond with a person.

Stop leading with who you are. Stop leading with your years of experience. Stop leading with your network.

Lead with their pain. Show up with the answer.

Find the opening. Find the person who fills it. Make the introduction before anyone else thinks to.

That is how you get a response. That is how you convert a cold message into a search. That is how you build a client from nothing in three weeks.

You already know how to recruit. Start using that skill on the front end.

Christine
Founder, Remote Recruiter

This is what independent recruiting actually looks like. No agency. No boss. No ceiling. Subscribe to Remote Recruiter and I'll show you how to build it.

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July 14, 2015. That’s the date I chose to leave agency life. Not because I had everything figured out. Because I had enough.

Enough of watching my billings build someone else’s empire. Enough of asking permission to take a Tuesday off. Enough of performing productivity inside four walls when I knew I could do this work from anywhere in the world.

Eleven years later, I still haven’t looked back.

Six figures billed. Every single year. From coffee shops in Mexico City, terraces in Italy, cities I chose on a whim. Time zones I picked myself. Places that had nothing to do with an office. Working half the hours. Keeping every dollar I made.

Here’s what I know now that I didn’t know then: the hardest part of going solo isn’t the business. It’s believing you’re allowed to build it differently.

I wish someone had walked me through what trusting yourself actually looked like in practice. Not the inspirational version. The operational one.

So that’s what I built.

To celebrate eleven years, I’m releasing the tools, guides, and frameworks I would have paid anything for in 2015. The step-by-step. The contracts. The scripts. The 30-day plan. The niche decision. The LinkedIn playbook for going independent.

Everything I pieced together over a decade, packaged so you don’t have to figure it out alone.

If you’re a recruiter sitting in an office right now thinking there has to be another way, there is. And it’s coming.

Stay close.

Love,

Christine
Founder, Remote Recruiter

Hit subscribe. This is not the one to miss.

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You need to work what’s already in front of you.

Here are the three ways I’ve kept myself busy for years running a solo practice. Tried. Tested. True.

1. Your clients are your best marketing team.

When you do good work, people talk. That’s not a maybe. That’s how this industry runs.

Your happy clients are sitting in boardrooms, on golf courses, at industry dinners, talking to peers who have the same hiring headaches they did before they found you. The referral is already happening. The only question is whether you’ve made it easy.

Ask. Directly. Not a vague “feel free to send anyone my way.” A real ask: Is there anyone in your network who could use this kind of support?

They are your free marketing. Use them.

2. Your candidates will become your clients.

I can’t count how many times a candidate I was working with came back to me on the other side of the table.

Some are already there. A VP you’re recruiting is already hiring for their team. A Director already owns headcount. Don’t overlook the seniority sitting right in front of you.

Others will get there. People get promoted, step into leadership, and suddenly own a headcount problem.

Either way, when that moment comes, they remember who actually took care of them.

Again. Ask. While you have them, while the relationship is warm, while they’re still in the process. Plant the seed. It pays off.

3. Take your best candidate to market.

Sometimes you’ve got a candidate sitting in your pipeline who is genuinely exceptional. Instead of waiting for a client to come to you, you take that person to market. You reach out to a handful of companies who should want to meet them. No job posting required.

You’re not giving anything away. You’re creating curiosity. The right company hears about the right person and suddenly they need to meet them. That conversation turns into a search. The search turns into a placement.

Companies don’t always know they need someone until the right person is right in front of them.

The pattern here is simple.

The easiest new business you’ll ever close is already in your orbit. A satisfied client. A candidate who’s about to level up. A standout person in your pipeline.

You don’t need more leads. You need to stop leaving the ones you have on the table.

Christine
Founder, Remote Recruiter

Real talk for recruiters building something of their own.

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In 2024, a CEO reached out to me.

He’d been working with Korn Ferry on executive searches. One of the biggest names in the industry. Global infrastructure and decades of brand equity.

He wasn’t happy.

So he found me. Solo. One person, no office, no team, no logo that anyone would recognize at a cocktail party.

I sent a few candidates. He was impressed. Not a little impressed — impressed enough to stop using Korn Ferry and start using me.

That’s the story. And it’s not a lucky story. It’s a structural one.

Here’s what you need to understand.

Clients don’t hire firms. They hire people. And when the person they hired gets replaced by a junior on the account, or gets too busy, or leaves — the relationship evaporates. The brand stays but the trust goes with the human.

Solo recruiters don’t have that problem.

