One of a key roles of a VC and investor is to help portfolio companies and startups recruit quality talent. Especially with the current competitive hiring climate, recruiting can be a challenging task for companies both big and small. Today, VC firm Greylock is announcing that it has created a dedicated talent team to help its portfolio companies recruit effectively and succeed in the current battle for talent.
Jeff Markowitz, former managing director of the venture capital practice at executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles, has joined Greylock as a ‘Talent Partner.’ Markowitz will focused on executive level talent, and will help Greylock’s portfolio companies as well as the VC firm itself to build a network of high-level talent.
Dan Portillo, formerly an HR and recruiting exec at Rypple and Mozilla, has joined as VP of Talent focusing on hiring in product and engineering for Greylock’s portfolio companies.
Clearly, Greylock is taking the battle for technical talent in Silicon Valley and the greater tech world seriously, and is staffing up to help startups wage this war. This is a trend that other top-tier VC firms are also aggressively pursuing. The firm says that it will be working on several initiatives to help companies build recruiting skills, source talent, leverage networks and more.
Greylock also recently added new talent to its own roster; bringing on Howcast co-founder and former Googler Sanjay Raman as a Senior Associate on the consumer team. He joins other recent hires including former Twitter and Facebook product lead Josh Elman and LinkedIn’s former VP of Search and Platform Adam Nash.