
$800K From Zero in 1 Year. AI Ran the BD
From The Elite Recruiter Podcast by Benjamin Mena
June 5, 2026 · 1h 8m · Season 1 · Episode 329
About this episode
Riece Keck discusses his journey of rebuilding a tech recruiting agency using AI and systems to achieve $800K in his first year back.
Most recruiters think AI is coming for someone else's desk. Riece Keck isn't so sure. Two years ago he said AI wouldn't replace great recruiters, but it would replace the mediocre ones sooner than anyone wanted to admit. He still stands by it, and he thinks we're a lot closer now than we were then. He's also taking the stage at the AI Recruiting Summit 2026 to go even deeper on this, so if today's episode lands, that's where you see it built live: https://ai-recruiting-summit-2026.heysummit.com/ This conversation is the proof. Riece built a tech recruiting agency to a $1.2M year, then watched it nearly die twice before it folded into a merger for a token amount. He stepped away during a brutal personal stretch, then cold-started the whole thing again in early 2025, and billed roughly $800K in his first year back without leaning on his old client list. The difference the second time wasn't more hustle. It was systems. Riece walks Benjamin through the no-code BD engine he built end to end: scraping job boards on a daily auto-run, identifying the right hiring managers, enriching the contacts, drafting the outreach, and dripping it out, all while he sleeps. He breaks down how he uses…
People in this episode
Host: Benjamin Mena
Guest: Riece Keck
Topics covered
- AI in recruiting
- business development
- tech recruiting
- systems and automation
- personal growth
Keywords
- AI
- recruiting
- business development
- automation
- tech agency
- no-code
- job boards
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Claude Code
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