When a client works with me, they get me. Every call. Every search. Every candidate. There’s no handoff. No wondering who’s actually working on their role. No account manager doing the talking while someone else does the sourcing. I own the outcome entirely, which means I’m invested entirely.

That’s not a pitch. That’s just the math of accountability.

The solo recruiters winning right now share one thing: they’re good at what they do.

Not good at building teams. Not good at managing overhead. Good at recruiting.

Whether you’re a generalist who can read a room and build relationships across industries, or a specialist who owns a vertical so deeply that clients come to you before they post anywhere — the common thread is competence and reputation. Those compound. Every search builds the next one. Every relationship extends the network.

The big office doesn’t do that. The flashy website doesn’t do that. You do that.

Companies pay for results. They pay recruiters who understand their business, deliver quality candidates, and make the process smooth. That work lives in the recruiter, not the letterhead.

And the market is moving our way.

The US staffing and recruiting industry represents $1.7 trillion today. Solopreneur numbers are surging toward 50 million domestically, over 150 million globally. The workforce is restructuring in real time — more companies building leaner internal teams, more executives moving between roles faster, more founders who never had an HR function and never wanted one.

They’re not calling the big firms first. They’re calling the person someone trusted enough to recommend.

The barrier to entry has never been lower. The potential upside has never been higher.

If you’re still inside an agency thinking you need the brand to be credible — ask yourself: who are clients actually calling? Who are candidates actually texting at 9pm with a question they’d never ask through an official intake form?

It’s not the firm. It’s never been the firm.

It’s you.

And you can take that with you.

If you’re ready to stop building someone else’s reputation and start building your own, Remote Recruiter is where that conversation lives. Subscribe below.

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That is not nostalgia. That is neuroscience. Memory forms around sensory experience. Trust builds through physical presence. Connection deepens when human beings share actual space.

No AI can give you that. Neither can Zoom.

Over the past month I have attended multiple events in Toronto. I live nomadically. I run a fully remote business. And I still make it a priority to get into rooms where real connection can happen. Because every time I do, something forms that no algorithm could have engineered. It reminded me of something recruiters are quietly forgetting.

Here is what I want you to sit with.

Everyone went digital. The pitch decks moved to Loom. The coffee meetings moved to Zoom. The relationship building moved to LinkedIn DMs and AI-personalized outreach sequences that fool exactly no one.

And in the process, an entire lane emptied out.

The recruiter who still gets in front of people — at events, over dinner, in a client’s office — is now operating with almost no competition. Not because in-person is old school. Because it is the only channel where the full human experience is available. Where someone can feel your energy, read your confidence, laugh at something real with you, and decide in their gut that they trust you.

AI can write the outreach. It can rank the candidates. It can summarize the debrief.

It cannot be in the room.

That is your edge. And right now, it is remarkably uncrowded.

Show up. Get in the room. Let the senses do what screens cannot.

The recruiters who figure this out first will not just be ahead of AI.

They will be playing a different game entirely.

Christine
Founder, Remote Recruiter

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AI is sourcing candidates. AI is screening resumes. AI is scheduling interviews. AI is writing job descriptions, sending follow-ups, and ranking applicants before you’ve had your morning coffee.

The posts are everywhere. And if you let them, they will get in your head.

Here’s what I want to say to all of it: ignore it.

Not because AI isn’t real. It is. Not because it isn’t changing recruiting. It is.

But if you are doing these five things, AI is not a threat. It is a filter — removing everyone who was never really competing with you anyway.

1. You build real relationships

I have a client I have been working with since 2009. That is 17 years.

We are so bonded he does not think to use anyone else. More than that — every time he joins a new company, he fights to bring me in. Regardless of their policy. Regardless of who they have on their preferred vendor list.

That is not a professional contact. That is trust built over years of showing up, delivering, and being someone worth fighting for.

AI can manage a CRM. It cannot build that.

2. You hunt. You don’t source.

This year alone, three of my placements were with candidates who did not have an updated resume or an optimized LinkedIn profile.

They were not on any AI-generated list. They were not in any database. They were not findable by any algorithm.

I found them because I know how to hunt. I know how to have a conversation with someone who is not looking and make them look. That is a skill. That is a craft.

Posting and praying is not recruiting. Sourcing from a database is not recruiting. Going and finding the person who does not know they are your next placement — that is headhunting.

3. You read the room

Last month I sat across from the founders of a company that had just been acquired by one of my clients.

There was no job description that could have told me what I learned in that room. Their energy. The way they worked together. The dynamic between them. The things they valued that they would never think to put in a brief.

