Click here for Part II, 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. How did you get your start in the recruiting business?

JEFF MARTIN: I’m from New York. I wasn’t given anything—I had to work for everything—so in the summers I worked down at the beach, taking telescope pictures of everybody. While I was down there, I was literally taking pictures of a family of a recruiter who told me that she had a great job for me when I graduated. I called her the day I graduated, and she put me in contact with the company that gave me my first start: NewDay USA. I started there as a loan officer and worked my way up.

Back then, there was maybe 40 or 50 of us, so everyone was wearing multiple hats. I think it was around 2009 when I was a sales manager there. As a sales manager, you had to build your team, but you were relying on a recruiter to do it for you. At that point, I knew that if I wanted to make the income that I wanted to make, I was going to have to go ahead and do it myself.

In 2009, I started building my own team and realized although I loved helping people and doing mortgage loans, my passion was really in recruiting and helping people find jobs. The hunt was exciting: to look for that person, then the selling the job, and to me there’s no better feeling than giving that person the opportunity. At that time, I decided to move into recruiting and ran recruiting at NewDay USA until 2014. In 2014, I decided to leave to open University Recruiters.

Q. Where did you get the entrepreneurial bug and find the confidence to start your own business?

A. I think what gave me my confidence is that I understood and I knew how to sell somebody a good opportunity. While I was an executive at NewDay USA, I was doing interviews for other recruiting companies all over the place—and there were some good ones—but I think the biggest issue was the amount of letdowns that I had that were just interviews thrown against the wall. I knew there had to be a better way, and if you did it right, the business would appreciate it. I saw so many resumes, so many good people who came in and just weren’t a good fit for some reason, or maybe they didn’t want to work there. When you’re a corporate recruiter and you’re recruiting for one company—which there’s nothing wrong with—it’s either they fit or they don’t, and I just knew that there were so many other places that would like a talent like that.

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