HubSpot’s 2016 Diversity Data
The Numbers and What We’re Doing About Them
One of our core tenets at HubSpot is transparency. We believe, as Louis Brandeis once wrote, that “sunlight is the best disinfectant,” and that people, teams, and companies operate better when the de facto setting is to share instead of keeping information secret.
That’s great in theory, particularly when sharing things you’re excelling at as an organization. But practicing transparency is most important when it’s hard. Like many tech companies, we have made a public commitment to diversity. Like many tech companies, our numbers are less than pride-inducing.
But one of our goals as an organization is to attract, retain, and grow remarkable talent, and both candidates and employees shared a resounding ask from HubSpot that we share this data publicly. This reflects what we’re seeing in the broader tech culture. Diversity is an important topic that people care about, and we want to be a positive force in moving this conversation forward.
And so, here it is.
In addition to sharing the data, I also want to share what we’ve learned to date about how to make progress on this front, and what we have lined up for this year. My hope is that, by sharing these initiatives (and updates on these initiatives) publicly, we can “open-source” our learnings on this front.
I’ll add this final note: I am continually humbled by this initiative. There is nothing like the topic of diversity to generate engaged discussions on our internal wiki 🙂 And much of the success we’ve had on this front has come from employees both contributing ideas and pushing the executive team to do more. I invite the same from you. I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments. We’re far from having it figured out, and welcome input on how we can do better.
Why diversity matters
We’ve made diversity a priority for three reasons:
- It’s better for our company. The research is clear, diverse teams perform better.
- It’s better for our customers and employees. HubSpot is a global company, with customers in 90 countries and employees in 5. Our customers want a remarkable product that takes their unique needs into consideration. Remarkable products are built by remarkable teams (and per the data above, remarkable teams are diverse). We view this initiative as a critical retention and recruiting priority for us long-term.
- It’s the right thing to do. We are a business that prides itself on making marketing and sales inherently more human. That starts with making people feel welcome and empowered at HubSpot.
Definitionally, diversity and inclusion are often lumped together. For us at HubSpot, we’ve defined diversity as the current snapshot of representation by demographic, which is important. But equally as imperative is how inclusive HubSpot feels to someone on a daily basis when they come into work. To that end, our diversity and inclusion mission at HubSpot is below:
Diversity in leadership
One of our greatest areas for improvement is our management team. With just two women and very limited racial diversity, our management team is less diverse than the rest of the company and certainly less diverse than we’d like it to be long-term.
We introduced two programs this year aimed at building a diverse bench of leaders:
- The first is The Rooney Rule, introduced in June. The term is rooted in the NFL’s efforts to diversify head coaching and general management positions to better mirror the diversity of players on the field and the NFL’s customer base. For every director level or up role at HubSpot we require the hiring team for the role to meet with at least one candidate that doesn’t match the majority profile of our employee base. Ideally, there are two such candidates in every hiring pool as research suggests this is a powerful tipping point.
- The second measure is The Norrington Grant, something unique to HubSpot. This is named after Lorrie Norrington, HubSpot Board member and former Intuit and GE executive. The grant is funded by our CEO and COO respectively and provides senior leaders across the company the budget flexibility they need to compete for top non-majority talent at the director level and above. Top talent commands top compensation, and we never want budget to be the reason we miss out on a senior leader who can help HubSpot improve as a business and augment the diversity of our leadership team.
These plays are still in their early stages, but initial results are promising, at least on the gender side of the equation. In 2015, 24% of our director level and up hires were women. In 2016, 50% of our global director and up hires have been women — we’ve doubled the percentage of senior female hires in just a year, which is pretty cool. We also made 19 internal promotions for directors and up, and of those 19 folks, 9 were female. So on both internal growth and external hiring, we are making some progress.
We still have work to do on diversifying our leadership team, the C-Suite in particular, but are energized by the early impact of the bets we’ve placed.
Diversity of ethnicity
While we’re seeing some early signs of progress on gender diversity, you’ll see we haven’t made the same traction on diversity of age or race.
Here’s some of the programming we have lined up to help us close the ethnicity gap.
We’ve created an employee resource group dedicated to supporting employees of color globally. People of Color at HubSpot, or PoCaH for short, launched a mentorship program to help employees of color grow, and assembled two of the HubSpot-hosted events I’m most proud:
- First Gens in Tech took place in Cambridge this fall with 100 attendees and a keynote from HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah.
- ConnectED took place in Dublin, and had 70 attendees and generated 20 applications to HubSpot.
