Inbound organizations assign people to support and monitor the culture to make sure it thrives in all locations and throughout all teams. HubSpot set up a culture team to bring the unique attributes of an inbound organization to all international locations as they expanded into seven global offices and almost 2,000 employees.
For HubSpot, scaling culture means focusing on what works. “It is about doing what we say we do, avoiding disruption, documenting our beliefs and culture, and sharing it,” says Hannah Fleishman, HubSpot's inbound recruiting manager. She adds:
The culture team's mission is to make sure the candidate and employee experiences are remarkable. The culture team focuses on growth opportunities for employees internally, and we don't think about growth as only professional. We want our people to grow as complete individuals too. We want our people to be their best self at work so that they do their best work, and if they leave, they are better for having been here.1
As companies grow, culture changes. Hiring people who naturally embody your core values makes it easy to continue to scale. It is a challenge to retrain experienced workers if they don't naturally embrace the company's values. You don't want to find people who fit the culture; you want to find people who add to it.
Over 70% of Millennials say the company they choose to work for should focus on societal problems, 70% expect to be creative at work, and over two-thirds feel it is the employer's role to make sure they have opportunities for growth and advancement, or they will leave. Most will leave for less money to work for a company that provides these opportunities.2 Millennials are a mission-driven workforce and desire a strong culture.
In the past, recruiting and job hunting were company-centric. People had limited options for finding job opportunities. Job applicants scoured classified ads in the newspaper, attended job fairs, or leveraged recruiters to find their next position.
Today the vast majority of candidates start their job search by using online search. Candidate-centric searches, enhanced by sites like Glassdoor.com, LinkedIn, and other social media sites, show people what it is like to interview and work for you and your company. These sites include comments from current and former employees and provide vivid details about your company's environment. Companies that put their mission and vision at the core of the recruiting process get the best candidates. Companies that ignore their mission and culture will likely never get the chance to talk to the best candidates.
Smart companies that want to scale use a playbook for inbound recruiting that follows inbound principles. They share their inbound culture as the most important attribute of the job responsibilities. They tout a culture that supports the opportunity for meaningful work, a positive environment, open communications, individual and team growth, and opportunities to develop and advance. Inbound organizations also build a process to attract, engage, and hire top candidates and promote their inbound culture as a prime attraction, sometimes years before someone becomes an active candidate in the recruiting funnel.
A recent study found that 76% of job candidates want to know before they take the job what their day-to-day experience would be like at a company.3 Job searchers dig deep to learn about your culture.
Inbound recruiting is much like inbound marketing. Inbound recruiting matches the way people research, evaluate, and decide on a new job today the same way people research, evaluate, and buy products. You must research and analyze your ideal candidate and develop a detailed ideal employee persona. The persona outlines the key attributes required for the position. For recruiting purposes, your ideal candidate persona should be the person who has the attitudes, skills, experiences, expertise, and energy required to do the jobs that need to be done to fulfill your mission.
The next step is creating the right content for your company to get found online by your ideal candidate. Dry job descriptions are not noteworthy, interesting, or attractive. Your job descriptions should allow the organization's personality and quirkiness to shine through. Posting a few articles on LinkedIn or tweeting a few stories about your people will not be enough. Inbound organizations must commit to sharing content in a broad way, as HubSpot does on hubspot.com/jobs.
Inbound recruiting attracts talent over the long term. People will pay attention to your company, listen to what you stand for, and then decide they want to work for you to enhance their career. By openly sharing your culture, you cultivate passive candidates and move them into the recruiting funnel, often triggering them to reach out to you.
Getting good candidates is hard for all businesses. Employees with strong cultural attributes are sometimes referred to as top 2%ers. Attempting to attract the top 2% means that you are looking for A+ players who have a track record of accomplishment and experience, are able to work together in teams, are status-blind, and get work done. Inbound recruiting is a lot of work. If creating an inbound culture is a priority, recruiting is the single biggest time investment required to build it.
Paul Roetzer told us this story:
Not long ago I led in an executive strategy meeting for a multibillion-dollar international company. The room was filled with all of the top marketing people in the organization, from the CMO on down. We presented a one-day workshop on how to evolve the marketing team to inbound. We made the whole argument with data from a few divisions of the company that did adopt inbound with striking results. The data and proof of success struck a chord with the audience.
The CMO asked her team what it would take to get the entire marketing team moving in this direction. And then she looked down the table at a boardroom of about 12 or 15 people and asked how many people on the current staff would be a fit for inbound. Mind you, this company had about 300 marketers on the payroll. Everybody just looked around the room at each other and one guy says, “We have maybe one or two I think could handle inbound.”4
Your people will determine your success as an inbound organization.
