The man who built Facebook's recruiting engine, scaled Slack's talent operation from 24 to 60, and now hands startups the playbook they never had.
In 2018, when Greylock Partners brought Glen Evans on board, the move was not subtle. This was a firm that had backed LinkedIn, Airbnb, Facebook, and Roblox deciding that the hardest problem in venture wasn't finding great companies - it was helping those companies find great people. Evans was the answer to that problem.
His career reads like a guided tour of Silicon Valley's defining decade. He spent seven years at Facebook building the engineering recruiting infrastructure from the ground up - a team that would grow to 100 people, responsible for filling the roles that built the social graph, the mobile apps, and the infrastructure running under billions of daily users. When Facebook acquired Oculus VR for $2 billion in 2014, Evans was the one tasked with figuring out how to move the humans - working directly with the Oculus founders to thread the culture of a 75-person VR startup into a company with 10,000 employees.
After Facebook, Slack came calling. They needed their first recruiting director - someone who could build a function from scratch during hypergrowth, in a category the company was single-handedly creating. Evans walked into a team of 24 and left behind a global operation of 60, with sourcing tools, interview processes, compensation frameworks, and onboarding systems that didn't exist before he arrived.
Then Greylock made him a Partner. Not a "talent resource." A partner at one of the most storied venture firms in the world.
A good talent person can increase your capacity to win.Glen Evans, Partner, Core Talent — Greylock Partners
The Core Talent program Evans runs at Greylock is the practical expression of that belief. For portfolio company founders - many of whom are first-time CEOs trying to scale a team while also building a product, raising their next round, and keeping the lights on - Evans functions as the recruiter they can't yet afford to hire, the talent strategist they didn't know they needed, and the person who can pick up the phone and say, "I know someone who'd be perfect for this."
His approach is relentlessly specific. Not "hire well." More like: here's what your sourcing pipeline should look like, here's how to structure your interview process, here's how your offer compares to the market right now, here's the candidate who just came off a company you'd recognize, and here's why she'd be interested in what you're building.
"Success should never come at the direct expense of others."Glen Evans — a principle adopted early in life that guides every hiring conversation
Pre-Series A, the founder is the recruiting function. Not a priority alongside other work - an equal priority. Most founders are shocked. Successful founders are not.
Sourcing, interviewing, compensation, onboarding - each needs a "repeatable, scalable system." Ad-hoc doesn't survive a growth phase. The moment it breaks is the moment you needed it most.
You can't out-brand Google. Lead with what you have: the mission, the technical challenge, the leadership quality, the ground-floor equity, the chance to define a category. Use it.
Don't negotiate to "win." Lead with your best offer. Negotiation tactics cost you candidates in competitive markets. The top person you want has three other conversations happening right now.
Reactive recruiting is expensive recruiting. Proactive relationship-building with candidates before positions open means you're a known quantity when the moment arrives.
High-volume hiring is not a strategy. Genuine fit between people and organizations is the outcome. Recruiting should not be transactional - it requires building real relationships.
Evans is honest about the transition from individual contributor to leader in a way that most executives aren't. "When you become a manager," he's said, "it's very hard to let go of the work that has led to that success." The skills that make a great recruiter - the ability to build rapport fast, to read a candidate's actual interest level beneath their polished answers, to close a reluctant hire - don't automatically make you good at coaching others to do those things.
He found two things helped most: developing emotional intelligence - learning to stay composed in difficult conversations rather than letting reactions run the room - and seeking mentorship from people at all career levels, not just from above.
That second part is notable. Most leaders extract advice from people more senior than themselves. Evans inverted the usual direction and learned from people on the way up too. It shows in how he works with founders - not talking at them, but meeting them where they are, treating the conversation as mutual rather than instructional.
His core ethical principle - that success should never come at the direct expense of others - is not a platitude. It's the practical foundation of how he recruits. Candidates who get passed on are handled with care. Founders who don't get the hire get an honest post-mortem. The long game matters more than any individual placement.
At Greylock, this translates into a talent partner who is rare in venture: someone with actual operational credibility from building real recruiting functions inside real companies, now deploying that knowledge at the portfolio level. Not a former operator playing at HR strategy. The person who actually built the machine.
One thing fantastic recruiters do really well is identify their unfair advantage and build on it.Glen Evans
When Facebook paid $2 billion for Oculus VR in 2014, Evans was tasked with the human side of the acquisition - working directly with Oculus founders to integrate a 75-person VR startup into a company with 10,000 employees. A different kind of systems problem.
His degree is in Managerial Economics from UC Davis - not psychology, not HR management. It may explain his instinct for building hiring systems that work at scale rather than optimizing for individual transactions.
Very few talent executives reach full Partner status at a major VC firm. Evans did it in two years at Greylock - a signal of how seriously the firm takes talent as a competitive differentiator for its portfolio.
At Slack, he built the global recruiting function essentially from nothing during one of the fastest company growth arcs in tech history. The infrastructure he created outlasted his tenure - a reliable test of whether a system was actually built or just assembled.
Evans is not a constant presence on the conference circuit - when he shows up, he brings operational specifics, not framework slides. His 2022 TechCrunch Early Stage appearance was notable precisely because it covered the actual mechanics of hiring in a hyper-competitive market: what to say, how to structure offers, how to follow up without burning a relationship.
His Greymatter podcast conversation on "Building Your Best Team" with Evan Reiser goes deep on what separates recruiting functions that scale from ones that stall. The Kruze Consulting Founders and Friends episodes - one from his Slack days, one from Greylock - provide a rare before-and-after view of how his thinking evolved from in-house talent leader to VC talent partner.
His TechCrunch writing applies the same specificity. No vague advice about "culture fit" or "moving fast." Instead: here is how you evaluate a recruiter's growth mindset, here is how you tell whether your compensation data is actually current, here is the follow-up cadence that works.