In 1981, if you needed to hire someone, you opened the newspaper and read the tiny gray columns. That's where talent lived. Between the cars for sale and the apartments for rent.
Susan Levine looked at that system and thought there had to be a better way to match a person to a place.
Not a listing. A person.
She started Career Group Companies that year in Los Angeles, and she built it on something that doesn't fit neatly into a classified ad: the relationship. She wanted to know the candidate. She wanted to know the company. And she believed that if you knew both well enough, you could put them together in a way no gray column ever could.
Forty-five years later, she's still right.
The firm she started now spans multiple divisions and coasts. This year alone, Career Group Companies staffed the FIFA World Cup 2026 — one of the largest events on the planet — and earned its seventh consecutive spot on Forbes' list of America's Best Recruiting Firms. Seven years in a row. That's not a lucky quarter. That's a pattern.
But here is the part I keep coming back to.
She never took a dollar of outside capital. Not one. In an industry that runs on growth and acquisition and somebody else's money, Susan built the whole thing on her own terms and kept it that way. When you don't owe anyone else, you get to decide what your company values. And she decided it would value people.
You could look at 1981 and see all the reasons it should have been hard. A woman founding a staffing firm. No investors, no safety net, no template for what she was trying to do. The world wasn't built for it, and the people inside that world weren't villains — they were just operating inside a system that hadn't imagined her yet.
So she imagined it herself.
And then she did something rarer than founding a company. She built it into a legacy. Susan runs Career Group Companies alongside her daughters, which means the relationship model she started with isn't just how she treats clients — it's how she built the whole house. Around a kitchen table long before it was around a boardroom one.
I love that. A mother and her daughters running a firm that finds people the right place to belong. There's a symmetry there you couldn't design if you tried.
Most founders chase the exit. The big sale, the payout, the walk away. Susan Levine kept showing up for forty-five years because she was never building something to sell. She was building something to last.
She could have taken the money. She could have cashed out a dozen times over.
She built a legacy instead — because *the point was never the exit.*
The World Cup will come and go. The Forbes list will print again next year. But the thing Susan started in 1981 keeps doing what it was always meant to do: put the right person in the right room and trust that everything good starts there.
She's still doing it. And I have a feeling her daughters will be doing it long after.
