1) We’re an inbound marketing company and we train our customers to grow by being generous, authentic, and helpful with the content they deliver, so we try to practice what we preach as it relates to walking the walk on inbound and content creation.

2) …as a company we are radically transparent, so sharing what makes us tick and what we aspire to be as an organization helped us all rally around its importance and be more honest about the degree to which we were living up to our promise across every candidate and employee touchpoint.

Tell me about the results?

Since it launched, the Culture Code has become our most powerful recruiting and employment brand tool, but it’s also an important promise to our customers about the type of company we are and how we hire people that will fundamentally help their companies grow.

“Culture Code has become our most powerful recruiting and employment brand tool”

I’ve been amazed by the sheer number of customers who choose our culture and approach to solving for the customer as a core reason to invest in partnering with HubSpot.

Who was involved in its creation?

Dharmesh Shah, our co-founder and CTO, was the primary author, spiritual leader, and catalyst behind the Culture Code, but countless employees were involved in its launch and success.

Dharmesh did multiple practice runs of the deck (both online and in person) to solicit feedback and ideas, and we continue to update the deck to reflect feedback from employees, partners, candidates, and customers alike. When it comes to culture, we are never done–just always improving.

Can you describe the biggest recruiting wins that came from your Culture Code?

One thing we are incredibly proud of is the degree to which it has helped us attract top talent as we scale globally–we are relatively well-known in Boston because it’s where our company started.

But as we have expanded to Portsmouth, NH, Dublin, Ireland, Sydney, Australia, and Singapore, we’ve been outside our traditional brand awareness comfort zone and the Culture Code has been a massive asset in helping us scale globally by attracting top talent in key markets.

How do you actively promote the Culture Code?

When we first launched, we did a fair amount of press around the Culture Code, along with contributed content, social promotion, and comarketing offerings, but since then it’s honestly taken on a life of its own.

Now, the Culture Code is primarily viewed on SlideShare given its popularity there, our Jobs page, LinkedIn page, Glassdoor page, or from one of our employees, partners, or customers sharing it on social.

The Culture Code is a great example of creating remarkable content and watching it spread like wildfire.

Dharmesh invested a herculean amount of time in building it, and that investment has paid off in spades over time.

We didn’t think of it as a campaign, we thought of it as a document to help scale how we think about what means most to us, and I think that’s why it worked.

What were the core steps you took to create a Culture Code?

1) Making a founder level decision to actually publish something externally with our viewpoint on culture

2) Investing time (not just from executive leadership but from employees at every single level and from every team) to fine tune and edit and refine the doc

3) Making it clear which parts of the document were aspirational and which we currently delivered upon

4) Hitting “publish”–it would have been easy for Dharmesh to work on the Culture Code for another five years, but ultimately there’s always room for improvement–hitting publish made us take a stand and put ourselves out there, and the risk was really well-received

5) Being clear and public about our commitment to improve, both in terms of what was in the doc and just generally to how we can continue to improve the candidate and employee experience.

How long did it take to create?

The creation of the document itself took Dharmesh and the team working on it months, but honestly, creating a culture and a company that our employees, partners, and customers can be proud of has taken us years, and we’re just getting started.

What are the top few tips for someone else creating a Culture Code?

1) Don’t be afraid to take a stand–sharing what you stand for with the world is hard, but if you’re boring and say what everyone else is saying or has said you’re not building any net gains with current or former employees. Be bold–it’s worth the risk.

2) Make it a commitment, not just content – at HubSpot the Culture Code isn’t just a doc, it’s something that helps inform day to day employee decisions and helps keep us honest about how we are improving every aspect of our employee’s lives.

We consider it a living, breathing document and something all of our teams reference on a daily basis – your culture manifesto isn’t a “set it and forget it” type of thing.

3) Share it–sure, you can keep it internal and put it on posters to show people when they get to your office, but why not share it with the world and get much more scalable awareness on what you stand for and what types of candidates you’re hoping to achieve.

How has it influenced your recruiting process?

I always say that the Culture Code is as helpful for the candidates it brings in as the candidates it filters out.

“Culture Code is as helpful for the candidates it brings in as the candidates it filters out.”

At HubSpot, we are radically transparent. We give employees a significant amount of autonomy, and we ship code, market, and sell at a really rapid pace, so if you don’t like that type of work environment, we likely aren’t the best fit for you.

Outlining what we value most (HEART, which stands for humble effective adaptable remarkable and transparent), and ensuring that we screen for it at every turn in the hiring process is imperative to us, and serves as a daily barometer for our recruiting teams and hiring managers on every team across the globe.

What were the biggest challenges in creating a Culture Code?

Balancing the desire for feedback and buy in with our general philosophy of shipping fast and iterating on what we deliver, and then I would say daily it’s the discipline to keep living it in every single thing we do.

Why did you acquire CultureCode.com?

Dharmesh is one of the most brilliant marketers I know. He is very deliberate and intentional in everything he does, and he knew every early on that people would remember a name that was simple, remarkable, and to the point, so making it highly searchable and easy to find on the internet was imperative.

This is just one of the many reasons he’s a thought leader in the world of marketing.

Do you have any other advice for employers about Culture Codes?

People think about culture as an after thought or tangential part of their competitive strategy, but at the end of the day it sets the tone for how your employees behave, how they interact, the types of people you hire, and the way in which you grow as an organization.

It is the very foundation of any remarkable company, so it should be a driving force in what you do, not something left on the back burner for a rainy day.