Opening an international office is a right of passage for many successful, fast-growing companies. HubSpot’s customer base was rapidly spilling over into new countries all over the world when we embraced the opportunity to expand into new markets and grow our talent pool outside of Cambridge, MA by opening the doors to an office in Dublin, Ireland in January 2013. Dublin is home to an emerging tech scene with companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google setting up shop in the city to tap into Ireland’s engineering talent. We originally planned to focus our efforts in Dublin on marketing, sales, and support, but it wasn’t long before I was asked the daunting question: how could we build a dev team abroad?
Fast forward to last week. I took my second trip to Dublin this year to work with the engineering team on interviewing, hiring, and training new talent. It was one of the most rewarding experiences to see how naturally the team had grown to work with one another and infused HubSpot’s core culture to into the Dublin office. Was I surprised at how self-sufficient the team had become? Yes and no. Opening our first remote engineering office was intimidating considering HubSpot’s 600-person team had always worked together under one roof. Figuring out how to transfer the most essential parts of our culture across borders was completely foreign to me, but it would make or break the Dublin team. I had to recognize which parts of our recruiting and training process were key in cultivating HubSpot’s culture and adapt them to work overseas if I wanted to build this team from scratch.
First, I considered the early stages of our dev organization here in Cambridge, MA to see what could be replicated. Our Director of Engineering was a driving force from the beginning in shaping HubSpot’s dev culture and has recruiting in his DNA; naturally, he was the first person I thought of when faced with hiring engineers in a brand new city. With his help, we kept the recruiting approach simple by mirroring most of our U.S. techniques. Namely, we never used recruiters. We visited universities, related government authorities, industry events, met with potential talent one-on-one, and listened carefully for networks we could tap into. Dublin is large enough to attract tech giants like Amazon and Facebook, but interconnected enough that meeting just a few of the right people can lead to promising possibilities. In our case, following hints and clues led us to hiring seven world-class engineers in less than two months. Our culture of recruiting didn’t stop there; we flew each new hire to our Cambridge office for orientation and training, and created a rotation schedule for engineers based in both Ireland and the U.S. to swap locations to experience both working environments.
Seven engineers is quite different from the hundreds Google or Amazon have working out of Europe, but we were tactful, thoughtful, and delicate in our approach and are being rewarded for it. These seven hires evolved the Dublin team to become so self-sufficient that they added three new engineers to the team by the end of the year with little guidance from me. The beauty of having a 10-person team was that I could individually train each one of them and understand the nuances of their specific skill set. In a matter of months, our Dublin team was achieving key tech leadership roles within our organization, owning entire product lines for HubSpot, and demonstrated during my most recent visit that they are still actively growing their team. As someone who keeps recruiting at arm’s length, I’m surprised by how much I trust them to find top talent while maintaining culture from 3,000 miles away. I guess you could say we hired the right people for our first international office.