The Placement Loop Podcast: Interview with Aaron, Founder of Search Station
Host: Brian Guest: Aaron (Founder, Search Station) Topics: Entrepreneurship, the staffing & recruiting industry, AI in recruiting, market insights
Introduction (0:00)
Brian: Welcome back everyone to the Placement Loop podcast. I'm your host, Brian. For those of you joining us for the first time, we talk about business and entrepreneurship journeys, the struggles within the staffing, recruiting, and consulting space and how we're solving them these days, and market insights on where consulting and staffing are headed. I have a wonderful guest with me today, and I'm so excited to have him on. Mr. Aaron.
Aaron: Yes, Brian, that's how to pronounce my name.
Brian: Perfect. Excellent. Welcome aboard, sir. Thanks for being on.
Aaron: It's my pleasure.
Brian: Tell us a little more about your background and how you came about founding Search Station.
Background & Journey to the US (0:54)
Aaron: Thank you for having me, Brian; it's a pleasure. A little about me: I'm originally from Nigeria, born in England but raised in Nigeria. I moved to the US in 2016. Before that, I'd already worked for many recruiting agencies back in Africa, across major industries: oil and gas, engineering, accounting.
When the move to the US came, I decided to stick with what I know: recruiting. I got my first US recruiting job with a company called AMN Healthcare, the number one healthcare recruiting agency in the US. I worked for them for about eight years. In total I bring about 15 to 20 years of recruiting experience, with eight years specific to healthcare.
The Point of No Return (2:07)
Brian: What was your point of no return into becoming an entrepreneur?
Aaron: Entrepreneurship has always been around me. My mom was an entrepreneur, my dad was an entrepreneur. I grew up knowing that one day I would be one too. My parents wanted us to have a great education, but they always said education can take you only so far; being an entrepreneur can take you where you really want to be.
When I moved to the US, I saw how big the industry was. I thought: if I could learn from the biggest player, that would give me the foundation to get into the market and compete. The turning point was my first day at AMN. From the parking lot, there were Corvettes and Ferraris. I thought, "Wow, these guys are making a lot of money. I need to be on this journey."
Recruiting as an industry doesn't get the recognition it deserves. Everyone says they want to be a doctor, an engineer, or work in IT. You don't hear anyone say "I want to be a recruiter." But if an establishment as big as AMN does nothing but recruiting and is a Fortune 500 company making that kind of money, that should inspire you. And it inspired me.
Recruiting as an Underrated Craft (4:06)
Brian: Recruiting is one of those things we don't get enough credit for. We're essentially mercenaries: we find the right talent for the role and we get paid for it. Usually a quick transaction, sometimes over an extended contract. You appreciate it once you're in the trenches, and once you've worked with a recruiter who's actually delivered for you.
As a client, hiring a recruiter saves time and money: you don't have to bring on someone full-time. And recruiters have more skin in the game; we make money by actually delivering the candidate.
Aaron: Absolutely.
Brian: For a lot of folks it's hard to go solo, because putting yourself out there, having conversations, getting your name out, setting up meetings with clients and hiring managers, is its own skill. If you have that as a solo recruiter, you end up making a whole ton of money.
Aaron: Absolutely.
The Economics of Recruiting (5:49)
Brian: I worked at two large businesses. I only recruited for six months, then moved into business development and sales for four years. What I realized is that we make companies a lot of money. As a BD person, you bring in the contracts, and each new client has four or five roles. But there are so many cuts that go to the company: the backend, the office. That's where going out on your own can become a no-brainer.
Aaron: The industry standard is 15% of the annual salary of the placement. In healthcare, an average physician makes about $250,000 a year. 15% of that is what you bring into the company as revenue.
Brian: But guess how much goes to the recruiter. Even accounting for their salary, it's peanuts.
Aaron: The salary of a recruiter is peanuts compared to that. And one recruiter might make three, four, five placements a month or quarter; that's a lot of revenue. Now, it isn't easy to set up your own shop; there's a lot that goes into it. Not everyone can be an entrepreneur, but I do believe the commission percentage has to go up.
The "Stepping Stone" Problem (7:59)
Brian: I use restaurants as a comparison; I worked in them for 15 years. Restaurants and recruiting are stepping-stone jobs for a lot of people. These companies are hiring sales and marketing graduates as junior recruiters to do bulk-volume hires and see who makes it. Meanwhile the senior folks end up working the hardest-to-fill reqs because they're the experts, which isn't always fair to them either. That's where a lot of people try to become solo recruiters, and it's hard. Many don't make it and go back to W2.