Both events aimed to diversify both the ethnic and socioeconomic composition of tech in general, not just HubSpot, placing the focus of the event on helping students and recent graduates consider careers in tech.
We’re supplementing employee-led programs with key partnerships in this area. We’ve partnered with the New England Venture Capital Association to participate in the first Hack Diversity pilot program. And we’re a beta customer of FutureFuel, a company out of MIT focused on reducing college debt as a barrier to entering the world of tech.
Diversity of age
Tech historically has put a premium on youth, and while HubSpot is proud to attract and grow recent graduates as part of our employee value proposition, it’s imperative to our long-term success as a business that we create an environment where experienced professionals and recent graduates alike can grow and thrive. While our numbers may look like a typical tech company in this area, we believe we can do better.
Right now, we have two key plays in the works on this front.
We are working to make HubSpot an employer of choice for working parents. In addition to a generous family leave policy, we are spending more time and energy than ever supporting both managers of parents and parents themselves:
- Backup childcare with Care.com
- Teledoc
- Support and resources for both the employee on family leave and their managers to optimize communication, support, and logistics
- Complimentary memberships to the Boston Children’s Museum for family outings to our employees
We’ve updated our employer marketing. We delivered training across the organization on how to make job descriptions significantly more inclusive. For example, we’re started the process of removing the term “digital natives” from our job descriptions–we learned a lot of people read this as “under 25 years old.” We’ve also overhauled our Jobs page to reflect our interest in attracting both emerging and experienced professionals alike by focusing on benefits that go deeper than free beer and ping-pong.
We’re also looking to partnerships to play a role here. We’ve already partnered with Apres — think LinkedIn for women returning to the workforce — to help us widen our pipeline of experienced women.
We think that creating a remarkably supportive environment for working parents and their families is the best first step toward improving age diversity, but it’s only a first step. In 2017, we’re planning to pilot additional initiatives to move the needle on this front. We believe that every age has its unique and valuable perspective, and we want to see a blend of ages throughout the company.
Diversity of sexual orientation
We don’t collect data on sexual orientation, but it’s still important to us. This year was the first year we sponsored major Pride initiatives in Boston and Dublin. We also hosted an LGBTQ intern event for all LGBTQ interns and allies in the greater Boston area. Those events garnered great responses from HubSpotters and their families, so we plan to continue to invest and expand our support for LGBTQ employees, candidates, and communities in areas where we do business.
Pride events and parades are an important and public signal around our support for LGBTQ employees, but equally as important is the daily work we do to ensure our lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer employees feel a valuable part of our success as a company. The events and steps above represent critical steps in the right direction.
Our path forward
From First Gens in Tech to our mentorship program for employees of color to our wildly popular Women’s Web App workshop (now completed twice stateside and once in Dublin) and our Add the Women Back Wikipedia event, many of our most successful events were sourced directly from the front lines of our business.
I don’t think that’s an accident.
In addition to galvanizing our employee base, employee-led events often tend to take a longer view than company-led initiatives focused on building the candidate pipeline. This means they have impact outside of the walls of HubSpot.
For example, in our Add the Women Back Wikipedia event, Maggie Georgieva of our product team added Caitlin Kalinowski of Oculus to Wikipedia for her contributions to design and virtual reality:
Our employees care about diversity, and have unique insight into how to create the culture they want to be a part of — both at HubSpot and in the broader tech world. While we plan to continue investing and supporting diversity efforts from the leadership team, my bets are on the most impactful ideas coming from the front lines.
For myself and the rest of the culture team, we’re zeroed in on creating an internal culture that nurtures diversity. One problem with a culture as strong and cohesive as HubSpot’s is it can inadvertently create a sea of sameness. We’re working to progress our thinking internally on this front.
For example, we’re training on how to hire for culturally additive traits–ensuring we don’t use “sameness” or “likeability” as a proxy for talent. Last year, we also hosted a HubTalk on inclusion, and this year we’ll be launching an UpStander class to help empower every employee at HubSpot to speak up and out when their peers or leaders fall short on this issue.
Finally, because diversity is so deeply personal and connected to people’s histories, families, and roots, we recognize the need to keep learning and evolving as a team. Everything we do is iterative — we’ll take feedback on each initiative and improve, evolve, and adapt it as we grow and scale.
I have no doubt I’ll receive volumes of feedback from HubSpot employees throughout 2017 🙂 , and I invite you to join in on the conversation as well. We’re far from having it figured out, and welcome input on how we can do better. And we’ll keep sharing what’s working (and what’s not working) as we push ourselves to create a more diverse HubSpot.
