The 60% of Recruiters Who'll Quietly Sink Your Agency. Part 2

In Part 1, Tom Kelly walked us through how EVONA scaled from four founders to 80 recruiters in three years, then deliberately cut back to 30 — and per-head revenue doubled.

In Part 2, he hands over the framework that explains how he manages the leaner team. And it starts with a number most agency owners have never been forced to confront.

If you haven't heard Part 1 yet, listen to that one first — it sets up everything Tom unpacks here.

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Tom segments every sales team into four brackets. The top 10% who don't care about anyone else — they just want to bill. The next 20% who aspire to be that top performer. The bottom 10% who were never going to make it. And then the middle 60%. The bracket nobody manages correctly. Because the middle 60% don't measure themselves against the top performers. They measure themselves against the bottom 10%. As long as they're doing enough not to be the worst person on the team, they think they're fine. That's the bracket quietly sinking most agencies, and most owners can't see it because they manage everyone on the team the same way.

The second framework Tom hands over is the activity benchmark EVONA uses to define elite. 25 interviews on a rolling four-week period. Reverse engineered from a 12-to-1 interview-to-placement ratio, the number means a recruiter hitting it consistently is doing two placements a month at minimum. Drop below 25 and Tom is direct — you are not fit to play at the top level.

Tom also unpacks why he would hate to be running a big recruitment company right now. AI governance is about to break the firms that can't police what their recruiters are doing with dashboards, prompts, and outreach automation. LinkedIn is heading into a tidal wave of AI-driven spam. Vertical platforms are about to replace the way candidates look for jobs. And recruitment is now an IQ-over-EQ game — the people leveraging the tools and staying sharp are pulling away from everyone else.

He opens the conversation with the moment that built all of this. Tom had a stutter so bad as a kid he was afraid to pay a phone bill. He chose recruitment specifically because it would force him onto the phone every day. That fear is the engine behind eight years of building EVONA — and the reason "evolving" is the company's core value.

Tom closes with the books that shaped him (the Rockefeller Habits, Ronnie Wood, Alex Ferguson on man management), why Claude is the tool changing how he thinks, why he's not crazy about Bullhorn, and the one piece of advice he'd give every recruiter facing the next 18 months. Don't be a lone wolf.

What You'll Learn:

- The four-bracket framework Tom uses to manage every sales team, and why the middle 60% is the bracket quietly sinking most agencies

- The 25-interview rolling 4-week benchmark that defines elite at EVONA, and the ratio behind it

- Why Tom says recruitment is now IQ over EQ, and what that shift means for average recruiters

- The vertical-platform shift coming for LinkedIn, and how candidates will find jobs in the next two years

- Why a stutter became the engine of Tom's career, and what that says about the recruiters who succeed

- The tools, books, and habits that shape Tom's leadership at EVONA

Connect with Tom Kelly:

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

Email — [email protected]

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