Joel Lalgee

A Decent Recruiter To Follow. Recruiting Is No Joke Podcast Host

With a decade in recruiting, I now partner with companies worldwide to recruit top GTM talent

What I do:

I help companies find talent.
From AE's to Revops to CRO's and VP of sales, we have access to the best talent.

I help companies with social media.
With an audience of nearly 1 million and millions of views, I know how to tell your story and attract the right people.

I emcee and speak at events.
Podcast host, keynote speaker, and global stage regular, I love sharing fresh perspectives on recruitment, leadership, and the future of work.

Outside the office, I’m a proud dad of three, a devoted husband, and a big believer in the power of recruitment to change lives and businesses.

Want more?
Let’s connect. Whether you’re hiring, building your brand, I’m always up for a real conversation.

Joel@therealestrecruiter.com - Brand deals PR

Founder

Contract recruiting
Marketing consulting/strategy
Podcast host

In the age of AI -

Never forget who's behind the profile.

Never.

Building Real GTM Talent - GTM Recruiter - Content Creator - Podcast Host - Speaker @therealestrecruiter Joel@therealestrecruiter.com for Partnerships

If you’ve worked in recruitment for more than 10 minutes you have likely experienced this.

I’m blessed to be working with hiring managers at Camunda who understand how to move the process quickly.

I usually get feedback in less than 24 hours -

This allows for a better candidate experience and helps move the needle to making a hire.

Shout out to all the hiring managers who understand how to move fast.

👏👏👏

Join me on this journey as I build a recruitment company in 2026.

Allow me to introduce Real GTM Talent a monthly subscription recruitment services designed to help companies scale their GTM teams.

(I’d love a repost to help get the word out)

We treat recruitment like a GTM action as true talent partners.

1. We define the ICP (ideal candidate profile)
2. We create the right messenging for social media posts, for DMs and emails.
3. We calibrate with hiring managers. We present profiles and adjust the search as needed.
4. We outreach - we build sequences that work with a blend of AI and human touch (video, voice messages, and yes phone calls)
5. We present the results and deliver talent. Our clients are never in the dark. With regular reporting, hiring managers always know the status of the search.
6. We close the candidates and build future pipelines.
7. We constantly market roles to our social media following of over 1,000,000 which can also lead to more brand exposure and even sales.
8. We only represent YOU. We don't market candidates to other companies to avoid conflict of interest. This may lose us some revenue, but it helps build stronger relationships with our clients.

I’m not in a rush to build this company. As we soft launch the first half of 2026, I’m looking for a few clients to partner with.

If you are looking to expand your sales team and don’t want to pay traditional fee’s. Let's chat.

No alternative text description for this image

I’m curious to understand your strategy for accepting requests on here.

Over the past few years, I have reached the limit of 30k connections (not followers) and since then I’ve had to disconnect with people.

My criteria for accepting/disconnecting - is simple - could we partner in some way in the future? If the answer is no, then I have to disconnect or not accept the request. 

How about you?

Do you accept every Linkedin connection request?

The author can see how you vote. Learn more

Yes - I 100% agree Steven Bartlett 

👏👏👏

Good recruitment and hiring is key for success.

True recruiting story: The other day I had a fake candidate show up to an interview.

Their resume looked good, their LinkedIn the same…

Then on the call, someone completely different showed up. 🤯

Candidate fraud is a hot topic right now and a lot of companies are going to waste tons of time vetting fake candidates.

This is a lose-lose for everyone:

The company,
The candidate,
And the recruiter.

If you are dealing with this - you should definitely check out this webinar in a few days that Gem is hosting.

They will give tips on how to identify fake candidates quickly, to save everyone from wasted time.

You’ll learn everything from fake resumes to deepfake interviews and how they are doing it.

This is a must for any recruiter in 2026 and beyond.

Sign up with the Link in the comments.

Please repost and tag a recruiter who needs this now.

#partnership post

It’s fine, I’m 3 out of the 4 😅

Guess which one I’m not?

