When Getting the Hire Wrong Costs Lives

When Getting the Hire Wrong Costs Lives

From The Elite Recruiter Podcast by Benjamin Mena

April 8, 2026 · 1h 6m · Season 1 · Episode 314

About this episode

Jake Frazer discusses his journey in transforming the recruiting industry for government contracting.

Most recruiting firms measure success by offers accepted. Jake Frazer watched that metric send unqualified people into a war zone. That was the moment he decided the industry was broken — and spent the next decade building something different. Frazer is not a recruiter. He is a government contracting operator who watched from the inside as one of the largest defense contractors in the world staffed programs the wrong way and paid for it in the field. He served in the Army, ran logistics at KBR pumping 2,000 people a month into theater, then built and sold a $200 million prime contractor. When he launched Precision Talent Solutions ten years ago, he made one decision that changed everything: he refused to run it like a recruiting firm. PTS does not hire traditional recruiters. Seventy percent of his 25-person team came out of govcon operations — people who have been on programs, who know what the mission costs, who have been ghosted by a bad recruiter and remember how it felt. They use a full assessment platform — personality profiling, cognitive scoring, custom video interviews — because Jake believes the resume, especially now, reveals almost nothing. He made hiring a P&L…

People in this episode

Host: Benjamin Mena

Guest: Jake Frazer

Topics covered

  • recruiting
  • government contracting
  • executive search
  • hiring practices
  • military experience

Keywords

  • recruiting
  • government contracting
  • executive search
  • hiring
  • military
  • logistics
  • assessment platform

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Precision Talent Solutions, KBR, Army, defense contractors

More episodes of The Elite Recruiter Podcast

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the The Elite Recruiter Podcast podcast page.