My take (long)
Anyone who has worked in a highly effective organization before can see why Mario is truly among the very best at recruiting. Mario is not just fast talking kids like some slick salesman into getting them to commit on impulse after a hard sell. He's building an outreach program that targets the right kids at the right time to fully buy into his vision, He has what's called an "operating framework" that he is imprinting onto the entire program.
Everyone on his staff has to buy into recruiting as a business process formed around a desired outcome -- actually a series of processes all interconnected, with multiple workflows for each step in each process. Every activity within each workflow involves people (the responsible, accountable, consulted and informed individuals for each task), detailed processes, technology and content. There is governance and inspection across the entire system and at every single step within every workflow in the system.
By far the most important element in recruiting is the people. But it's its own operating model like all organizational models. And Mario is building the foundation to make it the best of the best.
This particular event, EPD, makes sense when it's targeted at the next class who are Juniors and those last remaining prospects from the current class who have yet to sign. It should be exclusive -- hence the elite name -- because that subset of targets is appropriately a smaller target audience than all the kids the staff recruits at any given time. There will be time later to go back and scrub through the developmental or late bloomer prospects.