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During college recruiting season, Jeff Daniel crisscrosses the country at a dizzying pace. Some mornings, he wakes up after three hours of sleep and can't remember which campus he's visiting. Stanford? Harvard? Carnegie Mellon?

Some nights, he'll switch on his laptop at 3 a.m. and send email to recruits: Dude, how did that exam go? . . . I see it's snowing again in Ithaca. I hate to tell you, but it's 70 degrees today in Austin. . . . I'm coming in next week. Let's have dinner.

That commitment pays dividends. Trilogy is a small company, but it has a big presence in many of the nation's top computer-science departments and engineering schools. Chris Ostroot, 31, successfully tapped 33 students from Carnegie Mellon's Class of 1998 -- more than any other technical employer recruited from that university this year. In August, at Trilogy's annual awards banquet (which Trilogians call "prom"), she was named the company's "Superstar" and was awarded a 1999 Saab convertible.

On college campuses, Trilogy sponsors lectures and computer clubs, along with various traditional recruiting events. "At Harvard, you'd think Trilogy was the biggest software company in the world," says Rob Lilleness, 31, a Harvard MBA and a recent hire.

Because there is such a shortage of talent these days, Trilogy doesn't limit itself to recruiting only graduates with technical degrees. Roughly half of all TUers are liberal-arts majors. "We can take English majors who know nothing about software and make them great marketers," Liemandt says. "What's important is that you're very good or the best at something. It doesn't matter what."

Identifying college recruits is one thing -- after all, they're looking for jobs -- but finding great industry hires is another matter. Trilogy has tried everything from telemarketing to giving away coffee mugs. The most successful method? Referrals.

A Trilogy subsidiary called pcOrder.com, for example, held a drawing: By sending in a qualified technical resume of someone they knew, entrants became eligible to win a Porsche. Out of 2,000 submissions, the company found 24 leads that resulted in new hires. "People who are not looking are often the ones who are really good, and they're the hardest to find," says Venky Veeraraghavan, 26, director of industry recruiting.

Because it hires such top-notch talent, Trilogy itself has become a target of recruiting -- a nice compliment, to be sure, but also a potential curse. But Liemandt isn't worried about headhunters. "My job is to make this company so compelling that you want to stay. I do that by continuing to hire the best people. The number-one reason that our employees give for not leaving is 'I wouldn't be able to work with these people anymore.' It always comes back to the quality of the people."

Chuck Salter (csalter@bcpl.net) is a Fast Company contributing editor based in Baltimore. You can learn more about Trilogy Software Inc. on the Web (www.trilogy.com).