Tom Hunter

Founder of Story Recruitment — on how he turned LinkedIn into a $150K inbound machine, the follow-up most people skip, why personal posts do more than expert advice, and writing in his own voice with Claude

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18 minutes
LinkedIn Content · Inbound Leads · AI Content Workflow

About the Guest

Tom Hunter — Founder of Story Recruitment

Tom Hunter runs Story Recruitment, hiring the first finance person or the first CFO for tech, fintech and deeptech startups in Australia — from space and robotics to modern science

After about 10 years in accounting and finance recruitment he launched his own niche business, built a LinkedIn audience of finance professionals, and started the CFO Track podcast with Australia's best CFOs

30,000+ Followers
accounting and finance followers in Australia, built through about three years of consistent LinkedIn content
~2 Million Views a Year
thousands of people see each post — far more than the 20 to 30 calls he could make in a day
$150K in One Quarter
inbound work grew from $30–40K a quarter to about $150K once he added follow-ups to his content
CFO Track Podcast
a weekly show with Australia's best CFOs, about 50 episodes since launching in November

Key Quotes

“

I was just doing content. I wasn't doing the follow-ups. And that's probably the most important part for generating work.

Tom Hunter
“

LinkedIn used to be ultra corporate, but it's not. People buy from people.

Tom Hunter
“

It's like going to the gym. You don't get the gains from doing it one week. You get them from stacking on stacking on stacking.

Tom Hunter

Episode Chapters

0:00 On This Episode 0:40 Inside Startup Recruitment 2:17 The Talent Search Problem 3:29 The Business Growth Secret 6:30 Your Network = Your Revenue 8:19 Turning LinkedIn Posts Into Clients 10:33 The LinkedIn Content Grind 12:31 Posts That Bring in Business 15:05 AI-powered LinkedIn Content 17:27 Building the Right Partnerships

