Colleen Nori

A Newspaper and a Crowded Apartment

Colleen was working as a personal trainer at the time, and the roommates had made themselves comfortable. She told them the arrangement was over, then reached for the classifieds and started helping them find work. The task was supposed to solve a housing problem. Instead, she discovered she liked it.

"I've always liked matchmaking," she said. "I was LinkedIn before there was LinkedIn." She counts two successful marriages among her connections, neither of them her own. Her boyfriend at the time, now her husband of more than 25 years, was the one who suggested she look into recruiting as a profession.

She applied to a firm in Denver that she believes later became part of Kforce, and she went in cold. There was no computer at home, so her research happened on the internet at the library. What she walked into was technology recruiting in the middle of the 1990s IT boom. She stayed with the firm, grew there, and collected awards along the way.

The Years Off, and the Rush That Brought Her Back

Then came children: three in four years. Daycare for that many kids at once made the arithmetic unworkable, and Colleen stepped away for about ten years, keeping a hand in with a little recruiting. Two of those children are now in college.

The return started, fittingly, with someone in her house who needed a job. A girlfriend had been laid off and was searching, and watching that search reminded Colleen of what she had been missing. "I get a rush from it," she said of finding the candidate. Her degree is in exercise science, which she suspects makes her less of an outlier than it sounds: she estimates roughly 60 percent of people in recruiting come out of health sciences and similar fields, drawn to work that lets them help people and still make money.

One More Phone Call

The person she credits first is her very first boss, who taught her the trade when she was 23 and had no clue how any of it worked. He was a part-time horse ranger, a legitimate Colorado cowboy, and what he gave her was less technique than posture: how to handle the adult exchange with a candidate about a job, and how to get at someone's real reasons for change. His most lasting lesson she states simply. You can always do better, and you can always make one more phone call. Some 20 years on, they still keep in touch.

From the candidate side, the deal she calls the most interesting of her career came through a boutique firm where she was working. A billion dollar multinational asked the firm to find someone willing to relocate to Dublin, Ireland, a stretch of an assignment in this business. The answer arrived by referral: a candidate whose wife is from Dublin, which meant no work visa was needed.

Lawyers and tax accountants were involved, the complications ran well past the usual, and the outcome was the most rewarding she has had. The candidate is still with that company in Ireland eight years later. "Changed his life," she said.

Real Talk in an Automated Market

Colleen's read on AI is mixed, and she says so plainly. On balance she thinks it has made her job easier and her role more valuable at the same time. Automation means hiring managers now receive hundreds of resumes, and as she puts it, hundreds of resumes are just as annoying as two. So she leans into the opposite of volume: authenticity, and telling hiring managers that what she brings them comes from actually speaking with human beings. "I'm not having a chat bot situation," she said.

Her argument for the human recruiter is specific. AI will never know what a spouse said. It will never hear the hesitation in a voice, or the delays. Some people will be replaced, she allows, but she doubts that fate will reach the recruiters who talk to candidates for real and dig into the things that actually drive a decision.

She also has the long view on disruption, having recruited before cell phones. Recruiters used to fight over the morning newspaper, cut out the little ad, and dial from an office phone, which sometimes meant asking a candidate's spouse at six o'clock whether he could come to the phone, with the family upset about it. Cell phones changed that. Then LinkedIn became a thing, and access became universal. Each new layer, she argues, mainly turned up the dial on speed. The current layer carries a real cost: every resume is tweaked, and clients tell her they are getting fake resumes and sitting through fake candidate meetings. That, she believes, only makes the recruiter's job more important.

Advice for 2027

The advice comes fast, because it is what she already tells the newer recruiters she develops. Be picky. There are a lot of bad clients and bad job orders out there, and for a contingent recruiter, time is money.

Working with people who respect you, who give real feedback, and who are serious about hiring rather than tire kicking is, she argues, the difference between two entirely different years. You could be at 50k for the year, she said, or you could be at 550. The coaching question she puts to every new recruiter is deliberately blunt: is this really a good job order, and are they really going to take you seriously?