How to Earn Your First $10K with Social Recruiting

Stephen van der Meij

Jul 23 • Sales 💰

In the past few meetings I’ve had, one question keeps coming up:

👉 "How do I earn my first $10K with social recruiting?"

There are multiple ways to get there, but in general, you can take two main approaches:

Option 1: Offer Social Recruiting Campaigns Without Candidate Follow-up

This is the simpler and more scalable option.

Let’s break it down:

You charge $2,000 per campaign
Your costs are about $300 per campaign
The client pays for the ad budget separately

That means you earn ~$1,700 profit per campaign to hit your first $10K, you only need to sell 6 campaigns.

That could be:

6 campaigns to 6 different businesses, or
2 clients each buying 3 campaigns

Given the current labor shortage, this is very achievable — but you’ll need to focus more on sales and lead generation.Think: email marketing, LinkedIn outreach, Meta ads, etc.

Option 2: Offer Campaigns With Candidate Follow-up + Placement Fee

This option is more hands-on but can be more profitable per client.

Example:

Charge $1,000 for the campaign (excluding ad budget)
Plus, charge 1x monthly salary for each successful placement

Let’s say a candidate earns $5,000/month — you’d earn $5K per placement.That means you only need 2 successful placements to reach your first $10K.

This route requires more client attention and handling candidates directly, but can bring higher value and stronger relationships.

My Take:

Option 1 is perfect for starting out. It's simple, repeatable, and helps you learn the business model fast.
Option 2 is better once you have experience and want to offer a more premium service — but it does come with more complexity (especially around candidate follow-up, which many businesses struggle with).

💬 What do you think? Would you start with Option 1 or Option 2?

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