Elliot Hayes

A Sales Career, Redirected by a Single Conversation

Hayes spent the first three and a half years of his post-college career in sales, covering both hardware and SaaS, an origin that, as he puts it, "kind of makes sense now given my history." Circa 2010 he applied for a role on Google's sales team. The conversation took an unexpected turn. Google was building out its recruiting function, and asked whether he would be interested in that instead.

What sold him was not the brand. It was the training. Google at the time ran a three-week boot camp that taught sourcers the craft properly: what to look for in candidates, the lingo, the sources, the mechanics of how to actually source. He entered as a technical sourcer in a hiring class of 30 people, with roughly 200 of the best recruiters in the space around him. "By week three, I was ready to pick up the phone and represent Google," he says.

He still measures the industry against that standard. Most recruiters, he notes, learn on the job, starting as a coordinator and slowly progressing. He was fast-tracked, and he sees the disappearance of that kind of deliberate investment as a genuine gap in the market. The class itself compounded, too: he remains friends with most of those 30 colleagues, and many are now heads of talent at their own companies.

The People Who Shaped the Work

Ask Hayes about his career and he answers in names. Jon Locurto, the leader who recruited him at Google, walked him through what a move from sales into recruiting would actually look like and made the pitch that stuck: you will get to rub shoulders with these people and learn from the best. Locurto is still in the recruiting space, and the two remain friends more than a decade later.

Then there is Dom Farnan, with whom Hayes has now worked at four companies across roughly ten years. He hired her onto his team at Zendesk, and he remembers the reaction immediately after meeting her, turning to his coordinator and saying this was someone special who needed to be in the office right away. Two days later she was. They went on to work together at Zendesk and Cruise, then with her company DotConnect, and most recently at Groq, where both served as heads of talent. "She's the yin to my yang," he says. "We're different people, but we really balance each other out."

At Groq, Hayes reported to Allison Hopkins, the company's chief people officer and chief talent officer, and a figure he describes without hesitation as a legend in the HR space, having been at Netflix when it went public. Groq was a legacy startup when she arrived, and Hopkins reshaped its trajectory, helping the organization define talent density and rebuild how it went about finding the best people. She remains, in his words, one of his favorite bosses he has ever worked for, and the lesson he took from her was about permission: how you can do things differently and still make a huge impact.

He is equally quick to point forward. Hanna Niapas, who worked on his team at Groq and is now at Cursor, is someone he calls a rising star who simply gets it, and one to watch in the talent space. "One day I will probably work for her."

AI as a Research Partner, Not a Volume Machine

Hayes uses a great deal of AI at Gimlet Labs, as he did at Groq, but notably not to send more messages. He uses it to earn the right to send fewer. When approaching a VP-level candidate, he will pull every available resource on that person into the work first: what they have spoken about publicly, what they are passionate about, what actually matters to them. The result, he says, is that the first conversation feels like a continuation rather than a cold open. "You immediately establish yourself as a true talent partner."

His most instructive AI story is not about a tool at all, but about literacy. At Groq, the entire talent function, HR and recruiting alike, sat down with an engineer in a hackathon-style session that walked them through getting access to the platform, using tokens and starting to build. Everyone was then challenged to find a use for it. The HR side produced a standout: a chat function where a candidate could enter their current benefits and see a direct comparison against Groq's, including cost. Non-technical people, building working things. For Hayes, that is the whole point. The access is there, the barrier is low, and the excuse has expired.

Talent Density and Agency

Asked what single piece of advice he would offer other talent leaders heading into 2027, Hayes paused, called the question hard-pressing, and then gave an answer that connected the technology back to the team. The role of the talent leader is evolving, he argues, and incorporating AI into daily practice is now non-negotiable, not merely as a way to reach candidates but as a way to do the job better.

The deeper objective, though, is human. What he thinks about most in his role is how to build the most talent-dense team possible, and then how to give the people on it the greatest possible agency so that each of them is highly leveraged. It is a philosophy with a clear lineage: the boot camp that taught him the craft in three weeks, the mentor who showed him that a talent function can be redesigned rather than inherited, and 577 carefully chosen phone calls.