One Thing You Probably Didn’t Know Engineers at HubSpot Built
On the surface, building software and building brand couldn’t be more different. One is about writing code, the other about writing copy. One appeals to logic, the other more to emotion.
That’s why you might be surprised to learn that engineers at HubSpot are the reason we have an Employer Brand team today.
Let me explain…
In 2015, I was working on HubSpot’s PR team when a handful of engineering leaders got together and decided we were going to need a stronger tech brand if we ever hoped to hire developers competitively. We didn’t have an employer brand team at HubSpot at the time. And HubSpot was known for marketing, not software development. If you scoured Google for why you should join our product team, you wouldn’t find a great answer.
But that didn’t mean there wasn’t one. Because when we asked those engineering leaders to explain to us what made building product at HubSpot unique, they lit up. It was the small, autonomous teams. It was the relationship developers had with product managers. It was how many times a day we deployed to production. It was how much customers loved what we built. It was the ownership you felt over what you were building. It was how team events like Tacos Tacos Trivia became legendary.
The problem wasn’t that they didn’t have a story to tell. It was figuring out how to tell it. That’s why I joined the Product team a few months later. And for the following year and a half, I was their personal storyteller. I helped write blog posts about our tech stack (before really understanding what that meant), drafted speaker proposals about modern Java, organized React meetups, pitched journalists on our Women’s Web App Workshop, live tweeted Tech Talks, and collaborated with the team to write articles that could maybe, one day, if we were ever so lucky, get us on the front page of Hacker News. (It happened once.)
But I had only just started to scratch the surface. After piloting this work with Product, I started HubSpot’s Employer Brand team in 2016 as part of the People Operations org. We’re four people strong today, between Boston and Dublin, and manage content, PR, events, partnerships, and more to help HubSpot attract amazing candidates.
And while I haven’t worked as closely with Product since being on the team, I think about them a lot. The team’s doubled in size since then (if not tripled, #math), we’ve started to build a platform and solve technical problems at scale, and our tech leadership team is more passionate about culture and inclusion than ever.
That’s why the opportunity to craft our Product team’s story today is massive. And, that opportunity could be yours because I’m hiring a Marketing Manager of Tech Employer Brand to join my team. You’ll work side-by-side with developers, designers, product managers, UX researchers, and leadership to understand what makes HubSpot’s Product team a uniquely great place to build software. You’ll think like a marketer to create content, campaigns, programs, and experiments that help us share that externally.
At most companies, employer branding is spearheaded by the marketing or HR departments. But the reason we have a small and growing Employer Brand team at HubSpot today is because our engineering team saw a challenge, and they did what engineers do: worked out a solution.
So if you think the title ‘Tech Employer Brand’ might be outside your comfort zone, or if you don’t know much about software development (yet), I’d still encourage you to apply. Because building product and building brand actually have a lot in common at HubSpot.
Apply for the Marketing Manager, Tech Employer Brand role here. I’d love to chat with you about why joining the Product team was one of the best things that ever happened to this marketer.
