The Push and The Pull

30K YouTube subscribers hit over the weekend 🥳

Thank you so much for the support. It genuinely means a lot.

When I started the Recruitment Mentors Podcast eight years ago, I had no idea where it would go. 30,000 YouTube subscribers later, here we are.

Every subscriber is a signal that what we're putting together is landing. And that keeps us investing in what we're producing for this industry.

My ambition hasn't changed. Build the best and most trusted media brand in recruitment. That's it.

This year I want to push the boundaries of what content in this space looks like.

Try different things. Bring more of the countless amazing stories in this industry to life. Create things that haven't been done here before. All whilst continuing to have fun with what we produce.

So a huge thank you, and on we go to the next milestone.

And if you're reading this newsletter, you're part of the journey too. Thanks for being here every week. It means more than you know.

Here is what AI produced for me as they have these cool football mural-style image creators for the World Cup - Thank you!!!

A recruitment leader told me recently that he keeps a drawing up in his office whiteboard. Always visible. To him, to his team, to anyone who walks past.

A figure pushing a boulder up a hill.

The hill has two sides. The uphill is dark, steep, heavy. The figure is leaning in, grinding, giving everything just to keep the boulder moving.

But the other side of that hill is completely different. Smooth. Open. Downhill all the way.

The figure can't see that. All they can see is the climb.

I got Bradley to send his world-class drawing of this that lives on their deal whiteboard….. 😂

That visual is bang on for what the recruitment can feel like. You show up, you put in the work, you do everything right, and the results don't reflect it.

You push. And push. And push. And at some point, almost every recruiter reaches the same question: is this ever going to get easier?

I recorded a podcast with Madeline Brady yesterday, and her story is the perfect representation of what so many people who make it in our industry have gone through.

She spent the best part of a year working 12 to 14-hour days building a contract market from scratch in New York, having already moved on from two previous companies. Third company in three years.

She spent hours and hours mapping accounts, candidate calling, learning the market, building intel that wouldn't pay off for months. Deals falling through. Momentum that never quite arrived.

By the end of 2024, she'll tell you herself she nearly quit. Still grinding. Still pushing. And here's what I find important about that detail. She wasn't someone who was coasting or going through the motions. She was doing everything right. The hill was just steep.

But she didn't quit. She kept pushing uphill.

January came. Two deals landed quickly. She moved internally to the Miami office, joined an established team, and everything that had been building quietly in the background started to come to fruition.

By the end of 2025, she'd billed just under 500k. She's now on track to reach a million for 2026. Same person. Same work ethic. Different gradient.

The pull had arrived. The downhill had started.

Here's what I think people get wrong about periods where everything feels like push. They treat it like a performance problem. Numbers aren't where they need to be, so the assumption is something must be wrong with the approach.

Change the strategy. Change the market. Change the company. But sometimes it isn't a performance problem. It's a patience problem. The work is right. The habits are right. The hill is just steep. And the only variable is whether you make it to the top before you decide to turn back.

There's something else that makes this period so hard. When you're in the push phase, every small setback feels like confirmation that it won't work. A deal falls through, and it doesn't just feel like a lost deal. It feels like evidence.

Evidence that the market is wrong, that the timing is wrong, that maybe you're wrong. That narrative is dangerous. Because it isn't evidence of anything except that recruitment is hard, and when you're building, this phase is supposed to test you.

What makes it harder still is that the people around you who are experiencing the pull make it look effortless. Deals compounding. Clients calling them. Referrals landing without asking. From the outside the downhill looks like talent. Like luck. Like something they have that you don't.

It rarely is. It's almost always just that they made it over the hill before you did. They did the push phase too. They just don't talk about it as much now that the gradient has changed.

Madeline said something in our conversation that speaks to this perfectly. The question stopped being whether it would happen. She just decided it was going to happen. The only real question was whether she could hold on long enough to let it.

That mindset shift is everything.

Most people quit on the uphill. They do all the push and never experience the pull. Not because they weren't capable of making it. Because they ran out of belief before the market ran out of resistance. And the painful truth is that the people who quit will never know how close they were.

They don't get to see the other side. They just remember the climb.

If you're in the push phase right now and some days the effort and the output feel completely disconnected, this edition is for you.

The other side of the hill exists. You just can't see it yet.

Keep pushing.

This week I sat down with Stewart Wallace, founder of Konstrukt.

Stew started his business nearly five years ago with £10k, a second baby on the way, and a wife willing to back him. No database. No clients. Just a plan.

What followed was one of the most practical conversations I've had on the pod about building a contract book from scratch.

We got into the 300 plan, how he built his first market from a single CV, what cradle-to-grave delivery actually looks like in contract recruitment, and how he went from zero to billing significant weekly GP in the early months.

If you're in contract recruitment or thinking about going out on your own, this one is for you.

If you want to understand how long the push phase actually lasts, go and ask someone who is already on the other side of it.

If you're part of a team, find your top one, two, or three performers. The people who make it look easy right now. Pull them aside and ask them this exact question:

Then stop talking and listen.

You'll get a timeline. You'll get a turning point. And more often than not, you'll get a story that sounds a lot like the one you're currently living through.

If you don't have a team around you, lean on your network.

A former colleague, a mentor, someone a few years ahead of you in their career. Ask them the same question. The answer will be different every time, but the underlying truth will almost always be the same.

It took longer than they expected. And then one day, it just started to feel different.

Keep smashing it & honing your craft!

Hishem x

Know a recruiter who needs to hear this? Send it their way.