About — Job Judo

For more than ten years, Sam Williams taught marketing students at the Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona. Somewhere along the way, he noticed something that troubled him: even his strongest students — the ones with high GPAs, real internships, and actual ambition — were graduating into jobs that didn't require their degrees. The standard career-services advice wasn't working. Hope wasn't a strategy.

So he started teaching them a system. Not motivation. Not networking platitudes. A measurable, business-to-business (B2B)-sales-style methodology applied to the student job search: find out what the Buyers (Hiring Managers and Campus Recruiters) want, give it to them through Sponsors who advocate internally, and measure your performance with a single number — the Stage-to-Stage % Yield.

Small style improvements throw a much bigger opponent. The job market is the heavier opponent. Most students try to out-strength it. Job Judo students out-leverage it.

Over the years, Sam's students started landing at Boston Consulting Group, Goldman Sachs, NASA, Google, Nike, P&G, NBCUniversal, Mattel, and dozens of others — at rates well above their peers. The 30 named, on-the-record student stories featured on the main site are a fraction of who's been through the system.

As the methodology matured, it became a book of more than 40 chapters — internships, target lists, scripts, interview frameworks, offer-evaluation tools, financial planning. The challenge was that the book lived in Sam's classroom and on a few PDFs passed between students. It deserved a wider home.

That's where Juan Carlos Jimenez ("JC") came in. JC was one of Sam's students at U of A — he ran the playbook himself, landed multiple offers before graduation, and went on to become a World Wide Product Manager at IBM. He's the co-founder who's translating the curriculum into a platform parents and students can actually access from anywhere.

Job Judo, the platform, is everything Sam taught — made systematic, accessible, and updated for AI-era workflows. Real curriculum. Real tools (the Golden Grid Customer Relationship Management (CRM), the searchable database of 600+ companies and 4,000+ Campus Recruiters). Real community (Hunting Packs). And real outcomes — three high-quality job offers, not one.

01The Co-Founders

Built by the people who taught it.

Two co-founders. One who designed the methodology in a classroom over a decade. One who lived it as a student and now translates it into a platform.

Sam Williams

Co-Founder · Methodology Architect
Adjunct Lecturer (Retired), Marketing
Eller College of Management, University of Arizona

Sam taught hundreds of Eller students the methodology that became Job Judo. His students landed at Goldman Sachs, NASA, Boston Consulting Group, Procter & Gamble, Nike, NBCUniversal, and dozens of other top-tier firms — at rates well above their peers. Job Judo is everything he taught, made systematic and accessible to students who never had the chance to take his class.

Sam's voice is the brand voice of Job Judo. Direct, warm, quantitative. Treats students as capable adults training for a serious skill. The methodology, the terminology (Stage-to-Stage (STS) yields, Targeted, Timely, Responsive (TTR) applications, Side Door, Hunting Packs, Polite Persistence, Golden Grid), and the standards — all his.

Juan Carlos Jimenez

Co-Founder · Platform & Student-Side Perspective
World Wide Product Manager, IBM
University of Arizona alumnus

JC went through the methodology himself as a U of A student. He ran Sam's playbook, cultivated Sponsors, executed three Search Cycles, and landed multiple offers before graduation — including the IBM role he now holds as a World Wide Product Manager. He's lived every step of what Job Judo teaches.

JC also helped Sam coach other students through the methodology during his time at U of A. His role at Job Judo: bring the student-side perspective to every product decision. What does it actually feel like to navigate the internship market? Where does AI help and where does it confuse? What do parents really need to know? JC translates the curriculum into the platform.

02The Mark

From three teardrops to two… to none.

The Job Judo logo started as a traditional mitsudomoe — the three-teardrop tomoe symbol used across Japanese martial-arts heraldry, including the Kodokan, where modern judo was born. Three figures rotating around a center: motion, balance, and the cyclical nature of training.

Mitsudomoe Three teardrops

Futatsudomoe Two teardrops

We simplified it to two teardrops — the futatsudomoe — to focus on the relationship at the heart of every judo throw: two people, in motion, in balance.

Look closer at the result. The two teardrops aren't just abstract shapes. They read as two figures in contact — a handshake, the formal greeting that opens a new conversation.. or a judo match, the instant before the throw. Two readings, one mark.

An acknowledgment

The original Job Judo book was co-authored by Sam Williams and Pete Corrigan (Associate Director, Employer and Alumni Relations at the University of Arizona). Pete brought decades of recruiter-side perspective to specific chapters of the source material — what Hiring Managers actually want, how Campus Recruiters evaluate candidates, how the 4,000+ Recruiter database was assembled.

Pete is credited as a co-author of the source book. Job Judo, the platform, is a separate venture co-founded by Sam Williams and Juan Carlos Jimenez. We're grateful for Pete's contributions to the underlying methodology that made the platform possible.

03Mission

Why we're doing this.

52% of college graduates accept jobs that don't require their degree. Most stay underemployed a decade later. The gap between fully employed and underemployed graduates compounds across a 40-year career into roughly $2,000,000.

That gap isn't about talent or work ethic. It's about access to a system. Sam's students had access — through his classroom. Most college students don't. Job Judo exists to close that gap for any student willing to do the work, regardless of which school they attend or whether their career center has the resources to help them.

We measure success by one thing: three high-quality job offers in our students' inboxes. Not one. Not internships that don't lead anywhere. Three real offers with real companies — so students choose, learn, negotiate, and start their careers from a position of strength.

Built in a classroom.