Cory Anderson

An Operator Who Learned the Business From Every Angle

Anderson's career began in customer service and operations management before shifting to sales. Straight out of college he entered the training and development program at Enterprise Rent-A-Car, an environment that turned out managers the way other companies turn out spreadsheets. There he learned how to manage people, how to develop internal talent, and got his first exposure to hiring. From Enterprise he moved into outside sales at Paychex and then Cintas, two more organizations known for rigorous training programs.

"I had some really strong training and development programs from early on in my career," he says, and the compounding effect is visible in how he leads now. Those years taught him how to train other people, how to help them grow, how to take care of customers, and how to sell. Every one of those muscles turned out to be load-bearing in staffing.

A former Enterprise manager, Brett Davis, eventually recruited him to Ameri-Force. Anderson joined on the operations side, serving as the communicator with the client, owning delivery, and overseeing growth in the company's manufacturing division, which at the time was a new industry for the firm. He sat squarely between the client and the recruiters, which meant learning to translate in both directions and building a working understanding of what recruiters actually need to succeed. He advanced to Director of Operations, then was moved over to lead sales and recruiting together. The talent development piece, he says, has come more into play than ever. "It's been a lot of fun to manage this team."

The Mentors, Including the Ones Who Reported to Him

Ameri-Force is a small organization, and Anderson had few layers of management above him. So much of what he has learned came from below, a fact he states without any defensiveness at all.

Peter Ramirez, who joined Ameri-Force as a first-time recruiter and is now the company's Director of Recruiting, was integral in educating Anderson on the recruiting space. Driven and largely self-taught, Ramirez learned the ropes on the job and then turned around and taught his own boss the craft. Tanya Lang, a recruiter with 18 to 19 years at Ameri-Force, gave him the long view: what a career recruiter looks for, what earns their trust, what sustains someone across nearly two decades in one seat. Anderson credits both as central to developing his skill set. Coming into a recruiting management role without recruiting experience, he says, meant the job was less about speaking from what he had done and more about understanding what his team needed from him.

Earlier in his career the list was long enough that he struggles to name everyone. Chase Rogers at Enterprise played an important role. But the lesson he still repeats came from Vinny Santuemma, his sales manager at Cintas, who made selling simple in a way that translated directly to recruiting. Most reps learn from a rebuttal handbook, Anderson notes: if they say this, you say that. Santuemma cut through it. If a prospect is asking that question, he would tell his team, then you haven't done your job establishing interest in the first place. He was also willing to look inward and grade himself honestly, which Anderson calls rare among sales professionals. The debrief was always tied to the result, never to blame. "It's about trying to get better."

Humans Doing Human Things

At the SIA conference in Austin last March, Anderson counted roughly two out of every three vendors pitching AI. He watched the room split into two camps: those who fear AI will take jobs, and those planting a flag against it out of pure resistance. He thinks both are wrong.

The middle ground he advocates is disciplined rather than mushy. Ameri-Force's CEO wrote an article on humans doing human things, a theme that also surfaced at SIA, and it has become the company's operating mantra. Three responsibilities stay human. Judgment: gather every fact you can, but a person makes the decision. Connection: the ability to relate to a candidate, which Anderson considers the single most important quality in his recruiters. And closing: moving the process forward, whether that is a candidate accepting a job or a customer signing a contract. Everything else is fair game. "Can AI take things off our plate so that our humans can handle these three things more intentionally and more consistently?" That is the question he applies to every tool.

He practices what he prescribes. Claude runs in the background on his machine sourcing potential prospects while he works, and AI is always on across his leadership team. His own conversion came from something entirely unglamorous: sitting down to compose an internal email in exactly the right format, then realizing a model could produce it in a fraction of the time. That first draft saved him fifteen minutes of writing and re-editing, and he never went back.

The Long Game in Staffing

Asked what he tells people entering the industry, Anderson reaches for a line from Tom Erb, author of Winning the Staffing Sales Game and a frequent contributor to the American Staffing Association: whether you are going to be in this industry for 10 years, 20 years or 30 years, you are going to have success here.

Anderson has quoted it to his own team more than once. His read is that hiring needs are not going away, that the retirement data alone guarantees demand, and that a recruiting career remains a durable and well-compensated one. There will be retoolings and adjustments, he concedes, and he expects them. But he sees particular momentum in shipbuilding, one of Ameri-Force's core markets and an industry showing real growth and real potential.

It is a characteristically grounded position from a leader who came to recruiting sideways, learned it from the people who knew it best, and now spends his days making sure they have room to do the parts of the work only humans can do.