Sharon Hulce

The Phone Call That Started Everything

The path to that Yellow Pages moment was not planned. Hulce was a national recruiter for a women's clothing company when Cook Associates, out of Chicago, finally succeeded in recruiting her after courting her for years. She accepted. The plan was to relocate with her then husband, who was recovering from a serious fall, six feet off the side of a concrete camp. Then, days from the move, he told her he could not do it. She had already resigned her position.

So she started over, locally, with one phone call and one afternoon interview. That was the beginning of a career now spanning three decades, including 25 years running her own company. Five years into the business, with what she describes as a very robust construction practice already built, she bought a desk and launched ERG.

She founded it on a conviction that put her at odds with how the industry then operated. "I didn't love the transactional nature of how business was being done," she says. She became one of the first in her market to go out and visit clients face to face rather than working exclusively by telephone. Her thesis was simple and, at the time, mildly heretical: "It's more than a phone business. This is a people business."

The Woman in the Empty Seat

Hulce is candid that starting a company left her isolated. At Manpower Group of Appleton, she says, she was a mushroom: she sat, she made calls, she met no one. Her realtor suggested Rotary. She walked in, sat down, and left one chair beside her empty.

Into it, arriving late, impeccably dressed, came Joyce Bitoff, who owned a billion-dollar real estate company and who Hulce would later learn was the who's who of the community, a major donor and the top fundraiser on nearly every board she joined. "For whatever reason, I drew the lucky card and she sat beside me," Hulce says. "It was as if we knew each other our whole lives."

They became best friends and met once a week for lunch, a standing appointment that doubled as the most consequential mentorship of Hulce's career. Bitoff had a method. She would ask five questions, always exactly five, and then say, "Okay, here's what I would do." She never offered a sympathetic "good luck with that." She told Hulce, concretely, what she would do if it were her challenge, her initiative, her company. And she did it without judgment, which meant Hulce could ask anything.

Bitoff died of cancer 11 years ago. She was prominent enough in the community that the Chamber of Commerce created the Joyce Bitoff Mentorship Award in her name. This year, Hulce won it. What she treasures most is not the trophy but the platform. Most of the people in the room had never met Bitoff. "I love the fact that I won it, because I could honor her," she says. She was able to tell her friend's story in a way no one else could.

AI, Delegated to the Person Who Loves It

Hulce is bullish on artificial intelligence and refreshingly clear-eyed about her own role in it. The efficiencies, she says, have been fabulous: faster turnaround for clients and for candidates, better sourcing, gains in essentially every function of the firm. "It's not my space," she says. "I'm not a technology person. I run a desk."

So she invested in someone who is. Hulce sent her executive vice president of technology through a six-month AI program at Purdue specifically to understand implementation, prompt design, and where the technology could genuinely make the business better. He now leads every technology initiative at ERG and performs the due diligence on the constant stream of new products Hulce hears about, much of it through the Pinnacle Society, the invitation-only group of the top 80 recruiters in the country to which she belongs.

Her read on where this lands is measured. AI will not strip out the relationship at the center of the work, she believes, but it will change a great deal of what practitioners actually do as it grows more capable. Her firm intends to keep learning. "We will continue to be a student of what it is and what it isn't," she says. And she credits the human variable above the technological one: as a business owner, finding a person with real passion for the technology is what made the difference, because no leader running a desk has time to study everything on the market.

The Operating System Behind the Growth

Asked what advice she would give talent leaders heading into 2027, Hulce does not reach for a trend. She points instead to the single most transformational decision of her 25 years as an owner: adopting EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System.

ERG had been stuck for a few years, she admits. Running a desk was running a desk, a client was a client. EOS introduced disciplined gate checks: who has the ball, is it getting done. Crucially, she insists it was never surveillance. "The issue isn't the person, it's the issue. Let's solve the issue." Not you dropped the ball, but here is what we are challenged by, and as a collective unit let's fix it and move forward.

The results are not subtle. Nearly three years in, ERG has doubled its volume every single year since becoming an EOS company. The firm's average fee has climbed from roughly 40 to 50 thousand dollars to closer to 100,000, and Hulce now works a book of business where the comp on a search can be a million dollars. She attributes that shift directly to reclaimed time. Freed from the basic operational drag, she can do what she calls whale hunting and focus on the strategy work she is genuinely best at: assessing talent not only for culture fit but for strategic engagement and how a hire will help a company grow.

Her recommendation is deliberately non-prescriptive. Look at an operating system, she says, whether EOS or something else, one that handles the basic stuff for you and helps you solve problems faster.

The recognition has followed. This year ERG was named the fastest growing company in northeast Wisconsin, Hulce received a Lifetime Achievement Award, and she won the mentorship award named for her closest friend. "A lot of really cool things," she says, "because of it." She is also quick to point admiration outward, naming Matt Walsh at Blue Signal as a peer she absolutely admires, evidence that the mentorship Joyce Bitoff modeled over three decades of weekly lunches is still circulating.