When you feel like giving up on your business, do not make a permanent decision on your worst day — give the business one more cycle of contact first, and make those contacts to people who have already trusted you rather than to strangers. I'm Christian Saab, founder of CPG Recruitment. There was a day when my bank account was nearly at zero, I had just taken three no's in a row, and I was ready to shut the whole thing down. Then a past client texted me out of nowhere. That o

You're ready to hire when three things are true at the same time: the work adds up to a genuine full-time seat, that work is consistent rather than seasonal, and nobody already on your payroll can absorb it. I'm Christian Saab, founder of CPG Recruitment, and since March 2020 I've built teams across 25+ industries in Canada and the US. Almost every hiring mess I get called into started long before the job was posted — with an owner who hired on a feeling instead of running th

You negotiate your salary without losing the offer by accepting the role emotionally before you question the number: thank them, tell them you are excited, and then ask one calm question about flexibility instead of making a demand. I'm Christian Saab, founder of CPG Recruitment, and since March 2020 my team has built teams across 25+ industries in Canada and the US. I sit on both sides of that offer call every week. In all that time I have never once seen an offer pulled bec

Recruiters are ignoring your messages because "Can you help me find a job?" gives them nothing to work with. It is a request, not information, and a recruiter can only act on information. I'm Christian Saab, founder of CPG Recruitment, and since March 2020 my team has built teams across 25+ industries in Canada and the US. I get this message constantly, and so does every recruiter I know. The ones that get a reply all have the same four things in them: your title and years of

Smart companies stop paying finder's fees because a fee-per-hire model gets more expensive the more you grow, and a company that never stops hiring is paying a premium on every single seat. I'm Christian Saab, founder of CPG Recruitment, and I recently spoke with a business owner who paid $200K in recruitment fees last year. I could have cut that in half. Not with a cheaper recruiter. With a different model: one flat monthly rate that covers all postings, all interviews and a

You headhunt anywhere in the country by going outbound: you stop waiting for applications to arrive and start messaging people who already do the job, in the city where you need them, at a volume most business owners have never attempted. I'm Christian Saab, founder of CPG Recruitment, and we ran a search out of Windsor, Ontario for a role in Los Angeles and closed two hires in 18 days. Not because we found a secret candidate pool in California. Because we sent a thousand mes

You plan your entire week in ten minutes by talking instead of typing: you open an AI assistant, talk through everything you need to accomplish, and let it build the planner and deliver it before you walk into the office on Monday. I'm Christian Saab, founder of CPG Recruitment, and I do this every Sunday morning while I feed my son. Ten minutes of talking out loud, and the plan is in my inbox at 8 AM Monday. Since March 2020 I've built teams across 25+ industries in Canada a

New hires fail in the first 90 days because of attitude, not ability — almost nobody gets walked out of a building for lacking a skill you could have taught them. I'm Christian Saab, founder of CPG Recruitment, and since March 2020 my team has built teams across 25+ industries in Canada and the US. Here is the uncomfortable part: when someone washes out on day 60, the decision that failed wasn't made on day 60. It was made in an interview that spent 80% of its time on experie

You should hire for attitude and train for experience — and if your interview is still 80% questions about what someone has already done, you have the ratio backwards. I'm Christian Saab, founder of CPG Recruitment, and since March 2020 my team has built teams across 25+ industries in Canada and the US. Here is the pattern almost nobody says out loud: your best employee probably had the worst resume in the stack. That young kid you took a chance on, the one running your whole

You should never hire out of desperation because desperation quietly changes the question you are answering — you stop asking “is this the right person?” and start asking “can this person start Monday?” I’m Christian Saab, founder of CPG Recruitment, and since March 2020 my team has built teams across 25+ industries in Canada and the US. I watched one business owner spend $60,000 over six months on a hire with 17 years of experience on the resume who brought in exactly zero d

Handle it the same way you handle any other sick day: against a written policy that applies to everyone, every time, decided before the phone rings. If you are standing in your kitchen at 7am trying to work out whether a request is genuine, the problem is not the employee. It is that nobody wrote the rules down. I'm Christian Saab, founder of CPG Recruitment, and since March 2020 my team has built teams across 25+ industries in Canada and the US. Elite teams are built on acco

Every business that runs without its owner is built on three parts: the right product, a documented process, and the right people — and it is always the people that decide whether the other two survive. I'm Christian Saab, founder of CPG Recruitment, and since March 2020 my team has built teams across 25+ industries in Canada and the US. I left a six-figure engineering job at 24 to build companies, and engineering is where I learned to look at a business the way you look at a

You shouldn't trust the references a candidate gives you, because the candidate picked them. Every name on that list was chosen for one reason: it will say something good. I'm Christian Saab, founder of CPG Recruitment, and since March 2020 my team has built teams across 25+ industries in Canada and the US. A candidate-supplied reference list isn't a background check. It's a curated highlight reel handed to you by the person being checked. The real information sits one layer

You stand out when 100 people apply for the same job by refusing to be one of the 100. You pick one role, you write an application aimed at the person who actually owns the decision, you print it, and you hand it to them in person. I'm Christian Saab, founder of CPG Recruitment, and since March 2020 my team has built teams across 25+ industries in Canada and the US. Ninety-nine applications arrive the same way, through the same portal, in the same format, and they blur into o

If you hate your job, don't open a job board tonight — sit down and design your perfect day first, then go find the careers that fit it. That is the order, and almost nobody does it in that order. I'm Christian Saab, founder of CPG Recruitment, and since March 2020 my team has built teams across 25+ industries in Canada and the US. I have read thousands of applications from people running away from something instead of running toward something, and you can tell in about ten s

Your job posting attracts the wrong applicants because it was written before you decided who you actually wanted. Specific in, specific out. I'm Christian Saab, founder of CPG Recruitment, and after building teams across 25+ industries in Canada and the US since 2020, I can tell you the fix is almost never in the posting itself. It's in the 17 questions you answer about your ideal candidate before you write a single line of it. One client did exactly that and went from terrib

Your LinkedIn profile almost certainly does not say what you think it says — and you can find out exactly what it does say in about five minutes, for free, by pasting your own profile URL into Claude or ChatGPT and asking it to summarize you in five seconds. I'm Christian Saab, founder of CPG Recruitment. Since March 2020 my team has built teams across 25+ industries in Canada and the US, and I have read more profiles than I can count. The gap between what a candidate believe

You know your onboarding is working when your new hire goes home after day one, gets asked "how was your first day?", and answers "I'm so lucky I joined this company." That sentence is the whole scoreboard. I'm Christian Saab, founder of CPG Recruitment, and after building teams across 25+ industries in Canada and the US since March 2020, I've watched more good hires get lost in the first thirty days than in the search that found them. Hiring ends at the offer. Onboarding is

You know a hire was successful when that person is still in the role years later, doing the best work of their life — not on the day they sign the offer. I'm Christian Saab, founder of CPG Recruitment, and after building teams across 25+ industries in Canada and the US since 2020, I can tell you the offer letter is the least reliable signal in the whole process. The real scoreboard shows up at month twelve, year two, year three. Most business owners never look at it. That is

If you'd hesitate to re-hire someone already on your team, your hiring standards are too low. The difference between a company that thrives and one that quietly falls apart isn't the product or the market — it's the people, and people are the one input most owners are least rigorous about. I'm Christian Saab, founder of CPG Recruitment, and having built teams across 25+ industries in Canada and the US since 2020, I've watched two businesses in the same market with the same of