Elite Staffing: Nerds for Hire

IF YOUR COMPANY NEEDS AN INFUSION of high-achieving, intelligent hotshots, you may want to employ the services of Recruiting Intelligence Inc., a recruitment firm based in New York City. The company's main selling point: It places only elite college graduates into permanent positions.

Recruiting Intelligence recruits must have graduated in the top 1 percent of their classes from an Ivy League or similar top school, possess good standardized test scores and in other ways qualify as your basic overachiever. While these are the minimum requirements for consideration, some of the firm's clients demand even more." One company we work with won't look at anyone who doesn't have a minimum GPA of 3.5 and at least 1,350 on their SATs," notes Jane Caryl, founder and president of Recruiting Intelligence, who left her previous job at a placement firm because she "got tired of putting the brightest people in the dullest jobs."

Though companies scrambling to fill positions these days might disagree, she claims that "finding these people is easy. Once you start working with someone, they send their friends. I have a database of these people, and they all go on to have brilliant careers." Caryl has also found over the years that there is a direct connection between people who overachieve in school and those individuals who make the best employees."These are the workers who go the extra mile, broaden ideas, create projects and don't wait around to be told what to do. They do the work of three employees."