By: Angelica Burlaza
Maddi Carroll spent years watching her own industry fail the people it was supposed to serve. Instead of accepting that as just how recruitment works, she built something to change it. That decision became The Power Recruiter, a new online course designed to properly train recruiters from the ground up and to give an industry with a reputation problem an actual path toward fixing it.
Carroll already runs Power Recruitment and Consulting, a Brisbane-based agency known for relationship-first placements across the white-collar construction and infrastructure sectors. Building an education brand alongside that business was not about stepping back from recruiting. It was about taking what she had learned running her own agency and turning it into something an entire industry could use.
She built it to raise her own team’s standard, then realized the whole industry needed it
The idea for The Power Recruiter did not start as a business plan. It started with Carroll wanting her team at Power Recruitment and Consulting to be a step above, with a consistent approach regardless of who a client or candidate happened to work with. Whether someone on her team was a brand new recruiter or an experienced one, she believed the same fundamentals applied to both.
“I first built this to train my own team, and then I thought, why stop there?” she said. “If I can lift the standard across the whole industry, then recruiter goes from a word we’re a bit ashamed of to one we’re proud of.”
That shift, from strengthening her own team to taking on an entire industry, is where The Power Recruiter really took shape. Carroll built the course around the belief that recruiters wield real influence over people’s careers and livelihoods, and that almost nobody teaching the profession is still doing the job day-to-day. She wanted her course to be the exception.
Carroll says another motivation stemmed from situations in which candidates were contacted using information they did not expect to be shared broadly. She says those experiences reinforced her view that privacy, consent, and trust should be emphasized in recruiter training.
A common misconception about the course is that it is only for people brand new to recruiting. Carroll pushes back on that directly. “It’s not just for people starting from scratch, it’s for anyone at any stage,” she said. “Whether you’ve never recruited a day in your life, you’re coming across from another industry, or you’re already recruiting and just want to get better at it, the fundamentals are the same. And honestly, hardly any of us were ever properly taught them.”
What makes The Power Recruiter different is Carroll herself
Carroll is still an active recruiter, working real placements through Power Recruitment and Consulting while running the course. That matters because it means every lesson comes from what she is doing this week, not theory from years ago.
It also means her own approach to the job shows up directly in what she teaches. Carroll is vocal about the industry’s obsession with speed and fees, and about training recruiters to build relationships that last, not just chase a single placement. Her philosophy comes down to something simple: recruiters need to remember they are dealing with people first, and the job title comes second. Get that part right, she argues, and the results tend to follow on their own. For a founder who could have kept that knowledge within her own agency, choosing to teach it openly is a statement in itself.
The Power Recruiter’s social channels launched July 1, and the course is now live. Carroll built it because she was not willing to wait for someone else to raise the standard first. Now she is betting that the recruiters who come through her course will be the ones who end up setting it, and that the industry’s reputation changes one properly trained recruiter at a time.
