Colleen Neary

From a Nameless Startup to a Ground-Up Program

Neary's career began at a company that did not yet have a name. She joined as an intern at what would become Nest, later acquired by Google, when the team was roughly 15 to 20 people. There she worked under an early mentor who showed her the ropes across HR and people operations, and she helped lead the company's first intern class, a class she was part of herself.

That experience produced a specific curiosity: what would it take to build a university recruiting program from nothing? She got her answer at Thumbtack, where she joined as a recruiting coordinator and immediately stepped in to help lead university recruiting. She owned it end to end, deciding which campuses to visit on site, what the intern program should look like, which events to sponsor over the summer, and how to measure intern conversion into full-time employees. Over four years at Thumbtack she recruited roughly 30 software engineers per summer.

It was, she says, her first real taste of autonomy and ownership, and it set the terms for everything after. "It was very, very motivating," she recalls, and from that point forward she knew the startup scene was for her, particularly the growth stage.

Scaling, Repeatedly

Fair recruited her as a senior business recruiter, where she partnered directly with the head of marketing and the head of sales to build out both go-to-market functions. She was promoted into management, then into a broader leadership role in which she still carried her own set of reqs while helping scale the company from 100 to 1,200 employees by the time she left.

Unified Vision brought her in as its founding recruiter, leading talent across the full spectrum: executive search, engineering, go-to-market and sales. In seven months she helped double the team and built out a group of senior recruiters to carry the work forward.

Now nearly a year into ElevenLabs, she oversees the North America revenue organization's hiring, covering the full pre-sales stack from SDRs and AEs through leadership and executive roles, while leading a team on the revenue side as well.

The through line in her choices is not company logo or title. It is a question she asks before joining anywhere: is everything already built out, or is the company in prime building-from-ground-up mode? "Where can I add the most impact?" she says. Fully built processes she finds less appealing. The blank page she finds irresistible.

Recruiting as a Game of Operations

The most consequential lesson of her recent career came from Amy Chung, her most recent manager, and it reframed how Neary defines the job itself. Chung does not come from a traditional talent background; her previous roles include revenue operations. What she is exceptional at, Neary says, is diagnosing what someone is stuck on and clearing the path.

That taught Neary that recruiting is fundamentally a game of operations. Sourcing tactics and pipeline quality matter enormously, but there is an overlooked discipline underneath them: how you communicate with stakeholders, how you unblock your team internally so they can deliver their best work, and how you earn the trust of the business. It also settled a question she now considers closed. "You don't necessarily need to have 10 years of experience in recruiting to do your best work," she says. What you need is the ability to partner with the business and remove the obstacles standing between the team and the result.

The AI Stack, and the Case Against Fear

Neary is unambiguous about artificial intelligence. She loves it, and she has built a stack around it. Her team uses n8n to automate feedback loops and chase interviewer scorecards, ensuring impressions are captured while they are still fresh rather than muddied by a few days of delay, and that candidates hear back as quickly as possible. Claude is in daily use, generating reports and dashboards inside Ashby that track pipelines, time to hire and time in stage for North America roles, then feeding weekly reviews with hiring managers and stakeholders. For sourcing, Juicebox has pulled the team meaningfully away from LinkedIn, since a plain English query naming a city and a set of traits returns a tightly targeted candidate list. And the ElevenLabs voice agents handle candidate prep.

She has little patience for the replacement narrative. "I think it's the absolute wrong mentality to think that AI is going to replace us," she says. The math, as she sees it, points the other way. Where five to six hires per quarter was once the average recruiter workload, the emerging standard is 15 or more. As expectations climb, AI is not a threat to the role but the only way to meet what the business is asking for.

Advice: Raise Your Hand

For people entering talent acquisition, or weighing their first move between companies, Neary's counsel is characteristically direct. Raise your hand for the projects nobody else wants. Then chase breadth deliberately: university recruiting, technical recruiting, non-technical recruiting, executive search. Get exposure to every corner of the field before deciding which one is yours.

It is, in essence, the path she walked herself, from an unnamed startup with 20 people to running revenue hiring at one of the most closely watched AI companies in the market. The early experiences, she says, are what helped her hone in on exactly where she wanted to spend her time and which parts of recruiting were genuinely motivating. Autonomy and ownership were the answer. She has been optimizing for them ever since.