Glen Evans

Culture of excellence

My parents taught me to work hard, compete, and lead through adversity, which are my core operating principles today. However, they also taught me that success should never come at the direct expense of others, and I took this lesson to heart at an early age. It’s something I’ve cared deeply about throughout my life. Today, I firmly believe that the way I’ve treated others has not only been critical to my personal achievements but, more importantly, to the successes of the teams and organizations I’ve represented as well. Above all, this has been a key pattern of success for me. And it’s something that has become deeply ingrained in my team’s work as well.

For more than a decade, I’ve built and supported high-performing teams at companies like Google, Facebook, and Slack. Not only was I able to create lasting relationships with many incredible people in the tech industry, I saw first-hand that the foundation to building successful companies starts with how you treat people–which definitely resonated with me on a personal level.

Throughout my career, I’ve put a lot of focus into helping organizations find market success by fostering a culture that tolerates nothing but excellence in hiring. At Greylock, I manage the same approach with a similar goal: We provide direct support and actionable advice to every investment in our portfolio on how to create and manage the best recruiting experiences for their candidates. We take pride in helping our entrepreneurs learn how to quickly and consistently attract and retain exceptional talent throughout their entire startup journey.

Quality over quantity

While the recruiting profession has, at times, had a reputation as a transactional business, that’s never been my approach—and it’s not how we do the job at Greylock. At Greylock, it’s never about meeting hiring quotas, chasing recruiter bonuses, and/or moving on to the next hire. As a core standard, we believe in the power of quality over quantity.

Instead of providing a constant stream of passive referrals that may or may not match a company’s hiring needs, our recruiters focus on making select, targeted candidate referrals that they believe will have a high likelihood of success (i.e., making it to offer). We work hard to understand the needs and priorities of our portfolio companies, as well as the aspirations and motivations of each candidate in our network. And we aspire to find core value alignment for both sides to ensure we’re always one of the top sources of hires for each investment in our portfolio.

Timing is everything

Our core talent team works on hiring for positions from director level to earlier career. Even though we make targeted referrals to our investments, we’ll often reach out to promising candidates without a specific job in mind. We want to get to know them and their interests up front, so we can be a valuable resource for them when the time is right. When one of our investments is ready to make a hire, we’ll not only have active candidates to share, but we’ll also have a sense of who might be a good fit from our network. We also spend time coaching founders on closing strategies, compensation, and hiring strategies as a whole.