I left that meeting knowing exactly the kind of person who would thrive in that culture. Not from a checklist. From feeling it.

That is not something you can prompt an AI to do.

4. You advise. You don’t just fulfill.

A client of mine wanted to make an offer to an executive. Perfect on paper. Strong interview. They were ready to move.

I talked them out of it.

That was a $90,000 fee I walked away from. And I walked away from it because I knew in my gut it was the wrong hire. The fit was not there in the way that matters — the way that only shows up when you have been doing this long enough to trust what you feel.

My client was shocked. Then grateful. Then closer to me than ever before.

You cannot buy that kind of trust. You cannot automate it either.

5. You manage the mess

The process is never as clean as it looks on a flowchart.

Earlier this year I was working a search where I knew my candidate had three other offers on the table. I knew what mattered to him. I knew what would make him choose my clients over the others.

I kept my client informed at every step. Not just updated — informed. There is a difference. I made sure they understood exactly what it would take to win this person, so that when the offer came, it came right.

It was accepted on the spot.

That is not luck. That is managing the humans, the timeline, the emotions, and the variables all at once — with full transparency on every side.

No AI is holding that together.

The noise on LinkedIn is just noise.

The recruiters who will struggle are the ones who were already replaceable — posting jobs, screening resumes, moving paper.

If you are hunting. If you are building real relationships. If you are reading rooms and advising clients and managing the mess when it gets complicated — you were never going to be replaced.

You were always doing the work that actually mattered.

That does not change.

Christine
Founder, Remote Recruiter

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Recruiters were finished. Job boards were going to democratize hiring so completely that companies would never need a middleman again. Candidates would post their resumes. Employers would post their jobs. The market would sort itself out.

By the time I started my career, LinkedIn had already arrived. And that was the wave I walked into — the one everyone said would finally finish us. A platform so powerful, so connected, so good at surfacing talent that the recruiter was officially redundant.

Here’s what actually happened.

We became their biggest customers.

The platform that was supposed to eliminate us turned into our most powerful sourcing tool. The technology that was going to replace the recruiter made the best recruiters more powerful than ever. Every wave of disruption that was meant to flatten this industry ended up sorting it — washing out the transactional and elevating the relational.

Now it’s AI.

And the headlines are back. Recruitment is dead. AI will source, screen, shortlist, and close. The whole function will be automated. You, specifically, are no longer necessary.

I’ve heard this before. So have you.

What’s different this time isn’t the threat. It’s the speed. AI is moving faster than Monster did, faster than LinkedIn did, and the noise around it is deafening. I understand why people are rattled. I’d be lying if I said the landscape isn’t shifting in real ways.

But here’s what I keep coming back to.

The recruiters who got wiped out by job boards weren’t replaced by technology. They were replaced by their own model. They were already operating transactionally — posting and praying, moving volume, treating candidates like inventory. The platform just made that model cheaper to run without them.

The recruiters who thrived? They were doing something the platform couldn’t touch. They knew their clients at a level that went beyond the job description. They knew their candidates as humans, not profiles. They had relationships that took years to build and couldn’t be scraped, automated, or replicated by an algorithm.

That hasn’t changed. It’s just more obvious now.

Think about what’s actually happening on the AI frontier.

Companies are deploying AI to send outreach at scale. Candidates are using AI to apply at scale. In some corners of this industry, we are rapidly approaching a world where AI is talking to AI — automated messages landing in inboxes managed by automated filters, with no human in the room on either side.

That is not the future of great hiring. That is the commoditization of bad hiring made faster.

The executive who needs to trust someone with a confidential search is not going to hand that to a chatbot. The candidate considering leaving a role they’ve been in for a decade is not going to have that conversation with an algorithm. The relationships that matter in this business — the ones built on discretion, intuition, and genuine care — are not automatable.

They never were.

The AI wave isn’t going to eliminate the human recruiter. It’s going to make the human recruiter who was never really human in their work finally visible. And it’s going to make the ones who always led with relationships almost impossible to compete with.

I left agency life in 2015. People thought I was walking away from stability. What I was actually doing was betting on the thing I knew AI could never replicate: the trust I’d spent years earning with the people on both sides of every search.

That bet has paid off every year since.

If you’re reading this and you’re still inside a system that measures you in volume — sends, submittals, call metrics — ask yourself what you’re actually building. Because when the next wave hits, and there will always be a next wave, the only thing that holds is relationships.