Aaron: The pressure is real, especially in today's economy where the cost of everything is rising. It's hard to stay above water as an entrepreneur, particularly if you don't come in with enough capital. I've felt the pressure to go back to W2 employment, but I'm committed: this is my life's dream and goal.
The level of commitment has to be there, along with some financial commitment. But you also have to know what you're doing. Junior recruiters get the easier reqs and hit the phones every day. Senior recruiters work the hard-to-fills because they know the industry and the game. One call could bring a placement.
Brian: You don't have to make 10, 20, 100 calls. One call, one text, can make a placement.
Aaron: Exactly. Senior recruiters have a better chance of making it as a solo entrepreneur. If you're one or two years in, learn as much as you can. I spent eight years at AMN, and it was like going to school, like a college degree. I learned healthcare from the bottom to the top, how to have sales conversations, how to speak the language of healthcare providers. Now I feel confident I can run my own shop. I wouldn't encourage anyone to rush, but if you can get into it, it's profitable in the long run.
Betting on Yourself (11:28)
Brian: You start with no real certainty about the future, but you're confident in yourself, and that's the biggest piece. It makes you more committed, because you're doing it for yourself and betting on yourself against a steady paycheck. That's the hardest pill for some people to swallow. But I'd say: just do it.
Aaron: Absolutely. The fear of the unknown is very real. I saw a quote yesterday, and I can't remember the source, but it was something like: those who don't risk going far will never know how far they could go. If you wanted to walk from Texas to Alabama, you'd have to take the risk. If you never take it, you never know what's possible. There will be trials and tribulations, but you have to be committed.
The Value of Mentorship (12:54)
Aaron: One thing that has helped us is having a few mentors. I have friends who've been entrepreneurs longer than I have, and they give me tips and tricks. When I have a challenge, I go to them; they've probably faced it before. There are also a lot of mentorship programs: the SBA has them, and big companies run internal entrepreneurship programs. I know Lockheed Martin has one. A good mentor, successful in any industry, can guide you. I have a few and I call them every day.
Brian: Mentorship is one of those things people don't appreciate until it's gone. A good mentor gives you advice you need even when it's not what you want to hear. Entrepreneurship can get very lonely; you don't yet have the credit, trust, or authority to hang with the big boys. Mentors and close family are the people rooting for you. Keep them around.
Aaron: I totally agree. Everyone needs a mentor, even a recruiter on a W2. At AMN I leaned on senior recruiters with 10 to 15 years of experience when I had objections to overcome. Those little tricks are the ones I now pass on to our newly employed recruiters.
AI in Recruiting: Where It Misses (16:38)
Brian: Pivoting to the market: AI is basically a commodity now. When someone says "AI," it could mean anything. Where do you think AI is genuinely helping recruiting and staffing, and where is it missing the point?
Aaron: I'll start with where it misses: the human perspective. As much as engineers try to make the engine as human as possible, it still misses that human touch. Recruitment is human resources; it's in the name. People say AI will take our jobs; some jobs will be lost, but not all. Recruiting will still thrive. But that human element, the empathy, the emotional feel, the connection, is hard to replace.
AI in Recruiting: Where It Helps (18:26)
Aaron: On how it helps, that's huge. We're in conversations right now about bringing in an AI recruiter. There are third-party products, but we also have an in-house developer, so we're exploring something more bespoke.
The idea is to have the AI recruiter make the first-touch calls. Say we're looking for a nurse practitioner in Oklahoma. The AI calls all the nurse practitioners in Oklahoma and asks three to five qualifying questions:
"Hi, Miss Jane, I'm Judy, AI recruiter for Search Station. We have a job at Mercy Hospital in Oklahoma. Are you interested?"
If yes, it asks the next question, "Are you board certified?", then "Do you have an active license in the state?", and if yes, it passes them to a human recruiter. It handles the initial three-to-five-question screening.
A human can only make so many dials a day. When I started, I made about 120 calls a day, which is a lot. The AI can do that in 30 minutes, and then it sends us the results. We only call the nurse practitioners who are interested, cutting from ~100 calls a day to about 25 productive calls a day. That's huge.
Another way is applicant tracking. You might have 2,000 applicants; how do you find the needle in the haystack, the provider with the specific license? AI now lets you track applicants across different ATS and CRM systems. Resume parsing has become basic; almost every ATS has it now.
Where I see this going: eventually robotics and AI will merge, and we'll have physical robots making recruiting decisions. You'll walk into a room and an interview will be conducted by a robot from start to finish. That's the future.
Even in sales, constructing emails to candidates and clients, AI helps. I use Claude, and it's fantastic for crafting emails and outreach letters. Any agency not using AI now is losing out big time. AI is essential to the industry.
