Colleen Aylward

biography

Colleen refers to herself as the Hall Monitor, in lieu of the title President, partly due to Catholic school neurosis, and partly because she believes that EVERY CEO job is about monitoring, making small adjustments, and more monitoring and more making small adjustments. In a word "Control"—taking and giving Control. Her days are spent monitoring the halls of clients where her professional recruiting teams reside onsite to aid in start-up or scale-up hiring projects. Her startup clients have included such industry pioneers as Amazon, Visio, Spry/Compuserve, Xylo, Quintessent Communications, Rhapsody Networks, Avenue A, and many others who have depended on this onsite recruiting "war room" approach to kick start their revenue machines.

With a business degree from University of Washington, followed by 24 years of high tech sales and management experience in large and small companies, including NCSS, Dun & Bradstreet Computing, Comshare, Carlyle Systems, and GEAC, Colleen came to the Recruiting industry in 1990 on a soapbox of Change. Having been a hiring manager for years, and being unimpressed with headhunters in general, she made a point to meet with every client company she dealt with. What she found in that down market of the early 90s was a typical Catch 22—clients who needed to ramp up couldn’t afford to. They needed to spend their seed or Series A funding on salaries, not headhunter fees. So she dug back to the "solution selling" training of her background and created the Onsite Recruiting War Room model that took off immediately, and has earned Devon James Associates a steady stream of referrals since she founded the firm in 1992.

A stickler for details, truth-telling, and ownership, she tends to hire "solid" human beings who have been through the wars of life in some fashion, maintained their sense of humor, have outside interests, have traveled the world, share her passion for excellence, and have practical earth skills, but lean toward the idealistic in vision.

Colleen and her forward-thinking ideas have been featured in such magazines as Fast Company, Wall Street Journal, Smart Money, Washington CEO, Puget Sound Business Journal, Human Resources, Inc. Magazine, and Office.com. She has spoken across the country at large and small groups about Recruiting Tactics, How to Work with Recruiters as a Client, How to Find a Job in a Down Market, How to Interview Legally, and How to Bottom Line your Recruiting Investment.

Author of "How to Write a Resume to Save Time and Deoderant During Interviews", Colleen is a writer, speaker, artist, scuba diver, single mom, control freak, and promoter of forward thinking.