What Makes HubSpot a Best Place to Work

Ask any CEO if his or her company is a Best Place to Work and I guarantee you almost 100% of them will respond with a resounding “yes.” We all think we lead exceptional organizations with outstanding cultures, but at the end of the day, it’s not our opinion that matters. What matters far more is the day-to-day experience of employees, past and present, and their reflections on how accurately we live up to our employment brand promise. Twenty years ago, if you were a candidate seeking information on what it’s really like to work at a given company, you’d be stuck wading through company brochures or calling people you know who work there to get a sense of how the company’s rhetoric matched up to its reality. Now, the advent of the internet, social media, and Glassdoor has fundamentally transformed the recruiting space from a candidate-beware world to an employer-beware world. Want to know how well a company lives up to its culture? Glassdoor can help. Need context on how salaries stack up or what benefits look like? Reviews from past and current employees can heavily inform your research. Glassdoor is the job candidate’s version of the blind reference, and part of a broader trend in which all of our industries are being Yelpified. What we do differently here Given this shift in the universe, companies can maintain the status quo or adapt accordingly. At HubSpot, we’ve chosen the latter route. While candidates certainly benefit from employee and former employee reviews, companies benefit significantly too. We get real-time feedback on what’s working and what isn’t, and the opportunity to engage with employees past and present on an external platform focused specifically on workplace culture. We also use Glassdoor to inform our own hiring efforts. Last year, we were in the process of hiring for a key role in our company: Senior Vice President of Sales. One of the candidates we were talking to had impeccable credentials, but faced consistently abysmal reviews on Glassdoor from employees. We gave him a chance to respond to the negative feedback and provide some context, but at the end of the day, we went with a candidate who we felt took the employee experience more seriously and worked on a daily basis to improve upon it. Transparency and company culture are key! Louis Brandeis once said “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” Greater transparency means more information, more data, and better decisions, which is one of the many reasons transparency is a cornerstone of HubSpot’s Culture Code. This applies to recruiting, but also to how we run our business on a daily basis: Dharmesh and I set out to build a company that matched how modern humans work and live, and we spend a lot of calories internally ensuring that we deliver on what we promise in terms of what it means to work at HubSpot on a daily basis. When it comes to company culture, you can’t wave a magic wand that makes it work for your organization, nor can you buy it on the open market. Being a best place to work is a marathon, not a sprint, and requires diligence, persistence, and a willingness to be honest about your missteps and failures. Most importantly, it’s not something your management team can “do,” it’s a direct reflection of the employees you hire, their ability to succeed, and the extent to which their peers enjoy working with them day to day. Feedback: The golden ticket The best employees I know treat feedback as the breakfast of champions. The best companies in the world are no different. They are constantly working to get better, to lean in to their weaknesses and proactively address them, and to experiment with innovative ways to solve their team’s great challenges. They embrace transparency, encourage employee autonomy, and place a huge amount of emphasis on closing the gap between rhetoric and reality as it relates to hiring, recruiting, and culture. In work as in life, you’re defined by the company you keep. I’m very proud to work alongside the almost 800 employees who make our organization a great place to work, and am deeply grateful to the employees past and present who have shared their feedback on Glassdoor. PS, we’re hiring!