Adoption, Saturation & Managing the Tool Stack (23:03)
Brian: That robot future accelerates once it's saturated, like electric vehicles. At first people were for it and against it, then everyone hopped on and it became globally accepted, despite the early resistance.
The biggest piece with AI is understanding what each tool does and understanding your own business, where to actually use it. Some people buy everything and manage none of it, ending up paying for expensive, powerful tool stacks nobody's running. They don't have a proper consultant, and they don't realize you still have to teach the AI things specific to your business. Some people don't want to teach it; they want a plug-and-play thing. When they find out it isn't, they're upset they spent the money, and doubly upset they have to do work to make it work. It's a triple threat.
Aaron: There are tons of AI applications you can be coaxed into buying that have no relevance to your business. If you're starting small, funds are critical; you have to manage them wisely, and that dictates your decision-making. For us at Search Station, there's a lot we could get into, but we have to be practical: what's essential and urgent now, at this stage of growth? Look within your system, your company, and your industry, and see what's most essential.
Current Challenges at Search Station (26:02)
Brian: What challenges are you observing in your own business, and how are you thinking about solving them?
Aaron: Our biggest challenge is funding. There's so much we could do, but we don't have access to the funds. I'm skeptical about business loans; that's something I'll be more comfortable with once we've scaled to where we can make repayments without hurting the business. But we're open to investors, partnerships, grants, and seed investments.
With funding, we could employ more hands. Right now we have two recruiters, one part-time developer, and a part-time accountant, and the developers and recruiters are outsourced, outside the US, because we couldn't afford local-market rates. With funding, we could pay local recruiters and local BD executives.
On tooling: we have an ATS and a CRM, not the greatest, but decent. We could buy something better like Bullhorn or Salesforce, but we can't afford them right now. Operationally, it'd also be nice to have a brick-and-mortar office for meetings, even though everyone works remote.
Another challenge is the pace of growth. The expectation is that you want to grow, but the pace you want can't always be matched. If someone looks at us and says, "You've been open a year, why aren't you further along?", it's because getting there is almost unrealistic that fast. Finding clients took a long time. Six months in, we didn't have proper clients; we had personal relationships, "soft" clients, but winning real business was difficult because they don't know you. They know the big competitors. You have no track record. You end up competing against yourself, asking, "I'm a year in, I'm supposed to be here, why am I not?"
The key to any business is clients; without them, you can't do business, and that was hard for us. Then there's self-motivation. You wake up and do it all over again even when you see no results. I work 10 to 12 hours some days and have to keep motivating myself, five or six days a week. I have a strong family support system and mentors who keep encouraging me. But that self-drive, to wake up and do the same thing without immediate results, is a real challenge.
Brian: Patience is big in entrepreneurship, especially early. Keep people around who root for you and can teach you; mentors and a support system are bare basics. Close, in this sense, means people you can text at almost any time of day.
You're the first guest to name the psychological challenge: loneliness. Most people mention operational challenges, but the psychological aspect is just as important, because it affects operations.
Aaron: It does.
Closing: Advice to a Younger Self (32:56)
Brian: Final question, and I love asking this. Looking back, what would you tell your younger self to get where you are now, faster?
Aaron: I'd tell my younger self to learn more about every facet of the business. I learned to be a good recruiter at AMN, but I didn't learn to be a good account manager; the business development piece was missing. I'd have spent more time on earnings calls and BD calls, and in other roles that didn't directly affect me. All that knowledge comes into play when you start your entrepreneurial journey.
Now I'm having to learn those things: not just recruiting, but management, business development, accounting, and more.
Brian: They don't teach that in school. School teaches you to earn a salary and do a job. That's a problem, because if you want to be an entrepreneur, it's not about doing your job; it's about doing every job.
Aaron: Exactly. As CEO of Search Station, I have to think about branding, accounting, sales, delivery, everything. Social media is hard for me to manage because I have so much on my desk. Learn as much as you can from every facet of the business before you jump into entrepreneurship.
Brian: Agreed, and I'd start with sales. If there's one skill to learn first, it's sales.
Aaron: 100%. After that, you can learn everything else.
Where to Find Aaron (36:01)
Brian: What's the best way for folks to reach out?
Aaron: Our website has everything you need to know about us, www.searchstation.org: phone numbers, emails, all of it. We're also on Instagram and Facebook.
Brian: I'll put all those in the description. Aaron, it's been a pleasure, and amazing to have you on.
Aaron: Likewise, likewise.
Brian: All right, folks, we'll see you next time. Thanks so much.
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