Not your database. Not your tech stack. Not your ATS.

The people who know you, trust you, and call you first.

That is the business worth building. And there has never been a better time to build it.

Christine
Founder, Remote Recruiter

I write for recruiters who are done with the volume game and ready to build something real, on their own terms. Subscribe below.

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You just closed a placement that will change your quarterly numbers.

The fee lands. You exhale. Maybe you celebrate. You deserve it. You worked for it.

And then, quietly, almost invisibly, you stop.

Not completely. Not obviously. But the BD calls get lighter. The follow-ups get pushed. The outreach that was daily becomes weekly. You tell yourself you’ve earned a beat. And you have.

But your pipeline doesn’t care what you earned last month.

1. The coast begins before you notice it

I’ve been here. A placement closes and the immediate feeling isn’t just relief. It’s permission. Permission to breathe, to slow down, to stop pushing for a minute.

The problem is that “a minute” has a way of stretching. A week of lighter activity becomes two. Two becomes a month. And by the time you look up, the pipeline you neglected during the search is thinner than you realized.

It never feels like coasting. It feels like balance.

2. The search took more than your time

While you were heads-down delivering, something else was happening.

The relationship you meant to nurture went cold. The potential client you were building rapport with moved on. The candidate who trusted you is now working with someone else. You weren’t being neglectful. You were doing your job.

Independent recruiting is a presence game. Go quiet for a few weeks and you don't just lose momentum. You hand it to someone else.

3. The math nobody says out loud

An $80K placement is extraordinary. There’s no other word for it.

But spread across 12 months, it’s $6,600 a month. That’s not a lifestyle business. That’s one great moment in an otherwise inconsistent year.

The recruiters who build something sustainable aren’t always the ones with the biggest single fees. They’re the ones who never let the rhythm fully stop. Two placements a quarter at $30K each will outperform one massive fee followed by three quiet months.

Consistency isn’t the unsexy version of success. It is success.

4. Coasting is an identity problem, not a discipline problem

Here’s what I’ve learned about the coast phase. It’s rarely about being lazy.

It’s about a subconscious belief that you’ve proved something. That the big placement is evidence you’ve made it. That you can afford to exhale a little longer than you should.

The lifestyle business doesn’t run on proof. It runs on protection. Protecting the rhythm. Protecting the pipeline. Protecting the version of this business you built so carefully when you first went out on your own.

The $80K month is a result. It is not a signal to downshift.

5. What consistent actually looks like

It’s not grinding. It’s not being available 24/7. It’s not the frantic energy of an agency floor.

It’s never fully stopping.

One BD conversation a day. One relationship check-in a week. One piece of outreach that keeps you warm in a market that forgets quickly. It doesn’t have to be much. It just has to be continuous.

The recruiters who last aren’t the most talented. They’re the most consistent. They celebrate the big month and then show up the next morning like it didn’t happen.

The business has no memory. Only momentum.

The question worth asking after every placement:

What did I let go quiet while I was busy closing this? And when am I getting back to it?

That habit alone will protect everything you’ve built.

Christine
Founder, Remote Recruiter

Remote Recruiter is a weekly read for recruiters who are done building someone else's business and ready to build their own.

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I’m sitting with that for a second before I pack my bags and head to Toronto for a visit, then make my way to Mexico City in June. After that I’ll feel my way into it. Maybe somewhere new. Maybe somewhere familiar. That’s kind of the whole point.

This is what nearly 11 years of running an independent recruiting business looks like.

Not a corner office. Not a commute. Not a city I landed in by default. Nearly two decades in this industry, the last 11 years built on my own. A life designed around the places that actually fill me up.

Tulum this season gave me everything.

Morning movement, yoga, calisthenics, training outdoors with the jungle around me. Fresh fruit. Real food. Sound baths. Cenotes. Lagoons. The beach. People who are intentional about how they live, what they eat, how they move, what they build. My creative energy this season was off the charts.

That’s not a coincidence.

Nobody talks about location as a performance variable. We talk about morning routines, productivity systems, mindset. But where you physically are shapes all of it. The light. The air. The people around you. The pace of the place. It’s all input. And you’re either curating that input or ignoring it.

Most people never stop to ask the question because they never actually chose their location in the first place. They inherited it. A city they grew up in, a job that anchored them somewhere, a lease they just kept renewing. They work from wherever they ended up and wonder why something feels off. It’s not random. Your environment is either feeding you or draining you. Most people just never stop long enough to notice.

