Nick Burns

From Gym Memberships to a Career He Didn't Know Existed

Burns did not know what recruiting was when he was in college. Few people do, which is part of why he talks about the profession the way he does, as something discovered rather than chosen. His first job was selling gym memberships at Lifetime Fitness, work he did for a few years and which taught him something more durable than a sales quota: how to build genuine rapport with the person across the desk.

That rapport got noticed. A recruiting firm approached him to see whether he would interview, they hit it off, and he found the thing he had been circling without knowing it. The idea of connecting a hiring manager and a candidate, of helping someone land a job they actually wanted, landed immediately. "I fell in love with it from the very beginning," he says.

He started in sales recruiting. Then a marketing firm asked him to recruit for them, and he stayed seven and a half years. From there he moved through engineering recruiting, accounting and finance, and HR, until he had worked essentially every major practice area the industry has. The through line never changed. Every day, he says, it is fulfilling to make those connections and make people's careers happy.

Two Mentors, One Lesson About Slowing Down

Burns names two mentors, and he still keeps in touch with both.

The first was his direct manager at his very first recruiting firm, John Arnold, now a co-owner of Celerity. Arnold taught him how to recruit, then taught him how to talk to clients, which is a separate skill entirely. That client-facing mentorship, Burns says, was crucial. Arnold eventually left the firm to start his own business, and Burns had a front-row seat to what it looks like when someone goes out on their own and builds a company in their own image. It was the first time he had seen it done. Years later, he would do it himself.

The second came at his next agency and pushed him further on the same front. When Burns left that firm, he asked for constructive criticism on how he could improve. The answer stuck: when you are communicating with hiring managers and clients, really get to know them on a personal level before you go in and try to sell. Burns admits the feedback found a real gap. He had been scratching the surface, coming off, in his own assessment, a little too transactional. Now he treats the first ten or fifteen minutes of a conversation as the point, not the preamble, the time to understand who someone is and what actually drives and motivates them, personally and professionally. "That advice has been incredible," he says. It is also, he notes, the thing most easily lost in an industry built on speed.

Building the Tools Instead of Renting Them

Burns started TrustedHire the conventional way, with a Squarespace site, "because that's what people were doing." The limitations surfaced fast. He didn't own the code, implementing anything custom was difficult, and the result looked cookie cutter. His ATS and CRM had the same problem in a different package: $150 a month for a tool that met a lot of his needs but not all of them. Add the rest of the stack and he was spending over $200 a month on software that never quite fit.

So he rebuilt it. Using Claude, he coded the TrustedHire website from scratch, then his own ATS and CRM, then his own calendar scheduler, which let him drop Calendly. Everything is now built exactly how he wants it. Then he went further and built four AI agents that handle the day-to-day administrative tasks that bog recruiters down.

He is deliberate about the guardrails. The agents are not yet fully autonomous; Burns still approves what they produce, because the work is new enough that he wants eyes on it. But the destination is clear. Full autonomy would free him to do what AI cannot: attend networking events, build his personal brand, sit across from people. "Basically like having a team of employees in the office while I'm out of the office," he says.

The build has turned into a second business line. TrustedHire now offers recruiting services on one side and custom AI website and SaaS tool builds on the other, two distinct service offerings from a firm less than a year old.

On AI: Grasp It or Get Left Behind

Burns is unambiguous. AI is revolutionary, and he understands why it frightens people, but he sees the fear as a function of unfamiliarity rather than a reason to hold back. "It's not going anywhere," he says. "It's going to leave you behind if you don't try to keep up with it." His counsel to peers is to make understanding it a priority, not a project for later.

What he automates is telling. The agents take the administrative load, the work that carries no human weight. What he protects is the conversation, the relationship, the fifteen minutes at the top of a call. In his hands the technology is not a replacement for the craft his mentors taught him. It is what buys him the time to practice it properly.

Give More Than You Take

Asked what advice he would offer other recruiting leaders, Burns does not talk about tooling or throughput. He talks about pace. Slow down, value the relationships you are building, and choose quality over quantity. Treating every conversation as a transaction is obvious to whoever is on the other end, candidate or hiring manager alike. The people who succeed, he argues, are the ones who take time to understand who they are talking to, make them feel valued, and try to give more than they are trying to receive.

He points to The Go-Giver as the book behind the philosophy: give as much as you can, and expect nothing back. Some of it returns. Some never does. Burns is at peace with both outcomes. "You're always going to have the satisfaction of what you gave them," he says, and that satisfaction, in his view, should be the motivating, energizing thing, not the close. Do it that way and it reads as genuine, because it is. Those are the people, he says, who stay in your corner.