Ask Nick Burns what makes a hire work, and he will not start with a resume. He starts with fit. Skills can be taught, he likes to say, but culture cannot, and when the culture is wrong, nothing else holds up for long.
That conviction is the foundation of TrustedHire, the boutique recruiting firm Nick founded in Minneapolis in January of 2026. The name is not decoration. After fifteen years inside other recruiting firms, Nick had watched the industry lean hard into short-term transactions, and he wanted to build something that ran on the opposite instinct: long-term relationships, honestly maintained.
From Recruiter to Founder
The leap into ownership was not part of a five-year plan so much as a shove. Nick had been thinking about starting his own firm for about three years when an unexpected layoff arrived in December of 2025, the first of his career. He decided it was now or never. TrustedHire opened its doors on January 5th, 2026.
He is refreshingly candid about how much he did not know at the start. Setting up an LLC, choosing a tech stack, authenticating email, building a website from scratch, rebranding himself as an entrepreneur rather than an employee. None of it came pre-assembled. What carried him through, he says, was his network. The same people he had spent years helping showed up to coach him through the hurdles, share resources, and make introductions. He describes being a little overwhelmed by how willing everyone was to help.
Culture First, Not Resume First
The philosophy Nick built the firm around is straightforward to state and harder to practice. Most recruiting, in his view, treats candidates and companies as items to be matched and moved. He wants to do the slower work of understanding both sides well enough to know whether they actually belong together.
In practice, that means he weighs whether a candidate aligns with an organization’s culture and whether the organization genuinely serves that person’s career goals, before the conversation ever narrows to skills. Skills still matter, and they still have to line up. But he treats them as the part you can develop, while fit is the part you cannot manufacture after the fact.
His focus areas are Accounting and Finance, Human Resources, and Operations, with roles running from entry level all the way to the C-suite. He is industry agnostic and built for small to medium-sized businesses, roughly the ten to five hundred employee range, where a single wrong hire is felt immediately and a great one can change the trajectory of a team.
A Reputation Built in Public
Nick is not new to any of this, even if the firm is. Over fifteen years he has placed more than 500 people into careers across a wide range of industries, and he has built a substantial following on LinkedIn, where he has been recognized as a Top Voice for the content he publishes. He writes regularly about the realities of hiring, including a widely read piece on what the Minneapolis market has meant for small and midsize businesses. You can read his take on the Minneapolis hiring market and follow his ongoing commentary on his personal LinkedIn page.
Being a one-person firm is a feature, not a limitation, in his telling. Without layers of process to move through, he can meet a client where they are and shape a recruiting package around their actual needs rather than a standard menu.
The Long Game
Nick talks about his work the way he talks about the rest of his life. He coaches his kids’ youth basketball traveling teams and serves as their Travel Director, and he keeps in steady contact with friends and family as a resource whenever someone needs one. A favorite book of his, The Go-Giver, captures the ethic he tries to live by: give as much as you can to the people around you, and it tends to come back around.
There is motivation close to home, too. His wife, Lauren, homeschools their three children, and Nick is the sole financial provider, a responsibility he points to as fuel for building something durable.
His ambition for TrustedHire is national, but the definition of success stays local in spirit. He wants the firm to be known and trusted by small to medium-sized businesses across the country as one that recruits the right way, stays willing to help, and gives back to clients, candidates, supporters, and community alike.
You can learn more about TrustedHire on its company LinkedIn page or connect with the firm on Facebook.
