John Vlastelica, CEO and Founder, Recruiting Toolbox, Inc.
Our story so far, 2005-2025.
In 2005, I incorporated Recruiting Toolbox. At first, I was solo, doing smaller project and training work – mostly with Seattle-area companies – around competency model development, hiring manager training, TA process audits, and recruiter sourcing and closing training. I had no idea how to price what I planned to offer, so I offered my first client – a hiring manager training project – a whole bunch of value for just $2,500. The client told me she was expecting 5-10x that price. Ugh!
A few years into RT’s history I started focusing more on training recruiters and TA leaders to be better influencers, more consultative. This was the precursor to all of the work we’d do to help elevate recruiters to strategic Talent Advisors.
Over the past 20 years, we’ve been trusted partners in a lot of transformative work with over 350 clients in 20+ countries. We’ve been hired by world class companies to help them
Many companies have hired us multiple times – Nike, Google, Nestle, Booking, Amazon, Walmart, Adobe, PepsiCo, Autodesk, Adobe, LinkedIn, Disney, Deloitte have all hired us more than once. Our practitioner backgrounds as former corporate TA directors helped us gain quick credibility with our clients and ensured our consulting deliverables and training were tailored and real-world. And since 2017, when I partnered with SocialTalent to bring our training online, we’ve reached even more recruiters, TA leaders, interviewers, and hiring managers – each month, over ½ million minutes of our content is watched on their platform.
Our small but mighty team, which has averaged about 10 people over the past 10 years, has been so fortunate to have the kind of reputation that’s generated almost 100% inbound sales leads; rarely do we directly advertise our work. I like to think our potential clients can tell we’re in love with the problems in TA and not pushing a solution. We truly seek a good two-way fit and have never tried to be something we’re not just to make a sale.
We’ve built free resource sites and shared paid-training-quality videos and presentation content with tens of thousands of recruiters around the world. For example, TalentAdvisor.com has free resources for recruiters, RecruitingLeadership.com has free resources for TA leaders, and BarRaisers.com has free resources for organizations looking to put accountability mechanisms in place to set and keep a high hiring bar.
It's weird to share a “20 years in review” post like this – it can read as not very humble. So I want to be super clear – we have the best jobs in the world, and I’m so thankful for the hard work, product-market fit, and luck that’s enabled us to get paid to learn, paid to travel, paid to help transform, and paid to make a small but important impact on our profession. Plus we’ve made so many lifelong friends from our work. We love the people who’ve dedicated their careers to the world of TA.
It’s a fascinating time for TA right now. I’ve been writing and speaking a lot about the impact of AI on TA orgs, training TA leaders to show up as more holistic to solve today’s talent challenges, and sharing concerns about candidate fraud (identity and skills verification). There is real disruption in our profession happening now. I’m so happy my team and I are around to see the administrative parts of a recruiter’s job finally being automated. Now, as the role of recruiter evolves to Talent Advisor 2.0 (I’ll be sharing our framework in late June at our head of TA workshop in Seattle), recruiting teams have this incredible opportunity to spend more time guiding our businesses to more speed, more quality, and more access to opportunity.
Thank you to everyone who’s been a part of our journey: clients, partners, conference producers, blog editorial teams, podcast hosts, friends, family, and our regular and extended team. As a small business owner, without a sales team, it can be tough to rise above the noise and compete with the sales and marketing might of the big consulting firms. It’s because of my great team – past and present – that we’ve been able to build relationships and delivered value that has allowed us to thrive as a small business. A special thanks to those folks who have been part of our RT team.
And if you’ve read this far, first - thanks for reading this self-indulgent post, and second - if my team has helped you win in your job in some way, please add a comment to my post on LinkedIn.
Thank you!