Amplifying Recruitment - Learn, Grow, Lead

About Amplifying Recruitment - Learn, Grow, Lead

The podcast dedicated to supporting ambitious recruitment business owners like you. Our mission is to tackle the most pressing challenges in the recruitment industry and provide actionable insights to help you elevate your business to new heights.

Publisher

Jamie Burrows

Category

business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

28 Dec 2024

Latest episode

5 May 2026

Latest episodes

36 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   5 May 2026

   Four Steps to Building an International Freelance Business with Carl Chinnapen

   Every recruitment business owner who's ever pulled a freelance role in a new country has done the same thing, jumped straight to the margin calculator and started dreaming. Very few have stopped to ask whether they can actually get the money in and out. In this episode, Jamie Burrows sits down with Carl Chinnapen, co-founder of EWI Global Talent Solutions, to break down the four pillars behind building an international freelance recruitment business. Carl has spent 25 years in recruitment and runs EWI's international freelance operation mobilising staff to over 100 countries across energy, infrastructure, and mission-critical sectors. EWI sits at around 80 people globally, part of the Engage Group, and Carl's built the playbook for how it actually works at scale. He starts with cash, the thing most firms get wrong first. Clients paying in 90 to 150 days, FX exposure eating your margin, banking restrictions you didn't know existed. He's watched recruitment businesses choke because they put out 100 contractors without thinking about who's going to pay them and when. From there he gets into the business plan staying ruthlessly focused on specific clients and markets, hiring for language and local market fit, co-designing business rules with the team rather than dictating them, and keeping recruiters in their lane so they're selling, not chasing purchase orders in Argentina. He talks about EWI's "win, learn, change" mantra and why you can't let a failing desk run for months when the cash exposure is this real. And he makes the case for finding a mentor the industry's shifted, senior operators are more open than ever, and tapping into that network before you enter a new market will save you from mistakes you didn't know were coming. The upside is where it gets interesting. Freelance turnover makes clients stickier, opens the door to cross-selling perm and new locations, and makes your business worth significantly more than a pure-play perm operation where the consultant leaves and the fees leave with them. If international freelance is on your agenda, this is the episode that tells you what most people skip. Follow Amplifying Recruitment wherever you get your podcasts.

2. 

   21 Apr 2026

   AI for Recruiters: The Three Shifts You Can't Ignore with Tim Bennett

   Most recruitment businesses are still using the free version of ChatGPT to write job ads and calling it an AI strategy. Meanwhile, their candidates are running automated tools overnight to fire off a thousand applications before breakfast. That gap between what recruiters think AI is and what it's already doing to their market is where the real disruption is happening. In this episode, Jamie Burrows sits down with Tim Bennett, founder of Powerhouse Digital, an AI training and chatbot business that's been working with recruitment firms including parts of the S3 ecosystem to raise AI literacy from board level down. Tim also runs a digital marketing agency that's been operating for over fifteen years, and he's spent the last year deep inside the recruitment industry helping businesses understand what's actually changing and what to do about it. Tim lays out three shifts he sees reshaping recruitment over the next twelve months. The first is the move from transactional recruiter to strategic advisor, AI can now handle the repetitive, process-heavy work, which means the recruiter's value has to come from somewhere else. The second is the hiring funnel getting squeezed from both sides candidates automating applications at scale on one end, recruiters drowning in volume without the workflows to manage it on the other. And the third is the AI literacy gap itself, which Tim sees as the biggest risk of all. Most firms don't have an AI policy, most teams haven't been trained beyond surface-level prompting, and the businesses that close that gap first will pull ahead fast. He walks through the practical side too. His CRAFT prompting framework Context, Role, Action and Attributes, Facts and Figures, Target Outcome is a simple model that dramatically improves output quality from any LLM. He talks about why recruiters should be using paid tools rather than free tiers, how to set up projects and prompt libraries inside platforms like Copilot 365, and why tools like Notebook LM and Perplexity are better starting points than most people realise for market mapping and research. He also flags the risks that nobody's talking about shadow AI inside businesses, bias in CV screening, and the fact that there's been no test case yet under the EU AI Act to force recruitment firms into action on governance. The message is clear: AI isn't a bubble, the investment behind it is too large for that. The firms that treat it as a shiny distraction will get left behind. The ones that build literacy, put policy in place, and start using structured prompts as a daily habit will compound that advantage quickly. Tim suggests starting with just thirty minutes a day across a ten-person team over twelve months, that adds up to something enormous. If AI adoption is on your agenda but you're not sure where to start, this episode gives you the framework. Follow Amplifying Recruitment wherever you get your podcasts.

3. 

   31 Mar 2026

   Building a Publicly Listed, Bitcoin-Backed Search Firm with Scott Ellam

   Scott Ellam didn't fall into recruitment. He chose it, deliberately, after watching recruitment company owners spend money in the bars he worked at during university in Leeds. By 24, he'd started Spencer Riley. By 25, he'd tracked down a business owner through their Portuguese holiday villa, got invited onto a yacht called "Loose Change," and was offered a role with a company plane.But the real story starts in 2020. After four years studying the history of money from Bretton Woods to the Nixon shock to the slow erosion of purchasing power Scott switched his company's balance sheet to Bitcoin. He bought through a 75% drawdown from $61,000 to $16,000, accumulated consistently, and by December 2025 had taken the business public on the Aquis Exchange with 52 Bitcoin on the balance sheet, a $7 million market cap, and a 120% return on holdings.The model solves two problems Scott sees across executive recruitment. First, high-performing consultants earn big commissions but save nothing for the long term inflation eats the cash before it compounds. XCE offers performance-based share options in a publicly listed company where 50% of share value tracks Bitcoin exposure. Second, recruitment business owners have no clean exit. Private equity rarely touches perm exec search, competitors don't buy competitors, and the government just pulled the tax advantages on Employee Ownership Trusts. XCE offers an acquisition vehicle where owners keep their brand, their team, and their ethos but get access to capital markets and long-term equity in a growing group.Scott also breaks down Bitcoin in plain terms: why it's different from crypto, why mathematical scarcity matters, why confiscation resistance is more important than most people realise, and why he believes the 200-week moving average tells you everything you need to know about where the asset is heading.Whether you're a recruiter thinking about long-term wealth, a business owner quietly wondering what your exit looks like, or just someone who's heard about Bitcoin but never understood the actual thesis this one's worth your time.

Who has been a guest on Amplifying Recruitment - Learn, Grow, Lead

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Saeed Bor
• Jo Major
• Amy Williams
• Leo Harrison
• Chris Worden

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Spotify

5.0 / 5

3 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 18 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

24

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

32

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Guest appearances

Does not typically book guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.