HubSpot opens regional HQ in Singapore, plans to hire 150 staff

With the opening of its Singapore office, HubSpot announced today (26 April) it will hire 150 Singapore-based employees over the next three years across the business including sales, marketing, services, and support.

The office — known as SingSpot — becomes HubSpot's Asia Pacific headquarters, and the second regional office is in Sydney.

"HubSpot has an incredible opportunity for growth in Asia Pacific and we could not be happier to be celebrating that with a new office and a commitment to hiring 150 new employees," said JD Sherman, HubSpot president and COO.

Scroll through the photos of the new HubSpot office below:

[gallery link="file" ids="59383,59382,59381,59380,59379,59378,59377,59376,59375,59374,59373,59372,59371,59370,59368,59367,59366,59365,59364"]

At the opening, Human Resources spoke to Jeetu Mahtani, HubSpot's MD of international, and Katie Burke, HubSpot's vice president of culture and experience, on the manpower reasons behind choosing Singapore as the APAC headquarters and the talent strategies in the pipeline.

Q. Tell us a bit about the talent-specific reasons behind choosing Singapore?

Jeetu Mahtani (JM): In terms of talent, we’re looking for digital natives, people who understand marketing and how it is changing. A lot of the talent here gets how you can use content to attract the consumer who is buying differently today.

E-commerce is growing rapidly in Singapore, and talent here is getting very comfortable at being social and buying online so it was a natural fit.

Q. Tell us more about the variety of roles you're hiring for.

Katie Burke (KB): We want people from Singapore to service every touchpoint of the customer experience - talent that can solve every aspect of our customer’s challenges - and that autonomy is one of the things that make HubSpot unique.

For example, most customer support engineers are held accountable to metrics like how quickly you can get them off the phone, or how quickly can you push them to someone else. We do the exact opposite.

Our team is empowered to help customers solve problems, and our belief is that our APAC customers will feel the investment in the team we’re making here.

JM: Our commitment to our team is when we acquire a customer, every team works together, from marketing to sales to support to ongoing services, which is why we’re going to grow in all functions.

Q. How does your culture help you attract the kind of talent you defined?

KB: We want to create a workplace that reflects how modern humans live and work, and the most talented people really hate being micromanaged. The autonomy to do remarkable work is part of our core value proposition, not just in Singapore, but in our five global locations.

As a result, we spend less time providing rules and regulations on how staff do their jobs and instead focus on the results we want them to achieve on behalf of our customers.

We feel like that resonates with people who aren’t afraid of how the world is changing. At the same time, we benefit from attracting people who can think independently, like founders, and enjoy using autonomy for the good of our company and customers.

Q. Having recently entered the Asian market, what kind of talent challenges have you already observed?

JM: As a new player, I think our brand is not well-known enough; while in the US, Europe and Australia, a lot of people know of us. Early challenges are around getting our brand on the ground and getting talent to say "that’s interesting, who is HubSpot?"

We’re starting to get over that challenge and now people are starting to say "I want to learn more." There’s a lot of talent trying to decide if marketing is the space they want to stay long-term.

We have great content at inbound.org, what we call the HubSpot academy, and we tell talent to go check it out, educate themselves about inbound marketing. We let them know we’re here to share, and when they're interested they can come over for a conversation.

Q. Most HR leaders cite a talent shortage in the market - what's your take on this?

KB: As a company, we're a serial optimist. We believe that we’ve been incredibly fortunate in markets where other people have said we can’t.

One of the things we believe is that we need more marketers. There’s a massive talent shortage for our agency partners. Hiring top talent is one of the biggest challenges marketers face.

One of the things we are trying to do is not just service our own talent pool, but also help our over 2,000 agency partners globally grow.

Our hope is that in three years, Jeetu (JM) and I would be talking about how many people are inbound certified in Southeast Asia, whether they work at HubSpot or not.

Jeetu Mahtani: We’re not going to see talent shortage as a challenge, rather it comes down to us being able to create something unique to get them to pay attention to us.

Image: Provided