Me to my wife: “This year I’m going to be way more present…”

Also me to my wife: “Hold on a second let me make a quick comment on this LinkedIn post about the green open to work banner making you look desperate and the ATS robot kicking resumes out…”

Thanks career coaches, thanks.

🙄

I guess the job market as been cooked the past few years... 

Go figure.

#jobmarket

Recruiting Leader @ Zapier | Former Educator | Advocate for job seekers, humanizing recruiting, and making the workplace more equitable for everyone!!

WARNING: There are scam accounts using my name. The only domains I use are "zapier.com" and "bonniedilber.com". If the email comes from any other domain, it's a fraudulent account, please report to your email provider, and to the FTC. https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/
If you receive comments referencing me on your posts, these are bots as part of a scam, please report and block those accounts! 

A bit about me: I'm a former educator and dog/toddler mom who is passionate about equity in the workplace. I love to be outdoors except when it's super hot, I'm a foodie who hates cheese, and I like cooking, politics, and travel. I have a full time job managing the GTM/Ops recruiting team at Zapier, and also love creating content on recruiting, workplace culture and trends, and career development. There's a lot of misinformation and I try to combat it as much as I can! 

My goal is to educate and bring transparency to recruiting and hiring processes - I hope my content helps you understand why things play out the way they do. That doesn't mean I always like or agree with the realities of being a part of the working world in 2025, but I think we're all better off when we understand the rules of the game we're playing. 

All opinions are my own and do not reflect those of my employer! If you'd like to work at Zapier, please apply directly on our jobs page. 

I do not have the capacity to respond to DMs or answer one-off questions but DO answer reader questions and offer free 1:1 chats via my newsletter on beehiiv - your best bet is to submit it there!
You can access all of my resources here: https://linktr.ee/bonniedilber

Bonnie Dilber

Well y'all, for the first time in over 3 years, I'm HIRING for two Sr. Recruiters to join my team at Zapier!

One role MUST be a seasoned sales recruiter with experience hiring Account Executives for SaaS companies, the other can be more of a generalist across GTM/Ops roles.

I've detailed what we're looking for and what to expect in the interview process on the job posting, but I'll highlight a few tips:
- I care a lot about the application questions - an imperfect resume with thoughtful responses will go further than the perfect resume who skips those questions. 
- Builders and "figure it out" people do really well at Zapier in general, and certainly on our recruiting team. Our recruiting team has built our enterprise sales team from the ground up in the last year, we've built AI workflows that other companies have adopted, we test out new systems all the time - if you enjoy that kind of thing, you'll be a great fit. 
- The values on Zapier's website show up in how we operate more than any other place I've worked - if you lean towards transparency, authenticity, and are comfortable giving feedback in all directions, then you'll do well here. 
- Candidates who are leveraging AI in their work thoughtfully (which includes knowing where to use AI and where not to) will have an advantage as AI fluency is an expectation at Zapier. 

If this seems like a good fit for you, I hope you'll apply! I'll drop the app below. :)

Recruiting Leader @ Zapier | Former Educator | Advocate for job seekers, demystifying recruiting, and making the workplace more equitable for everyone!!

Someone on LinkedIn told me they couldn't take me seriously because I was a teacher more than a decade ago after I requested some data to back up their claims (something that happens far too little on social media). 

That's not an unusual sentiment from those working in just about any other field outside of education - I heard it when I told people I was joining Teach For America out of college.

The reality is our society doesn't respect or value teachers. They place much of the blame for the state of education in this country on teachers rather than where it belongs (poverty, income inequality, etc). It's been normalized so it doesn't surprise me that someone would jump to "you're just a teacher" to attack someone's credibility. 

And I don't personally take offense at the "attack" - I'm proud of my time in the classroom and in education. It's still on my resume, I talk about it in every interview even though it's not altogether relevant. But I think it signals something about my character, values, and skills:

As a teacher:
- At 22, I taught kids to read 
- At 23, I wrote my first grant to build a community garden
- At 24, I raised over $70k to take my kids from TX to Disney World
- At 25, I became a grade level chair
- At 26, I ran an entire summer school as part of Teach For America's training institute

There's no world in which I could have learned and grown that much sitting in an office for 4 years. 