Here’s what I know after doing this for a long time. When I’m aligned with my life, my work is better. Not marginally better. Noticeably, undeniably better. Because I’m not depleted. I’m not grinding. I’m not white-knuckling my way through a week just to recover on a weekend. I’m living in a place that makes me feel like myself, and that version of me is a better recruiter.

People ask how I do this. The honest answer is I built a business specifically so I could.

I left agency life in July 2015. Nearly 11 years ago. I didn’t have a roadmap. I had a conviction that there was another way. Fully remote. Fully independent. Fully on my own terms. It took trust. It took time. It took figuring out what I actually needed to do my best work.

Tulum is part of that answer. So is Toronto. So is Mexico City. So is whatever comes after that.

The nomadic life isn’t about being everywhere. It’s about being somewhere that matters, on purpose. That intentionality carries into every search I run, every client conversation, every candidate I place.

You can’t fake that kind of presence. You have to build a life that creates it.

Another season wrapped. Another one beginning.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Christine
Founder, Remote Recruiter

If you're tired of defaulting into a life you didn't choose, you'll feel at home here. I write about independent recruiting, location freedom, and what it means to build a business around a life you love. Subscribe and let's go.

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That recruiter used to sit exactly where you’re sitting.

They came from agency. Or they came from corporate. Some only ever sold. Some only ever sourced. They didn’t all look the same and they didn’t all need the same things to get there. But they all made it.

This is what it looked like for each of them.

The Agency Full-Desk Recruiter

This is often the one closest to ready. They already know how to run the whole operation because they’ve been doing it. Prospecting, pitching, sourcing, placing, invoicing. Every single thing.

What they need help with is permission. Permission to quit. Permission to believe that the clients they’ve built relationships with over years aren’t actually the agency’s clients. Permission to charge 30% because they’ve always been worth it, even when the agency was pocketing the difference.

The hardest part of coaching them isn’t the business. It’s the leaving.

The Sales-Side Recruiter

The one who can close a client in a single call, build a book of business in a new market, and charm anyone into a partnership. But ask them to sit down and source a shortlist and they go quiet. They’ve always had someone else do that part. Going independent means doing the whole thing, and that gap terrifies them more than they’ll admit.

The sales-side recruiter already knows how to find people who weren’t looking for them. They do it every time they open a new client. Cold outreach, relationship building, following a lead until it opens. That’s sourcing. They just never called it that.

What they need is to stop treating it like a different skill and start treating it like a familiar one. The mechanics of finding candidates can be learned. The instinct they already have.

The Recruitment-Side Recruiter

Almost the mirror image. They can find anyone. Passive candidates, hidden talent, people who weren’t even looking. The Unicorn Hunter in every one of them is strong. But business development? Cold outreach? Pricing their own work? That’s where they stall.

They don’t need to become a salesperson. They’ve been selling their entire career. Every time they convinced a hiring manager to move fast on a candidate, every time they got a skeptical account manager to trust their shortlist, that was a pitch. They just never had to find the client themselves.

What they need to understand is that finding a client isn’t different. It’s the same conversation, aimed in a new direction. They already know how to solve a hiring problem. Now they just lead with it.

The Internal Recruiter

They’ve spent years inside a company, hiring across functions, partnering with leadership, sitting in rooms where decisions got made. They’ve done work that would have cost the organization six figures if they’d picked up the phone and called an agency. They just never saw it that way.

These are often the ones who struggle most with fees. Not because they don’t deserve them. Because they’ve never charged one. Their entire frame of reference is salary, not invoice.

What they need is to stop pricing themselves like an employee and start pricing themselves like the expert they already are. The expertise didn’t change when they left. Only the paperwork did.

Every single one of these people wants the same thing.

They want to wake up and decide what they’re working on. They want to pick their clients, set their terms, and do the work they’re actually good at without someone else’s quota attached to it. They want to stop building someone else’s business and start building their own.

And every single one of them already has what it takes to get there. A network built over years without knowing what it was for. Relationships that make the first client feel like a conversation, not a cold call. Expertise that doesn’t disappear the moment they hand in their notice.

They just need different things to unlock it.

Some need help with the quit. Some need help structuring the business. Some need a niche, some need a fee, some need a search brief template and a contractor agreement so they stop operating on a handshake.

The starting point is different for everyone. The destination is always the same.

Freedom, on their own terms.

Christine
Founder, Remote Recruiter

If you recognize yourself in one of these, you’re closer than you think. Remote Recruiter is where we figure out the rest.

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