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- 🎙️ New Ep. Rebecca Medina & Jeff Phillips | How Talent Cheetah Cut PM Hiring from 90 Days to 5 Minutes with Transparent Pricing
🎙️ New Ep. Rebecca Medina & Jeff Phillips | How Talent Cheetah Cut PM Hiring from 90 Days to 5 Minutes with Transparent Pricing
🎙️ The newest episode of START is live!
Hey There,
🎙️ START Ep. 30 | Rebecca Medina and Jeff Phillips built an AI-powered talent marketplace that's disrupting recruitment with transparent pricing, direct negotiation, and same-day PM hires for SMBs.
Rebecca Medina had the network. She had decades of Big Tech experience. She had the credibility. But when she needed project management help on a client engagement as an independent consultant, none of it mattered.
"Even with my network of project managers, I couldn't find the right person fast enough," Rebecca recalls. "And it created a big problem for the company because we weren't able to scale as quickly as we wanted."
That pain point became Talent Cheetah.
Five years later, Rebecca and her co-founder Jeff Phillips have built an AI-powered talent marketplace connecting pre-vetted project managers with SMBs. They've scaled to 300 PMs across 34 US states. They've even partnered with the Project Management Institute. But the metric that matters most: the Bureau of Labor Statistics says it takes 90 days to hire a technical project manager. Talent Cheetah does it in minutes—with same-day hiring possible.
In this episode, Medina and Phillips break down the recruitment model that turns recruiting on its head: transparent pricing that exposes hidden markups, lower take rates than traditional agencies, direct PM-to-company negotiation, and real-time hiring through AI matching.
Key Topics Covered
Exposing the hidden markup: traditional agencies bill $x/hour, pay PMs $x/hour, keep $x secret from both parties
Fractional engagements: 10-hour/week arrangements that traditional agencies can't serveTransparent pricing model: complete visibility vs. hidden markups, lower take rates than Robert Half/Adecco/Tek Systems
The 90-day problem: Bureau of Labor Statistics average vs. Talent Cheetah's minutes-to-same-day matching
AI-powered matching: real-time algorithm surfaces top 3 PMs, with 100’s more to browse
I hope you find this educational content valuable and can apply it in your business. Until next week - keep experimenting, keep scaling, keep building.
David J Phillips
Founder & CEO at Fondo