I clearly have a lot of confidence (why else would I regularly subject you all to my thoughts?) and my time in the classroom taught me that people lash out when they are feeling bad about themselves so I don't take this "critique" personally. 

But I wonder how someone currently teaching might feel seeing their profession used as a critique of someone's achievement, skill, or worthiness?

People are leaving the classroom in droves in large part because of the challenge of the work coupled with the lack of value society places on that work resulting in low pay and a lack of support. 

But I'll leave you with this: in a talent strategy conversation a few months back, our CEO said, "I love hiring people with teaching backgrounds, you all know how to find creative solutions, you work hard, you appreciate what we're building here. We need more people like that here." 

I work in a workplace that values my background as an educator, and I have lots of colleagues who share that background. 

And while there are those people out there who see educating our children as an inferior career path, there are plenty of people who recognize and value what educators do and know that the future of our country depends upon teachers.  

If you made it this far, I hope you will:
- support and advocate for the teachers around you
- fill your companies with the kinds of people who value and respect educators instead of those who look down on them
- hire more people with education backgrounds

In full transparency, I:
- do not answer calls from numbers I don't know
- will not give our personal information on a call with a person whose identity I have not verified (on the rare occasions I accidentally answer)
- do not engage with job opportunities where I don't have basic details like title and compensation 

I share this because I see a lot of recruiters out there criticizing applicants for not answering their calls or engaging with their outreach. And personally, I don't think this is a realistic expectation in 2026 when we're inundated with spam, and when scams are rampant. 

My suggestion to my fellow recruiting professionals:
1. Always emails from a professional domain. 
2. Let people know when they can expect to hear from you, or better yet, schedule a call at this convenience.
3. Provide information about the opportunity you're contacting them about, or be open to providing that info before requesting someone spend their time on a call with you. 

And if you're on the market or hearing from recruiters, please know that the above are both reasonable and protective measures you can take in this market where sadly anyone can be a target.

The bar for AI fluency has risen significantly in the last year and as someone who is theoretically going to be hiring for her team in the next few weeks 👀 , AI fluency will be top of mind. 

A year ago, "I've been using ChatGPT to plan my next vacation" or "Claude helps me speed up emails to customers" met the bar. 

Today, that's table stakes, and companies are looking for things like: 

"I built a workflow where an agent identifies inbound emails that could be potential customers, adds them to my CRM, enriches the profile and routes them to the right AE based on company size and location."

"I automated our weekly reporting by connecting ChatGPT to our CRM and data warehouse, cutting a 3-hour manual process down to 5 minutes."

“I created a custom prompt library and evaluation framework so our team gets consistent, on-brand outputs instead of generic AI responses.”

“I fine-tuned an internal GPT to answer questions using our SOPs, product docs, and past tickets — and tracked deflection rates to measure impact.”

“I built a hiring intake assistant that turns messy stakeholder notes into structured job requirements and scorecards.”

If you've done this kind of stuff, be ready to talk about it in interviews. If you haven't, then pick one of those ideas or come up with one of your own and start building!

P.S. I'd be lying if I said I can do this on my own; I use Zapier's copilot heavily to drive the process and then make a few tweaks from there so if this is overwhelming, start there. :) 
P.P.S. I'm going to drop some of the resources we're shared around AI fluency and AI in the hiring process in case you're considering applying at Zapier!

I keep seeing suggestions that people use AI to create resumes that match the job posting, lie about their experiences, etc. so they can "beat the ATS". 

And while I often try to educate on how ATSs work, today, I'm going to just embrace that and say, "OK sure, the ATS only moves forward people who perfectly match the job description." 

Even if that were true (which it's not, but if it was), eventually, you will have to talk to a recruiter or a hiring manager, and at that point, your lack of relevant experience, or your misrepresentation of your experience will come out and be disqualifying...and likely will disqualify you from future employment at that company as well because most companies aren't going to give a second chance to people who submit fraudulent applications.  

So it simply makes no sense to try to game the system. 🤷‍♀️

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Joel Lalgee

Bonnie Dilber

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The Battle

Joel Lalgee

Bonnie Dilber

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