Stop Selling, Start Connecting: How Leading Recruiters Are Winning Business in 2026
At the first French-language edition of Winning New Client 2026, three recruitment leaders made the same point from three different angles: the firms winning new business right now are the ones that stopped selling and started connecting.
TLDR
Six months ago, Elliott Delente, Director, Europe & USA at Montreal Associates, launched a free, invite-only AI Leaders Club. It now counts 150 members, has produced more than 90 introductions, and converted into three signed clients, by his own account, with no sales pitch built into the format.
Camille Haddjeri, co-founder of TRech International, argues the deeper problem isn't outbound at all. It's positioning: she sees firms charging an 18% fee on one placement and a 30% retainer on another, inside the same building, and says that inconsistency is what confuses clients.
Asked what they'd do with a hypothetical €10,000 business development budget, none of the three panellists mentioned a tool. All three said: get on a plane, take clients to dinner, spend time in the room with the right people.
Yoni Szpiro founded Generations Recruitment in Brussels 25 years ago, specialising in marketing and sales recruitment, and built a proprietary placement framework he calls G.R.A.M. Elliott Delente runs the European and US side of Montreal Associates, a technology recruitment firm with teams in France, Spain, Belgium and Germany, and is now expanding further into the US. Camille Haddjeri has spent 15 years in recruitment, the last four building training academies for generalist recruiters across France, Spain, Italy, Germany and Benelux. Francine Ruth Nyamba moderated.
The Club With No Sales Pitch
Six months ago, Elliott noticed something in his own client base: a growing number of tech leaders wanted to talk to peers about how fast their organisations were actually adopting AI, not be sold anything. So he built a private club for them.
It's invite-only. New members come in two ways: referral, increasingly, or direct sourcing by Elliott's own team. There's no fee.
"The club is free. It's invite-only and sought after, but free. There's no barrier to entry, and that's deliberate. The point for us isn't to sell anything, at least not in the short term. Not at all. The point is to take part in the ecosystem, to connect people who would never otherwise be in the same room."
Six months in, the club has made more than 90 introductions between members. Three of those relationships have turned into signed client contracts for Montreal Associates, a result Elliott describes as a byproduct, not the goal.
The model scales down, in his view. A firm of two or three people can run the same logic with a WhatsApp group of ten clients and candidates. The size of the ambition is optional. The discipline of treating the network as an asset isn't.
Positioning Is the Real Differentiator
Where Elliott builds trust through community, Camille starts from a more uncomfortable diagnosis: most firms haven't decided what they are.
"What I see today is that inside the same firm, you'll have recruiters billing an 18% fee on one placement and a 30% retainer on another, for the same type of work. There's a lot of inconsistency, sometimes inside the very same firm. And that creates confusion in the market."
Her read: specialist firms, the ones who've picked a lane and stayed in it, survive market downturns because clients and candidates know exactly what they're for. Generalist firms, often the larger ones, blur that line internally, which makes it harder for junior recruiters to explain why a client should choose them over anyone else.
Yoni's firm sits deliberately in the specialist camp. Going deep into one or two disciplines, he argues, is what let him build real authority instead of competing purely on price or speed.
The Account You're Already Sitting On
The panel's sharpest practical point came as a surprise: before chasing new clients, look at the ones you already have.
Yoni's point: most recruitment firms have no real account management discipline. A client who has already bought from you, already trusts you, is treated the same as a cold prospect rather than as the asset they are.
In the same live poll, roughly two-thirds said they prioritise long-term relationships. About a third said short-term pressure leaves them no choice. Yoni's view was that the split is less a strategy choice than a cash flow reality: firms with an established reputation and steady revenue can afford to play long. Firms still building both can't always choose.
Legend Has It: The Eighth Contact
Camille shares a number she uses often in her training sessions: eight people out of ten would give a referral if asked. Only four out of ten recruiters actually ask. Her training also recommends five to eight outreach touches before giving up on a prospect.
Legend has it, she says, that you won't get a yes before the eighth contact, though she's careful to call that a legend, not a rule.
What €10,000 Actually Buys
As a closing exercise, the moderator put one question to all three: if you had €10,000 to spend purely on business development, what would you do? None of them reached for a platform or a tool:
Camille Haddjeri: flights and dinners with his most important clients and prospects.
Elliott Delente: the same, plus a budget for leadership coaching.
Yoni Szpiro: the same, plus, half-joking, a gym membership.
"I'd take every flight I could and book the best restaurants to go see my most important clients and prospects." — Camille Haddjeri
"I'd still get a gym membership, because after spending €10,000 on dinners you'll need it. But really, it's about human relationships. Put the money into reconnecting physically with people." — Yoni Szpiro
The Bottom Line
Business development in recruitment hasn't been automated away. The tools, the clubs, the training cadences are all in service of one thing: a relationship a client or candidate actually remembers. The firms ahead right now are the ones treating that as the most human part of the job, not the most scalable one.
Don't miss the complete discussion. Watch the full Winning New Clients replay here.
This article is based on Winning New Client 2026, a webinar series by Talent Business Partner.