Your number one goal is to find the best people who understand the state of buying today and put them in key positions. Old-school thinking, hierarchical bureaucrats, and fear of change are your enemies.
The only way to become an inbound organization is to be inbound.
So your people must be inbound.
Hannah Fleischman shares her thoughts on the recruiting process at HubSpot:
The reason I love working at HubSpot is that I truly believe that our founders care about people and putting people first. HubSpot does not think about closing customers but about helping customers. We always put people first and that creates a culture where wanting to see employees grow is the right thing to do.
So, in our recruiting process, we think about solving for the candidate and putting the candidate first in our hiring process. That thinking continues internally when they come on board as well. We put a lot of energy and invest heavily into the employee experience. All of those things relate to how our organization puts people first, not only for the customer but everyone in our ecosystem.5
HubSpot sees the recruiting funnel much like a traditional inbound marketing and sales funnel: awareness, then consideration leading to a decision, and then success or delight. The candidate experience is an important precursor to the employee experience.
Fleischman continues:
We design candidate pathways intentionally; they do not just happen. The candidate experience is monitored for effectiveness and adherence to the culture as documented in the HubSpot Culture Code.
HubSpot surveys all face to face interview candidates and asks if they would recommend HubSpot as a place to work on a scale from 1 to 10, and then asks for anecdotal feedback on the interview process. The resulting scores are shared with the interview team, and the process is adjusted or updated using these suggestions. Candidates are also encouraged to leave a Glassdoor review whether they were hired or not. Whether or not a candidate decides to work at HubSpot, we know they will tell their family and friends about the experience. We think that word of mouth is critical to our brand and to our ability to attract the best people to our company.6
Top candidates pick the best companies to work for, not the other way around. Much like buyers' access to information, employment candidates expect to research, learn, and understand much more about a potential employer before they even start the interview process.
Mike Ewing, HubSpot customer renewal manager, tells how he attracted HubSpot to him and landed the job he desired.
I was working at a family run e-commerce company and ended up out of a job. So, I started researching where I could apply my experience, and I ran across the book Inbound Marketing. I became excited about the ideas in the book, and I decided to combine them with what I knew about e-commerce. My next step was to create a blog talking about inbound e-commerce. It was a unique blog at the time; not many people were talking about inbound e-commerce, not even HubSpot.
Then I started to connect with people at HubSpot and others in the marketing world and to tweet about inbound e-commerce. I applied for another job at HubSpot and was turned down because I did not have B2B experience. What I didn't know at the time was that two people at HubSpot were tasked with building an inbound e-commerce group. When that group needed to bring in another person they told the recruiter to get the guy writing the blog ecommerceInboundmarketing.com because he was the only one writing about this topic.
The recruiter laughs and says we just turned this guy down for another job!
The blog was the reason I got found by HubSpot.7
Culture is to recruiting as product is to marketing. Customers are more easily attracted with a great product. Amazing people are more easily attracted with a great culture.8
HubSpot is very intentional about their culture and the employee experience. Beginning in the preinterview stage, they send people content explaining the process and expectations. From the first day on the job where every aspect is planned and scheduled, to the last day when lessons are shared and plans made for continued connection to the team, the employee journey is designed to result in an amazing experience for both the employee and the company.
Katie Burke, chief people officer at HubSpot, talks about the candidate experience:
On the candidate experience, we monitor every stage of the candidate journey from candidate Net Promoter Scores (NPS) scores to acceptance rates. Our approach to data within our people operations team is to use full-funnel employee journey data points as leading indicators rather than wait for lagging ones to emerge.
Companies love to use internal data as a form of self-congratulations, ignoring platforms like Glassdoor or InHerSight because they include data points that are hard to hear about your organization. You can ignore external data and employee review sites for as long as you'd like, but you do so at your peril. The scores your candidates and employees leave on review sites are seen by thousands of people each year and have a far greater impact on your acceptance rates and brand than you realize.
It's hard, really hard. You have to really listen, and you have to act on what you hear. You also have to strike a balance between responding and empowering other teams and individual employees to fix challenges themselves. But we view it as the best way to get a pulse on what's going on and to give employees a voice in what's working and what isn't. I think more companies should replace long surveys that don't work with short ones that do. But don't let the most interesting conversations happen in whispers.9
Inbound culture is about creating opportunities for people to engage in meaningful dialogue about what matters and what's broken even when—especially when—it's hard to do.
Inbound organizations focus on creating and documenting a culture that is transparent; puts people first; is structured around small, autonomous teams; makes decisions close to the customer; and is focused on a mission that inspires employees and customers.
“Your culture is your brand because whatever a company's culture is internally will ultimately show up in its behaviors and thereby its perception and reputation in the marketplace. You cannot have an exceptionally positive, trustworthy brand without the corresponding culture,” states Dharmesh Shah.10