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Case Studies Home > Risus Talent Partners
How Risus Talent Partners Achieved Record-Breaking Growth with RPS+ and Hiring Assistant
Results delivered
$300,000 in Placement Revenue Generated
Risus directly attributed 12 placements sourced through LinkedIn Hiring Assistant. These placements spanned a diverse range of seniority levels and functions, from Customer Service roles to C-Suite executives like a CFO – their largest ever placement fee as a business.
Measurable Business Growth
Risus used RPS+ business development features to target decision makers who were actively hiring, reached out through BD InMails, and signed a new commercial construction client with two new requisitions. RPS+ gave their full desk recruiters the tools to prospect smarter and win new business, not just fill roles.
Future-Facing Business Transformation
Risus didn't just adopt Hiring Assistant - they reorganized around it. Leadership created a brand new internal Associate role dedicated to AI-powered sourcing, shifting the focus of senior recruiters to closing candidates, client growth, and new business. Player-coaches who were stretched between billing and managing got relief too, as Hiring Assistant kept them producing as individual contributors without sacrificing leadership responsibilities. What started as a sourcing tool investment became a new way of running the business.
Supercharged High Producers
Risus’ top recruiter achieved the highest quarterly production in the firm’s five-year history by leveraging Hiring Assistant. Simultaneously, Hiring Assistant has fundamentally raised the bar for what junior recruiters can achieve. By leaning on agentic sourcing, junior recruiters are now delivering high-quality candidate pipelines and niche talent, such as Mechanical Engineers, that were historically reserved for senior-level recruiters.
Hours of Time Saved
Shanna Munisteri, a Recruiting Director at Risus, replaced the time-consuming process of manually playing with keywords and filters to turn a half-day task into a background process. Shanna fed intake notes directly into Hiring Assistant, with a quick 5-10 minute setup, and a list of 25+ qualified candidates instantly surfaced.
challenges
Maximizing Output Without Compromising the Talent-Partner Standard
As Risus expanded its client list to over 25 accounts, the team faced the dual pressure of maintaining high touch client relationships with the manual intensity of full-cycle recruiting, leading to bottlenecks in candidate delivery and revenue growth.
- Sourcing Friction: Manual searches for specialized talent were time-consuming, often requiring recruiters to spend hours layering keywords and filters to build a viable pipeline. This directly impacted the speed to submit candidates and slowed their ability to meet aggressive placement timelines for niche roles.
- Full-Cycle Fatigue: Recruiters were tasked with a full desk workflow, balancing business development and client management with intensive sourcing. This split focus limited their capacity for the high-touch engagement needed to ensure candidate quality and deep pipeline volume.
- Stagnant Accounts: Manual sourcing efforts often stalled on tough, long-standing requisitions, causing Risus to spin their wheels on high-effort, low-probability roles. These bottlenecks prevented the firm from unblocking "stale" accounts, directly impacting their potential placement revenue and long-term client momentum.
How LinkedIn helped
A Unified AI Strategy for Business Development and Talent Discovery
Risus implemented a powerful combination of RPS+ for business development and Hiring Assistant to automate the hardest part of the recruiting lifecycle: finding the right people.
- Smarter Prospecting: Using RPS+ business development features, Risus targeted decision makers who were actively hiring and reached out through targeted BD InMails, signing a new commercial construction client and bringing on two new requisitions. With RPS+ as the foundation and Hiring Assistant as the force multiplier, their full desk recruiters now run agentic sourcing and business development from the same platform.
- High-Impact Placements: A recruiting leader managing a large account was balancing active recruiting with team leadership - running one-on-ones, managing client relationships, and supporting other sourcers. She posted a niche VP of Sales role, set up her Hiring Assistant project, and stepped into back-to-back meetings. By the time she returned, Hiring Assistant had already sourced and pipelined a qualified candidate, work that would have taken her hours to do manually. That candidate was ultimately hired, resulting in a major placement. Hiring Assistant let her stay active as an individual contributor without sacrificing her leadership responsibilities.
- Reviving a Client Relationship: A client relationship had gone cold with no placements since 2023. When the client recently resurfaced with a mechanical engineer role the team had historically struggled to fill, the recruiter treated it as low priority, spending just 1-2 hours a week on it. He posted the role, set up Hiring Assistant, and let it work in the background. Hiring Assistant surfaced a candidate who was ultimately placed - a hire the team doesn't believe would have happened otherwise, given the limited time invested. That single placement reopened the relationship entirely: the client has since sent four new roles, including a director of accounting, turning a stale account into an active partnership.
- Organizational Transformation: After seeing strong candidate quality from Hiring Assistant, Risus built enough trust in the agent to restructure their team, creating a new junior associate role dedicated to sourcing and high value administrative work. This freed up time for senior recruiters to focus on revenue-generating activities like closing candidates, deepening client relationships, and driving new business.
- The Adoption Turning Point: Adoption clicked when a client made an internal hire, only for Risus to realize that Hiring Assistant had already identified and surfaced that exact candidate weeks prior. Seeing the AI pinpoint the same "winning" profile as the client removed all doubt about the tool’s quality.
- The Triple Threat Sourcing Model: Recruiters powered up Hiring Assistant by combining job descriptions with their proprietary client intake notes, and using the profile mention feature to reference profiles already in their pipeline that proved to be a strong-fit for previously filled positions
Direct Placement Recruiting. Recruitment Process Outsourcing. HR Consulting.
Risus Talent Partners was built on a simple belief: talent partnerships work better when they’re human.
Founded by experienced HR and talent acquisition leaders with 40+ years of combined experience, Risus was created to bring a more strategic, transparent, and relationship-driven approach to recruiting - one built on partnership, not transactions.
We specialize in Humanizing Talent Partnerships for companies that make, move, and build things - particularly within modular construction, packaging, equipment rental, and growing industrial businesses.
Whether supporting a critical executive search, acting as an outsourced recruiting function, or providing strategic HR guidance, we help growth-focused organizations solve talent challenges with the insight, urgency, and business acumen of a true internal partner.
Because hiring is too important to trust to someone who treats it like a transaction.
Industry
Staffing and Recruiting
No. of Employees
11-50 employees
Headquarters
Baltimore, MD