At the end of 2017, Glenn Diersen was the top producer at The Select Group, outshining 140 other producers at the multimillion-dollar staffing agency. He left all that behind to found Richmond’s Summit Human Capital, a staffing startup geared toward the information technology industry.
“If it was about the money, it never would have made sense for me to leave,” said Diersen. “But I had to. I had to because of what this industry needs.”
Despite starting out with zero outside funding, Summit is now looking at $40 million in annual revenue as it approaches the end of its fifth year in business.
The company, which has connected more than 550 workers with technology jobs at both government and private-sector agencies, is focused on a value-based system, according to Diersen. The goal is to match a prospective employee’s personal passions with a company’s mission — an idea which, in Diersen’s opinion, is a major change for the staffing industry.
“We firmly believe you cannot commoditize people,” Diersen said. “Because of our commitment to these values, we're requiring the industry to change their way from going to a commodity-based mindset to a genuine human-centric way of carrying themselves.”
The firm opened a second headquarters in McLean in 2021 to extend its services to government contracting in addition to the commercial sector. Working with both sectors has helped maintain steady demand throughout times of upheaval. It allowed Summit to avoid laying off employees as a 2-year-old startup during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, and can help manage any lull from a potential government shutdown, Diersen said.
Summit’s exceptional revenue growth has landed it at the top of the Inc. 5000 list of the nation’s fastest-growing companies. In its first year of eligibility for the list in 2022, it debuted at No. 20 thanks to a three-year revenue growth of 14,413%, and ranked again this year at No. 310 with 1,841% growth.
Fueling this growth is simple, Diersen said: “It’s who we hire.”
Despite a roughly 200-person workforce, Summit isn’t an easy place to get hired. In the process of hiring six new employees last June, the company interviewed more than 200 candidates, Diersen said.
Once hired, employee recognition and acknowledgement is crucial to Diersen; a bell literally rings any time someone connects a staffer and a company, and the office joins together to celebrate. In May, the company was named one of Inc. magazine’s Best Workplaces.
“We're more fired up for Mondays than one could ever imagine,” Diersen said.
