Justin Glaser

From the Ballpark to the Phone Bank

Out of college, Glaser went to work for a minor league baseball team, the sort of job people dream about until they price it out. He was living in a small town, working 14 hour days, and doing the math. "It's probably five dollars an hour or something crazy like that," he recalls of the breakdown. The ladder in front of him was long and the rungs were far apart.

The pivot came from a friend working at a staffing agency in Seattle. Glaser had no frame of reference at all. He didn't know what staffing was. He didn't know what recruiting was. What his friend knew was that Glaser had been the one working the college phone-a-thon, the one who could pick up a receiver and make something happen. Glaser interviewed, collected two offers, and took the job at Apex Systems.

He stayed ten years. In that decade he became a 12 time top performer and a multiple time recruiter of the year, accolades that would have made a permanent career very easy to justify. Half his career, by his own accounting, was spent in staffing, and that is where the foundation was poured.

The Mentors Who Built the Foundation

Glaser names his influences quickly and with real warmth. Christian Lentz, head of recruiting at Apex for the entire ten years Glaser was there, gave him something rare in this industry: consistency. One manager, one voice, one full decade. "He just had a big impact in kind of creating the way for me in recruiting," Glaser says. Lentz, now a director at Robert Half in Seattle, remains a close friend eight years after Glaser left the firm.

Lane Gerritsen, the managing director who ran the office, was the other half of that formative pairing, and Glaser has stayed close with him as well. Later, moving in house, he found Hailee Axelson at Sendoso, a manager he describes as a go getter, a confident and strong operator with genuine depth on the talent side. The team there was eventually laid off in full, but the friendship survived the org chart.

Then there is Anne Forr, his manager for a year at Instawork and, in his estimation, one of the best bosses he has ever had. What made her exceptional was not process design. It was empathy, understanding, and a willingness to go to bat for recruiting inside a business that had plenty of competing priorities. Her departure, Glaser says plainly, left a hole and big shoes to fill. Notably, when asked to nominate other leaders worth spotlighting, he named Lentz, Axelson and Forr, choosing to redirect the attention rather than keep it.

Why the Tools Matter and Why They Are Not the Point

Glaser is not an AI skeptic. He works at a company that, in his words, fully embraces it and is not resistant to it, and he considers that a genuine advantage. "If we're not using it, we're going to be behind on the game," he says. His team uses Juicebox for sourcing, running it as an agent and treating it as a natural extension of LinkedIn Recruiter. He leans on Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT for research, which matters enormously at a smaller company still working out which markets to attack and which companies to source from.

The volume of available tooling can be stressful, he concedes, but the payoff is specific and he can articulate it precisely. AI, done well, means a recruiter no longer spends 95 percent of their time banging their head against the wall on sourcing and other mundane tasks. That reclaimed time goes somewhere: more conversations with candidates, a stronger candidate experience, closer partnership with hiring managers and stakeholders. "I definitely think it's a game changer," he says. The change he cares about is not fewer humans in the loop. It is better humans in the loop, with more hours to spend being human.

The Advocate in the Room

Ask Glaser for his advice to talent leaders and he goes straight past tooling to purpose. There is a lot of noise right now, he notes, and a persistent anxiety that robots will make recruiting obsolete. His counsel is to not lose focus on the goal, and the goal, as he defines it, runs from the very first sourcing message all the way to a signed offer: treat every candidate with the utmost respect.

He hears the alternative far too often. Terrible recruiter. Got ghosted. Never heard back. Glaser acknowledges there is legitimate value in automated first screens and agent driven steps, and he refuses to call them a bad thing. But he draws a line where it counts. "That human element, human connection of me talking to a candidate, I think is the most important," he says. Some leaders, he observes, become so focused on process and automation that candidates start getting handled like cattle. His framing is the inverse: he is the one who gets to give them a positive experience, and the feedback he receives reflects it.

It is a philosophy that scales in both directions, inward as well as outward. Partnering closely with hiring managers is the other half of the in house recruiter's job, and Glaser treats stakeholder trust as a companion discipline to candidate care rather than a competing one.

The Case for Leaving Comfortable Behind

Glaser could have written a very different career. He could be sitting on 18 to 20 years at a single staffing agency, with the top performer plaques on the wall and, he admits candidly, a bigger paycheck than the one he draws today. He sometimes wonders whether staying would have been the smarter play. He chose otherwise, and he would choose it again.

The through line from Apex to Amazon to Zillow to Sendoso to Instawork is a deliberate refusal to settle. Enterprise scale, mid sized, startup: he has now worked inside all three environments, and the variety is precisely what he values. There have been uncomfortable moments and tough ones. There have also been a lot of cool people met along the way, which is the part he mentions first.

His challenge to the profession is simple and comes from lived experience. Get out of your comfort zone. Try something new. The skills, he points out, are portable enough that there is always a way back. "It's been a good ride," he says, and he says it like someone who fully intends to keep riding.