Full Transcript

BTW: This episode of One Thing That Worked is produced by Beverly Media. Featuring entrepreneurs and podcasters who share the one decision, strategy, or habit that had the biggest impact on their business.
0:00 On This Episode
Host I'm so surprised that posts about puppies and lying on the beach make a difference and get so many views, because it's supposed to be a professional network.
Tom LinkedIn used to be ultra corporate, but it's not. People buy from people. And don't get me wrong, you're not going to do five posts in a week about you being on the beach, having ice cream and playing with your puppy. You need to balance it out.
0:40 Inside Startup Recruitment
Host Today my guest is Tom Hunter, who's a finance recruiter for startups. He's the owner of Story Recruitment. Tom, welcome to the show.
Tom Absolutely. Thanks for having me. It's good to be here.
Host My pleasure. So tell us a little bit about your company, Story Recruitment. What do you guys do?
Tom I hire the first finance hire or the first CFO in startups in Australia. Usually it's tech, fintech or deeptech — deeptech being space, robotics, modern science, that kind of thing. I launched the business about eight or nine months ago, so it's still very early days. But I've been doing accounting and finance recruitment for about 10 years, and when I started the business I really narrowed down the niche. Riches are in the niches, I say.
Host This is interesting, because I have a lot of customers who do video and podcast production for recruiting companies in the US. You have to educate me a little bit. If a company has a need for a C-level executive and they come to someone like you, then what do you do?
Tom For the candidate it's free. For the client, I charge a percentage based on the salary. Let's say it's 20% and the salary is 400K — then it's an 80K fee.
2:17 The Talent Search Problem
Host What are some of the biggest challenges? Why can't companies find the talent themselves? Why do they need you?
Tom There are kind of two sides to it. Some markets are very candidate heavy, with lots of candidates available, and in some candidates are short. In my market it's not hugely hard to find candidates, but it's always difficult to find the absolute top-tier people. In startups it's not just the technical fit — the skill set is important, obviously — but very often it's a culture, personality and pace thing.
Tom Startups move at a fast pace because they're growing quickly and things are constantly changing. There's a lot more pressure on cash, given they've got investors involved and all the rest of it. It's a very specific environment, and it's just harder to find that type of profile.
3:29 The Business Growth Secret
Host Let me ask you the signature question of my show. As you're growing your business and finding these people, what is one thing that worked and works best for you?
Tom I've been doing content on LinkedIn for about two and a half, three years now. I started with written content, just dipping my toe in, and did a bit of LinkedIn-for-recruiters training. It usually breaks down into three buckets. First, valuable content, where you give advice, share market insights and basically share your expertise. Second, entertaining or personal content, where you build rapport at scale — an interesting story about yourself, something you did on the weekend, a meme, anything that makes people laugh or think of you.
Tom And then there's credible content, which is why someone should work with you — a testimonial, a recent win, a case study, a review. Basically building credibility at scale. I started doing this three years ago and incrementally did it more and differently. Right now I've got just over 30,000 accounting and finance followers in Australia, and the content generates about 2 million views a year.
Tom I put a lot of time into it, but it's incredibly powerful. The number of calls you can make on any given day might be 20 to 30. But I put a piece of content out there and thousands of people see it without me even picking up the phone. Initially it was just written content and the odd picture, then I started doing selfie videos — a bit awkward, but we battled through.
Tom Then last November I launched a podcast for my niche called the CFO Track, with Australia's best CFOs. I've been doing it weekly since November, about 50 episodes now. It's been incredible, not just from a branding perspective, but for building relationships with the people coming on, and from a learning perspective. You're talking to really high-calibre, successful people, and the learnings you bring from their stories are crazy. It's made me better at my job, because I can pass really specific, really good examples on to other people in their own career journey.
6:30 Your Network = Your Revenue
Host In your case, I think the phrase “your network is your net worth” is right on point. Your network pretty much determines your close rate, in a way.
Tom Absolutely. It makes it a lot easier to ask for referrals or to broadcast a job. When I'm recruiting for a role, I do this thing called a story post — a promotional piece of text with a graphic or a carousel about the role. I write it in a way that's quite celebratory and really elevates the business: where they've been, where they're going, telling the story.
Tom That piece gets so much traction in my market, because my network is accounting and finance people. I get so much inbound from people interested in the role that I might never have spoken to before. Melbourne is about a five-hour flight from Perth, and at the start of the year I was recruiting for a role in Melbourne. Someone in Perth saw it, they were moving to Melbourne a couple of weeks later, and I'd never spoken to them before — they'd just seen the post. Little things like that make a massive difference in my line of work.
Host In my case, I actually started generating more content after I started the podcast. For you it's vice versa.
8:19 Turning LinkedIn Posts Into Clients
Host How did you sustain this frequency of publishing? In the beginning you can't quantify the effect of content marketing. When did you realize it was worth doing consistently? Did you measure it, or were you still doing old-school outreach in parallel?
