1. Why We Started Virtual Equity With This Question

For the very first episode of Virtual Equity, Lindsey did not ease into things. She sat down her co host Nicole Evans and asked her four questions about recruiting, questions Nicole had a single day to think about. The theme of the episode says it plainly. To be a great recruiter, you have to know a great recruiter.

Lindsey has spent about six years in healthcare staffing and has interviewed a long list of recruiters along the way. What she noticed is that recruiting experience does not always translate cleanly from one industry to another, especially into healthcare, where the pace is unlike almost anywhere else. Nicole has been in staffing for around fifteen years and made that exact transition herself, so the conversation became a real look at what separates a good recruiter from a great one, no matter which industry you are in.

2. Nicole's Path Into Recruiting, and Why the Long Way Around Helped

Nicole's career did not start with a plan. She began at a staffing company in New Jersey, taking applications on a floppy disc at the front desk, before gradually moving into recruiting for executive and scientist roles, plus some distribution positions. When she later relocated to North Carolina with no job lined up, she walked into a staffing agency to apply for work herself, interviewed on a Friday, and was asked to start the following Monday.

From there she moved through front desk work again, into recruiting, into account management, into a branch manager role, took a few years overseas, came back to the same company on the operations and market management side, then moved into HR before eventually landing in healthcare staffing, which she describes as her first true deep dive into the space and a completely different beast in terms of recruitment.

The takeaway is not that Nicole followed a straight line. She did not. Nearly every step, front desk work, general labor recruiting, account management, HR, ended up feeding directly into the skills that make her effective now. If your own path into recruiting has felt scattered, that is not necessarily a problem to fix.

3. What Changes When You Move Into a Faster Paced Industry

Lindsey pointed out something specific about healthcare staffing. The core work of recruiting does not change, you still have to build relationships, connect with people, and get candidates to commit. What changes is the clock. In traditional recruiting, Lindsey often hears candidates describe a process that stretches over one to two months, a week or two to connect, another week or two to build a resume, another week or two to submit. In healthcare staffing, that entire process has to happen in one to two weeks, sometimes one to two days.

Nicole's advice for anyone making that jump starts with attention to detail and a willingness to actually learn the specialties you are recruiting for. Healthcare is vast, and unlike more familiar roles such as a forklift operator or a dock worker, most people outside the industry have no intuitive sense of what a given healthcare role requires. Understanding the licensing, the equipment experience, and the specific years of general and travel experience needed is what allows a recruiter to source quickly instead of guessing and losing time.

4. The Real Bottleneck Is Usually Pace, Not Skill

This is one of the more useful reframes in the episode. When recruiters move too slowly, the instinct is often to assume they need more training or more talent. Nicole's point is that pace is a habit set from the top, whether intentionally or not. Earlier in her career doing distribution and general labor recruiting, the standard was a twenty four to forty eight hour fill, and forty eight hours was already considered cutting it close. That pace was built on pipelines, preparation, and staying proactive instead of reactive, not on any recruiter being unusually fast individually.

If you are early in your recruiting career and wondering whether you are simply not fast enough, it is worth asking whether the pace around you has ever actually been set as a real expectation, or whether slower has just quietly become normal.

5. Communication: The First Thing Every Great Recruiter Needs

When asked what a recruiter absolutely must do to succeed, Nicole led with communication. Not communication in the generic sense, but the specific ability to connect with a wide range of people and stay approachable no matter who you are talking to or what role you are trying to fill. Being relatable enough that a candidate actually tells you what they are looking for, rather than giving you a surface level answer, is what separates a recruiter who fills roles from one who is simply going through the motions.

6. Problem Solving: Why You Have to Love the Chaos

Nicole's second requirement is genuine problem solving ability, and she is direct about who this rules out. If you do not enjoy solving problems, recruiting is probably not the right career, because deadlines shift and last minute issues show up constantly. The recruiters who thrive are the ones who can think quickly, always have a backup plan, and then have a backup plan to that backup plan.

7. Discipline: What Keeps You Going Between the Highs

The third requirement is discipline, and Nicole is candid that this one is easy to underestimate. Recruiting has a natural rhythm of highs and lows. A great placement feels fantastic, and then the next question is immediately what comes next. Someone with a short attention span will struggle here, because the wins do not sustain themselves. The recruiters who last are the ones who keep making calls and building relationships on the days when nothing exciting is happening at all.

8. Using Improv to Think Faster on Your Feet

Lindsey shared a practical tool she and Nicole have used with their own team members who struggle to think quickly under pressure. Improv exercises. The goal is learning to fill gaps in conversation without falling back on filler words, staying relatable, and keeping a conversation moving forward even when you do not have a scripted answer ready.

This is a skill you can practice deliberately rather than something you either have or do not. If quick thinking does not come naturally to you yet, structured practice, even something as unconventional as improv, can build that muscle over time.

9. The One Line in Your Email Signature That Can Change Your Pipeline

Every episode of Virtual Equity closes with a recruiting tip, and the first one came directly from Nicole. Add a line to your email signature asking for referrals, something as simple as a seasonal greeting followed by a note that the best gift someone can give you is a referral.

Nicole is refreshingly honest about where the idea came from. It was not the result of research or a case study, it came out of a normal working conversation. What makes it work is simpler than the tactic itself. Referrals matter because staffing runs on word of mouth, and when someone likes you enough to recommend you by name, that recommendation already does half the work of proving you are reliable before you ever pick up the phone.

10. Why Nicole Still Loves This Work After Fifteen Years

Nicole pushed back gently on the stigma that sometimes surrounds staffing agencies. At its core, she sees the work as problem solving and service. Finding the right person for a role nobody else could fill, and getting a message months or even a year later thanking you for the connection, is what keeps the job from ever feeling dull. Recruiters also get to serve two sides of every placement, the candidate and the employer, which she describes as genuinely loving both sides of the coin.

For anyone early in a recruiting career and wondering whether the highs are worth the roller coaster, that is the honest answer from someone fifteen years in. They still are.