The Knockout Move I Learned From the Best Recruiter I Ever Hired

You pick up tricks from every recruiter you work with – different styles, different ways of engaging clients, different methods for turning relationships into revenue. But every now and then, someone teaches you something so sharp, so audacious, that it sticks with you forever.

This one came from a million-dollar biller – someone who, on the surface, might have seemed unconventional, but who actually followed the fundamentals better than anyone. They asked the extra-mile job briefing questions. They chased down every name on a longlist. They made sure there were always runners in the race. In other words, they worked hard, but never just busy hard. They worked smart hard.

And then one day, they showed me something next-level.

We were taking a job brief at Collins Place, sitting in the food court near the Kino cinema, when a sharply dressed professional walking past called out to us. At first, it seemed like a chance encounter – until I realised my recruiter had orchestrated it. They’d arranged for this candidate to "just happen" to walk by at the exact right moment, setting up a seamless introduction to the client.

It was bold. It was risky. There was no guarantee the candidate even fit the brief. But it worked. What was supposed to be a five-step interview process collapsed into two. The candidate sat down with the client right after we left, and by sheer force of positioning, what could have been a long, drawn-out dance turned into a real conversation. Of course, they got the job and we got the deal. Poetry in motion.

I called it the "drive-by" after that – a perfectly timed, perfectly executed move that cut through the noise. And it wasn’t luck. It was strategy.

That’s the thing about great recruiters – they don’t just follow the playbook. They expand it. They find ways to compress timelines, create opportunities, and turn routine interactions into game-changing moments. Any that’s why Zinger’s lessons are guardrails only – anchor themes to give recruiters the confidence to run hard and insert their own DNA into. Zinger’s not trying to create robots – Zinger's trying to inspire innovation from recruiters. 

So – any knockout moves you’ve picked up over the years? I’d love to hear them. Because the best tricks in this business are the ones worth stealing.