Ep. 10 of Out of Line with Tiffany Scott, with Sheridan Hall.
Most agency owners have never sat in the corporate recruiter's chair. Sheridan Hall spent about 25 years there, at Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta, and Nike. Then he started a staffing company without ever having worked at an agency.
That makes Episode 10 unusual. Sheridan can tell you exactly what happens on the other side of your submittal, and he has learned firsthand what it takes to get a corporate buyer to take your call. If you sell staffing to companies with in-house talent teams, this one's for you.
Sheridan started his career as a manager trainee at Hertz. He got referred in as an admin to a recruiting team, became a recruiter, and went on to recruit for some of the most sought-after employers in the world. He co-founded Operation Hired with his brother, Lieutenant Colonel Matt Hall, to fix how companies evaluate and hire veterans. Operation Hired has also built a free AI-powered resume generator for veterans. Sheridan volunteers as a mentor through the 50 Strong mentorship program.
The business started with a phone call. Sheridan's older brother, a lieutenant colonel, asked him to look at his resume. Three minutes later, Sheridan called him back and said he had no idea what he was reading. They rewrote it line by line, and Sheridan realized there were a million recruiters like him moving on to the next resume.
"I can't go to the hiring manager and try to convince them to talk to you when I can't even understand what you did."
That isn't only about veterans. Any candidate whose experience doesn't fit the reader's frame of reference gets skipped. When you translate a resume for a hiring manager, you're doing the job that gets your candidate in the door.
Sheridan described offers at large tech companies that needed several approvals. He once got every approval he needed between 11 p.m. and midnight because everyone was still working. He also explained why enterprise salary bands work the way they do. When you sell to these companies, assume a committee, a process, and a calendar you don't control, and build your timelines around that.
I asked Sheridan the question that's bugged me forever: why wouldn't a company at least look at free resumes? His answer was honest.
"as a business owner, we've hired vendors and been burned."
He also said a lot of companies assume an agency will just post the job on Indeed and forward whoever applies. Budget is part of it too. Once he actually gets a meeting, he walks them through everything his firm will do, and the conversation changes. Your first job in a sales meeting is to prove you're not the vendor who burned them last time.
Sheridan made a point that every recruiter needs to take in:
"we're getting to the point with AI where people are easy to find nowadays."
The hard part, he says, is getting them to talk to you. The same is true on the sales side. Contact data is everywhere. Being the person a buyer or candidate actually wants to respond to is the real skill.
His advice to veterans works for any candidate who's changing careers. Step back and ask what you really like to do. Do you want to work with lots of people or be left alone? Do you want to be moving or sitting at a desk? Then find a company whose values match. With Operation Hired, he also explains the corporate side: why a company might keep a req posted without hiring, and what HR is trying to accomplish in an interview. He's not a veteran, but he knows corporate, and that's his value.
Sheridan shared a story from his time at Intuit. Brad Smith, the CEO, told the company there are rubber moments and crystal moments. Drop a rubber ball and it bounces back. You can miss one baseball game, because there will be another one. Drop a crystal ball and it shatters. Some birthdays and graduations don't come back. As a single dad running a business, he still thinks about that all the time. He also uses delayed send so nobody gets his 2 a.m. emails.
Pull up the last five resumes you submitted and read each one as a busy corporate recruiter would, in about ten seconds. Fix anything that buries the candidate's best work. Then ask yourself why a buyer would choose you over the twenty vendors already in their inbox. Write that answer down and make sure your outreach says it plainly.
Connect with Sheridan on LinkedIn (linkedin.com/in/sheridanhall) and at Operation Hired (operationhired.com).
Sheridan's point applies to selling, too: anyone can find the contact, but getting the conversation is the hard part. myScout is built to give you a real reason to reach out, based on what that company is actually hiring for.
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