Tom The reason I got into content: I listened to a podcast with a guy who runs a LinkedIn branding company. I heard his story and thought, I'm leaving cash on the table here, I need to get involved. So I started doing three posts a week.
Host How many followers did you have on LinkedIn when you started?
Tom About 10,000, because with LinkedIn you're constantly connecting with people as part of the job. I was posting three days a week and wasn't really getting much out of it. This was pre-AI, so you're writing them all by hand, and it was pretty demoralizing at first — you're putting yourself out there and getting no engagement.
Tom I kept pushing on, and in the end I did the paid course from that company. They broke it down in a much more systematic way: how you structure the post, how you make it better, how you review it, and the process of outreach afterwards. Because what I wasn't doing — I was just doing content. I wasn't doing the follow-ups, reaching out to the people who had engaged with the content or viewed my profile. And that's probably the most important part for generating work: the follow-up.
10:33 The LinkedIn Content Grind
Tom From there it started to make a difference. In the first quarter I had maybe $30,000 to $40,000 worth of inbound work. The next quarter was about the same, maybe slightly more. Then the third quarter was about $150K worth of inbound work — someone commenting or liking a post and me following up in messages and having a chat, or someone messaging me directly saying, “Hey, I'm recruiting for this role, can you help me?” It started getting momentum pretty quickly.
Tom Since then it's just perpetuated further. It's like going to the gym: you don't get the gains from doing it one week, you get them from stacking on stacking on stacking. Before you know it you have familiarity with people you've never met or spoken with. So many good connections are people I've never met in person, but we've talked a couple of times on LinkedIn, or they've seen my content, or asked me a question about my puppy.
Host Would you say it's almost a full-time job? It's like sustaining a community on LinkedIn.
Tom It can be. I probably spend an hour or two at least each day. In the past, before I was using Claude to help me write content, I was spending four hours on a Sunday writing the whole week's content. That's not really sustainable. But I don't have kids, so what else am I going to be doing? If you're trying to run a business, you put in whatever you can.
12:31 Posts That Bring in Business
Host In your experience, what kind of posts bring both views and, most importantly, real results?
Tom I think it's the valuable ones. But you need to balance all three, because although personal and entertaining posts don't generate work directly, people buy from people. They want to relate to you, to see that you're a real person, likable, authentic and genuine — and that doesn't have to be super polished. I post about my garden and what I'm doing with my blueberries, and people buy into that. It's a bit silly, but you're just being yourself.
Tom From an algorithm perspective, personal posts get the most engagement — usually the most likes and comments. If you post one at the start of the week, you kick off engagement momentum, and every post that follows gets more as a result for three to five days. So you always want your highest-performing post at the start of the week, which is typically something personal or entertaining, something you did on the weekend. Beach, food, babies, dogs — those normally go pretty well.
Host That's something my team and I will have to rewatch. LinkedIn is supposed to be a professional network, so I'm surprised posts about puppies and the beach make such a difference.
Tom It's social media at the end of the day. LinkedIn used to be ultra corporate, but it's not. People buy from people. You're not going to do five posts a week about the beach, ice cream and your puppy — you need to balance it out. Puppy, then some great advice about CFOs, then the latest market update, then a recent placement that went great. Balance that and people get a really all-round view of you.
15:05 AI-powered LinkedIn Content
Host You mentioned Claude. I was reading about Stanley, an AI assistant specifically for writing LinkedIn posts. What is your relationship with AI in terms of copywriting for LinkedIn?
Tom I've got a bit of a system worked out. I have an MCP connected to my CRM, which has all my call and meeting transcripts from client meetings, and that's connected to Claude. Claude also has a connection to Airtable, which has an Apify scraper that scrapes my own content. So it gets a view of my voice from the transcripts and from my posts. Transcripts are so good for ideas — the problems and challenges your clients are having. You can pull them out.
Host And data from the podcast at the same time.
Tom Or just from clients and candidates talking about the problems they're experiencing. It's great content. Airtable also scrapes the people I'm trying to track, so if I know what clients are posting about and what problems they have, I can shape my content off the back of it. I pull how I post and what my style is, plus the post ideas, and create from there.
Tom It's never going to be 100% ready, because you should always review it, but it comes out pretty close — 80 to 95% correct — and you just touch it up. The more you train it and the more feedback you give it, the more it improves. It's a pretty good system as it stands.
17:27 Building the Right Partnerships
Host Sometimes these conversations really prompt me to change something in my business, so I'm really thankful for this piece. If people want to connect with you, who do you work with and what partnerships are you interested in?
Tom I recruit senior finance people in deeptech, tech and fintech in Australia — the east coast, or the west coast, Perth or Adelaide. The business is Story Recruitment, the website is storyrecruitment.com.au, and on LinkedIn it's Tom Hunter Story. I'm open to chatting with people looking for work, or who just want advice or a sense check of the market and salaries. Same for founders and CEOs, or businesses investing in early-stage startups, who want some free advice or a market sense check.
Host Thanks, Tom.
Tom Thank you.

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