Click here for Part I, Part III & Part IV

From your first job……to your best job

Jeff Martin is the president and CEO of University Recruiters. Based in Maple Lawn, Maryland, University Recruiters is a global recruiting and job placement agency that champions the needs of young professionals and recent graduates. The company assists candidates throughout the job-seeking process, refining resumes, preparing candidates for interviews, and offering tools to help individuals define and pursue their long-term career goals. Prior to University Recruiters, Jeff served as Director of Recruiting for NewDay USA for 12 years.

Q. Tell us about your vision for the company and what makes it different from other recruiting firms.

JEFF MARTIN: I believe that any good recruiter company has access to the same people. There could be a level of that that could be dialled down or up, but what makes us different is I want to exclusively work with young business professionals—really, millennials. I honestly believe that in recruiting you have to have a niche, because when things do get tight—and they will tighten back up at some point—everyone goes to the company that’s the expert in what they do.

I truly believe that I saw a movement: companies were going younger. I decided that I wanted to be the company that specialized in placing, training, and coaching the millennial business professionals on how to get a job, and then place them. I also realized that companies weren’t going to pay you a 20% fee for a young kid one year out of school. It just wasn’t going to happen.

At that point, I knew I wanted to go into working with young business professionals. I had years and years of experience and I enjoy it. I love it—you know, being the big brother, the mentor, the coach. But at the same time, I knew that there was a business to be had if I was to do it southwest a little bit and change my pricing structure to make sense to be affordable for the mom-and-pop shop down the street that can’t pay you 20%. I’m not knocking any big companies—they have rules and they have to follow them—but because we were small I was able to build my team off an overhead that worked with clients telling me what they could afford to pay and making it a win-win.

The thing that prides me the most is when anyone gets an invoice from a recruiter—it’s another bill to pay, and it could be a big bill—I always tell clients that I meet that my goal is, when you receive the invoice, that you really do believe it’s a win-win. You may not want to pay it, but it’s a win-win, and you understand that I have your back as much as your employees.

You’re never going to mess with the big boys. There are great companies out there that one day I hope to be the size of, but it definitely is, because we do a lot of interviews, and we always ask. Because when they come to meet us, we’re not trying to jam them into a job. We want to know who they are and many times we say, “We don’t have anything for you.” We ask: “Where else are you interviewing? What else are you doing? I may know someone there.”

I very often get the response: “another recruiting firm,” and I try to get the feedback on how that was, but we get calls and emails, and more of the sense of “Can I come work for you?” or “How are you guys doing this?”

I know right now I’m just a small thorn, but as we grow and we grow the social media thing that many people are ignoring… You know, these big recruiting firms have been making so much money the same way, and when the cheese moves, you move with it. We’re getting ahead of the game. I do believe we are a thorn.

We don’t try to do everything everyone else does. Right now, I don’t do contract work, so a lot of these companies I’m not messing with. I don’t do a lot of stuff that’s very high-end or unique clearance. That’s not my model. My model was to do one thing and to do it better than anyone else, to do it faster than anyone else and to do it cheaper than anyone else. Because of that, I’m being noticed and we’re disrupting the way it’s done, and it’s only going to get more disruptive when we roll out some of this new stuff that we’re doing.

Connect with Jeff on LinkedIn

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