About Us
The story of Amtec
Bob Underwood Takes Over
In 1959, Robert Underwood took over what was then a floundering, debt-ridden staffing company, with the mission of finding the right candidates for its customers. Renaming it Amtec Engineering, Inc., Bob worked hard to pull the company out of the red and honor his predecessor’s debts. With God’s help and a lot of elbow grease, he succeeded, and the little staffing agency grew under the leadership of Bob and a new partner, Peter Van Dyken.
At first located on Commonwealth Avenue in Fullerton, California, the company served mainly technical companies like Beckman, General Dynamics, Honeywell, and Rockwell. Without the invention of computers or fax machines, candidates hand-delivered or mailed in their time cards and resumes, which were coded and painstakingly filed so they could be retrieved for the right direct hire or contract job. Each week, many contractors came in to pick up their checks, and they were always greeted by name.
Scott Kuethen Joins the Team
Scott Kuethen joined the Amtec team as a recruiter. Young and full of new ideas, he constantly made suggestions for improvement, such as bringing in new technology (the fax!) and ways to cut costs so the company could survive the latest economic downturn. Scott loved the win/win opportunity that recruiting afforded him; helping both a candidate and an employer in one fell swoop was almost as good as eating ice cream!
When Pete decided to retire, Scott and a partner bought his share of the agency. A few years later, when Bob wanted to semi-retire, they bought him out, too, making Scott the CEO in 1999.
Jay and Barrett Arrive
The winds of change continued to blow as Jay Ramos, fresh out of college in 2000, began recruiting at Amtec. Computer technology also rapidly evolved, enabling us to be even more efficient in tracking candidate resumes and employers’ open positions.
2006 brought us a new bookkeeping intern, Barrett Kuethen, just in time to help us weather the economic downturn of 2008. In 2012, Amtec moved its headquarters to Chino Hills.
Three Partners
By 2015 the shape of the company had changed. Jay, by then a dynamite salesman, had become Amtec’s president and a partner. Barrett, the intern-turned-bookkeeper, had grown into our wise Operations Manager and a partner alongside Scott. Three people, three vantage points, and one shared conviction: that a staffing company is only ever as good as the relationships it keeps on both sides of a placement, with the candidate and with the client.
New partners brought fresh ideas and widened what Amtec could imagine for itself. What did not change was the reason for the work. We were still here to find the right person for the right role, whether that meant a direct hire or a contract placement, and to be the firm a client called first. We were still measured by how well we did both.
Sixty Years
In 2019, Amtec turned sixty. We celebrated with the people who built the company: the families, the longtime clients who kept calling back, and the contractors who remembered when picking up a paycheck meant a handshake and a hello at the front desk.
Sixty years is a long time in staffing. Filing cabinets gave way to applicant tracking systems, fax machines to real-time analytics, and the economy rose and fell more times than anyone cared to count. What carried through was simpler than any of it: know the work, know the people, and do what you said you would do.
The Third Generation
In April 2025, Barrett Kuethen became CEO. By then he had been at Amtec nearly twenty years: the bookkeeping intern of 2006, the Operations Manager of 2015, the Chief Operating Officer of 2021. A third-generation owner, he now carries a legacy stretching back to 1959 into an era being reshaped by AI.
Barrett’s conviction is that transforming recruiting takes two engines running together. On the front end, recruiters who know their clients’ businesses as well as they know their candidates, armed with decades of experience and proprietary hiring tools. On the back end, technology that keeps the operation friction-free, including Bilflo, the back-office platform Barrett founded so staffing firms can scale their operations without scaling their costs.
Much has changed since Bob Underwood took the keys to a struggling agency in Fullerton. The tools are almost unrecognizable. The mission is not: know the people on both sides of a hire, find the right person for the right role, and greet everyone by name along the way.
Technology and human empathy are not opposites. They are multipliers.