Why do some recruitment firms consistently produce top billers while others struggle with slow ramp-up and constant handholding?
It’s easy to blame the talent market. To say, “We just need better recruiters.”
Larissa Gerlach’s story suggests something else.
Her first year in recruitment, she made $40,000. She remembers sitting in a meeting with her regional manager and saying she couldn’t keep going at that income level.
His response was simple: “You’re doing the right things. It will happen.”
At the time, that didn’t feel reassuring. It felt like survival.
But she stayed. And what changed her trajectory wasn’t luck, a hot market, or a breakthrough placement. It was the standards she worked to every day.
Larissa is the founder of Vibrant Talent Group and an associate coach at Recruitment Coach. Before launching her own firm, she became the fastest-growing salesperson a private equity-backed recruiting firm had ever seen – so much so that the CFO emailed her directly to ask what she was doing. The answer led her to build and run the company’s national sales training programme across 25 offices. She’s trained salespeople who went on to bill over $2 million a year.
“Investing in somebody’s training will immediately impact your bottom line. If we could all hire somebody that’s going to bring in $2 million of revenue, I’m sure we would all hire immediately.”
In this episode, you’ll hear what it really takes to develop high-performing recruiters. Most owners assume that because someone understands the theory, they can execute it live. Those are very different things.
Episode Outline and Highlights
- [03:56] From fashion sales to recruitment after the 2009 recession
- [08:37] The $40,000 first year and the meeting where she nearly quit
- [12:35] Why most recruiters struggle in year one and what actually starts to click
- [22:15] The 200-calls-per-week discipline that separated her from everyone else
- [25:25] “You always heard Larissa’s voice” – building momentum through visible activity
- [26:07] The CFO email that led to building a national sales training programme
- [28:17] What the playbook actually looked like – from three-ring binder to full LMS
- [35:51] Why daily role plays create elite performers
- [41:38] Why role plays aren’t just for new starters – they should run your entire career
- [44:14] The deliberate moves she made before launching her own firm
- [47:41] Why Vibrant Talent works retained and RPO only from day one
- [1:05:49] The three reasons most founders struggle to train their teams
- [1:10:29] Why group cohorts outperform one-on-one onboarding
The Year Most Recruiters Quietly Drift
When Larissa talks about her first year, she doesn’t sugarcoat it.
“That first six months, that first year – it’s really hard.”
Most recruiters enter the industry thinking it’s straightforward. Find candidates. Match them to jobs. Close deals. Then they discover the reality. Rejection. Objections. Delayed gratification. Human psychology is layered on top of performance pressure.
The company’s expectation was 200 calls per week. Larissa planned for 250. Her daily target was 50 calls before she even opened her inbox. Emails came later. Admin got pushed to the weekend, so weekdays stayed focused on revenue-generating activity.
“I always overplanned my days. You put in the reps. Everything else just comes.”
That’s not motivational language. That’s muscle memory.
By year two, the results began to compound. By year three, she hit the president’s club. Not because she suddenly became more talented. Because she stayed long enough – and worked deliberately enough – for the activity to show up as results.
For agency owners, this is where the reflection starts. When someone on your team struggles in year one, is it a capability issue? Or is it the absence of reinforced structure?
“You Always Heard Larissa’s Voice”
When Larissa moved into business development at her second firm, she didn’t wait to be told what to do.
She already knew the metrics. She’d sat on the recruiting desk for years and watched her sales managers work. When she made the switch, she applied the same standards she’d always held herself to.
Her recruiters knew it too. When she walked toward your desk, it meant she’d worked hard to bring that job in – and she expected it to be filled.
“You never wanted to see me coming to your desk. You knew I was going to be hard on you. And if you hadn’t submitted candidates, I was going to sit down and help you find them.”
A regional manager put it plainly: when you opened the front door, you always heard Larissa’s voice. Always on the phone. That visibility created energy across the office. When recruiters heard she was working for them, they were motivated to bring in stronger candidates.
Then the CFO emailed: “What are you doing? This is incredible.”
Her first instinct was to say she just worked hard. But when leadership looked closely, they saw something repeatable. They asked her to design and run the firm’s national sales training programme.
What the training actually looked like
She didn’t build a course. She built a system.
It started as a three-ring binder and eventually became a full LMS, with modules covering how to plan a business development day, time-block a calendar, structure calls and follow-ups, and overcome objections at every stage. She ran intensive three-day boot camps for new hires. Then she got on a plane every other week to a different office, training bag packed: headset, flip chart markers, printed objection scripts.
She’d sit beside people on live calls. Pause mid-objection to debrief. Go out on client visits, prep beforehand, and debrief after. And every single morning, the team started with role plays.
“There’s a reason they do that. There’s a reason it worked.”
Why Role Plays Are Non-Negotiable
Most recruiters hate role plays. They feel awkward, artificial and uncomfortable.
That’s exactly the point.
“The job is uncomfortable. Role-plays lower your inhibitions and help you get comfortable being uncomfortable. That’s part of the value.”
Reading objection scripts is a starting point. Larissa printed every potential pushback she could think of and pinned them around her cubicle at her second firm – she’d glance across mid-call until the responses became instinct. But she knew that reading bullet points wasn’t a long-term solution. Role plays are. They build the response into muscle memory before the live situation arrives.
Role play 2.0
Larissa separates basic objection practice from what she calls role play 2.0 – the harder conversations that come once a recruiter has found their feet. Retainer conversations. Exclusivity pushback. Candidates stalling at offer stage. These aren’t first-week objections. But if you only ever practise them once they’ve already gone wrong, you’re always one step behind.
And it doesn’t stop when you’re experienced. Objections evolve. Technology changes how clients and candidates communicate.
“We should be practising our entire lives. I’m never going to be perfect.”
The Three Reasons Training Never Gets Done
Larissa coaches agency owners through Recruitment Coach. She sees the same pattern repeatedly. Owners who believe in training. Owners who know their team isn’t developing fast enough. Owners who still can’t make it happen consistently.
Three reasons come up every time.
First time. Training new hires pulls you off your desk at exactly the moment your overheads are rising. Even owners who are genuinely good at mentoring struggle to protect the hours.
Second, content. Most founders haven’t spent years building structured training materials. Creating that from scratch while billing, winning clients, and running operations is overwhelming. The result is ad hoc sessions, variable quality, and inconsistent hiring practices.
Third, confidence. This one doesn’t get said out loud enough. “Most founders, honestly, don’t necessarily feel confident to do training for their teams. They sort of feel like, well, I’m still figuring it out.”
So training gets deprioritised. Not because owners don’t care. Because it feels like a big, vague undertaking with no obvious starting point.
Every month, a new hire isn’t billing, and has $20,000 to $30,000 in unrealised revenue. That’s not a minor inefficiency. It’s a compounding drag on the business felt most acutely in the firms trying hardest to grow.
The recruiter training programme Larissa now leads at Recruitment Coach is built around group cohorts, structured over 18 weeks, covering both business development and recruiting fundamentals. The group setting matters – learning alongside peers from different firms produces better results than being the only new hire in a small office with an owner who’s already stretched.
“I really believe in the power of the group setting. You can learn a lot from people who are in a similar boat, even if they’re recruiting in completely different sectors.”
For details, visit recruitmentcoach.com/training.
If your team isn’t billing at the level you believe they’re capable of, this conversation will give you something concrete to look at – and maybe something you need to chang
