I’M IN THE TRENCHES...JUST LIKE YOU.

(2 min read)

Thanks for clicking that “continue” button. That tells me something…

It tells me that you’ve felt (or are feeling) a lot of what I described on the last page…

• A feeling of overwhelm.

• Uncertainty about how to get things under control.

• Unsure about where to turn for help.

But, because you’re a high-achiever…you’re not going to give up!

Before I get into sharing some solutions…I just realized something. I ranted on for a couple hundred words without introducing who I am or, more importantly, why I’m writing this in the first place.

So I apologize. That was rude of me. So, here’s a quick “About Me” blurb…

My name is James Colino. I’ve been pursuing recruiting excellence since I was a Junior in college.

You read that right. A Junior in college.

So, I’m NOT one of those recruiting leaders who starts their biographical story by saying “Ten years ago, I fell into recruiting.” 

Nope, I started in the field of recruiting as a 20-year-old during an internship at a startup Physician Recruitment firm. The office was in the founder’s basement, my desk was a fold-out table and we were somewhere in the middle of Wisconsin cold calling doctors and hospitals trying to make a match.

It was at this experience that I fell in love with recruiting. More specifically “Recruiting Operations”. And, since then, over the last twenty years, I’ve built a career that involved leading, starting, or turning around recruiting functions at high-profile companies like Pfizer and The Hershey Company. And smaller, lesser-known companies as a consultant too.

Over the last twenty years, I also started, grew, and sold two recruiting software companies and served as the Global Technology Enablement Leader for a world-class RPO named Cielo. 

More recently, I wrote and published an Amazon best-selling book on the topic of recruiting operations. And at present moment, I’m the Director of Talent Acquisition for a 700-unit convenience store brand on the east coast of the United States. 

So all this stuff I’m writing about here…I live it every single day. I’m in the trenches just like you.

My goal is to spend the rest of my working days as a practicing “Head of Talent Acquisition”. But, I also want to serve people like you by building a small-but-mighty community of recruiting leaders who want to eradicate the feeling of overwhelm and run high-performing talent acquisition departments – in a more systematic way — with less effort. 

So that’s WHO I am. 

But WHY am I doing this?

Well, here’s what actually happened…it was kind of traumatic.

Next Up — Part 3 of 6 — The Reactive Recruiting Function