Hiring is the ultimate business skill — more valuable than knowing AI or the latest marketing channel. If you can find and land A-players, you can build anything.

Ugis exited an 8-figure business in 2020 and has since spent 10,000+ hours doing nothing but hunting A-players for 100+ 8- and 9-figure brands, poaching from names like Alex Hormozi, Tony Robbins, AG1 and Golden Hippo. 93% of those hires are still there a year later, and he closes 80%+ of his searches (the industry average is ~20%).

In this episode he breaks down the exact system.

In this episode:

- Founder takes on X: is the "laptop lifestyle" a myth? We react to a viral take on the dark side of scaling a 90-person agency - plus Ryan Deiss on scaling into "no man's land."

- Job ad reaction: a media buyer role posted by @markbuildsbrand — what makes the ad work, and why the best hires get hunted.

- 14 principles for closing 80% of your roles from "only hire to solve a bottleneck" to "get a work sample" and "stack specialists instead of hunting unicorns."

- The outreach message that gets a 46% reply rate (vs. the 25% industry average), broken down line by line.

- A live case study: hiring a conversion designer for a 9-figure e-commerce brand.

• Two mistakes we made this week and how to introduce an unconventional hiring test the right way.
• What a founder-turned-headhunter sees that a career recruiter completely misses.

Have a key role you want an expert to fill?
Book a call: https://recruitermill.com/qualify

Your job description should read like a sales page, not a corporate list of synergies.

In episode 1 of The A-Player Show, founder-turned-headhunter Ugis Balmaks(Recruiter Mill) breaks down how 8 and 9-figure e-commerce founders actually hire.

He gives live reactions to hiring takes from Ryan Deiss and Ayman Al-Abdullah, then to two real e-commerce job ads (a head of growth and a creative strategist), including how he'd sell the opportunity better and why putting the real base salary in the ad gets you more applicants, not fewer.

He breaks down a case study of a brand that scaled to $80M in its second year after it stopped hunting one "unicorn" creative strategist and hired specialists who are each 10 out of 10 in a single area.

Then: the 6 ways his team uses AI in hiring (and 2 they don't, at least for now), the 4 things he needs to know before taking on a role, and the 4 elements that turn a job description into a sales page.

Got an open role and want our help? Book a call: https://www.recruitermill.com/qualify

X - https://x.com/ugisbalmaks
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ugis-balmaks-74067647
Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/@ugisbalmaks

Recruiter Mill offers top-tier headhunting for 8 & 9-figure eCommerce/DTC brands, SaaS, coaches, and agencies.

In 2020, Ugis Balmaks, the founder of Recruiter Mill, exited his bootstrapped, 8-figure online course business.

Since then, he's helped hundreds of eCommerce brands and tech companies hunt world-class talent.