Hire Top Tier Talent With HubSearch [Endless Customers S.1. Ep. 39]

This transcript has been generated with AI and not checked for accuracy.

Jason Azocar
0:00:00
We hear often, I don't know what I need. I know I need somebody great. They have to know HubSpot or this particular component of HubSpot, but beyond that, I'm not really sure. So we get to do a lot of scoping to help our clients crystallize on like,

Jason Azocar
0:00:12
what do you actually need this person to do? What are they gonna do for the business?

Jason Azocar
0:00:15
What are you gonna do for the business? What are you gonna do for the business? What are you gonna do for the business?

Alex Winter
0:00:29
Welcome back to Endless Customers. My name is Alex Winter and today I'm joined by Jason Azekar. He's the CEO of HubSearch. Jason, welcome to the show. Thanks Alex. I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to have you. We're at Impact Live. We're here in Chicago. Yeah, it's been an amazing event so far. This is the perfect type of event for us. We were thrilled to be able to sponsor and the content has been incredible. So we're happy to be here. That's awesome to hear and thank you for sponsoring. We love having you guys as a sponsor and being a part of the community.

Jason Azocar
0:00:50
Sure.

Alex Winter
0:00:50
What is HubSearch? Let's let our audience know what you guys do and a little background on how the company started and what you're all about.

Jason Azocar
0:00:56
All right, perfect. So at the most basic level, HubSearch is a recruiting organization and we're hyper specialized to the HubSpot ecosystem. So most of what we work on for our clients is we need somebody amazing and they have to know HubSpot.

Jason Azocar
0:01:08
So there's a lot of variety in there, which is great. Our clients come to us and say, we need a marketer or an ops professional, RevOps, HubSpot admin, something in that world. And the dotted line is essentially always dot, dot, dot. And they've got to really understand the HubSpot platform and how to do sophisticated, complex

Jason Azocar
0:01:24
work in the products. And have their certifications and all that stuff. Certifications, experience. We get really deep when we get into it with our clients on what must they have done, what portions of HubSpot must they have seen, et cetera. Oh, very cool.

Jason Azocar
0:01:36
But that's our focus. And I'll tell you a little bit about the Genesis story. So I was really fortunate to work at HubSpot for years. So I was a HubSpot employee from 2012 to 2015. I led the tech recruiting team. It was an unbelievable time.

Jason Azocar
0:01:47
We weren't, it wasn't super, super small when I got there. I was probably employee 300 or something and we got it to about 3000 before I left. You rode the surge. It was amazing. I got to go to the IPO party. It was, it was a blast.

Jason Azocar
0:01:57
It was really, really fun. Very cool. Left in 2015, did some consulting mostly for Boston tech startups all in this talent space, like how do you build an effective talent acquisition process,

Jason Azocar
0:02:07
how do you get the talent you need, et cetera. And then in 2019, we looked at the market, my co-founder and I, we looked at the market and said, essentially, how in the world is there no recruiting company that's specialized to HubSpot? Because Salesforce has a couple.

Jason Azocar
0:02:20
So we saw this model be really effective in the Salesforce landscape. There are a couple of big, successful recruiting companies that their whole acquisition phrasing is like, we are the specialists in Salesforce. And for some reason, nobody had done that for HubSpot yet,

Jason Azocar
0:02:34
and the bet we made in 2019 was maybe this space is ready.

Alex Winter
0:02:38
It's something here.

Jason Azocar
0:02:39
Yeah, and five years later, 400 placements in, we're so far so good.

Alex Winter
0:02:43
400 placements in.

Jason Azocar
0:02:44
Yeah, it's been a really cool five years.

Alex Winter
0:02:45
Well, HubSpot is an amazing tool, and it's an amazing community, but it's a complex tool. There's a lot of really cool things that you can do, but you have to know how to do those things. It's like anything else, and if you're not a specialist or if you haven't had training,

Alex Winter
0:02:59
I think it's hard for business owners sometimes to be able to select the right person because it's easy to make it look like your resume, you can do all these things, but in reality, maybe it's fluffed up a little bit. Do you see that happening a lot where?

Jason Azocar
0:03:09
We do, yeah, we do. There's a couple of things to say there. So, let me talk about the certifications first. So HubSpot Academy is amazing. I would encourage anybody to go there, learn. That is a great destination to start your HubSpot journey. But it's not quite at the point where it's difficult to pass intensive examination type stuff. I know

Jason Azocar
0:03:29
HubSpot's talking about doing some some more in-depth stuff, but it's really more 101 level knowledge, which is great, great place to start. But certifications in our world don't always mean you've really gotten deep into the more sophisticated components, like how do you actually customize a CRM for a business needs, for their processes, for the funnel.

Alex Winter
0:03:48
Totally.

Jason Azocar
0:03:49
So certifications are great, but really what we tend to look at more is experiential and situational project work. So that's what we talk about when we interview candidates. We talk about like, do you know this thing?

Alex Winter
0:03:59
Okay.

Jason Azocar
0:04:00
Talk to us about the most complex example of this thing, and then when that thing inevitably broke, what did you look for upstream, downstream? So we've gotta get into it where certifications are a great indicator, but it's not the full story.

Alex Winter
0:04:12
Yeah, it's fascinating to me because I think a lot of business owners don't know these things, and it's really, it's gonna help them bridge that gap where they can get the person that they really need that has the right skill set to help their specific lines of business versus just kinda hoping

Alex Winter
0:04:27
that you're hiring the right person and seeing how it goes. Because it's a big investment. HubSpot's not cheap.

Jason Azocar
0:04:32
For sure.

Alex Winter
0:04:33
And hiring a person's not cheap either. So when you're spending this kind of money, I think we get a lot of impact as we coach and train and we love HubSpot too. We've been part of the HubSpot community since pretty much the beginning. And we get that a lot where business owners are a little afraid to make the investment. And the picture we try to paint is that ROI that comes with it.

Alex Winter
0:04:53
It's like if you do it correctly and you hire the right person, it can really return a huge amount. And the control you can have with your sales and your pipeline and all these funnels is it'll exponentially change your business.

Alex Winter
0:05:03
But you have to start with the right ingredients. So what do you say to business owners that are trying to do this but are like, hey, I installed metal fab roofing or I'm not a tech person, like help me. What do I do?

Alex Winter
0:05:16
Like what's that conversation look like for you?

Jason Azocar
0:05:17
Okay, that's a great question. So our customer base is so wildly across the board and it's evolved a lot over the years. So when we first went to market in 2019, our only audience was the HubSpot partners, like Impact for instance.

Jason Azocar
0:05:28
We said we're gonna go really own this space, really focus on these relationships, which was an amazing place to start. I'm glad we did it, but candidly we over-niched, right? Like there was a time where we were saying, hey, HubSpot customer, we're really for the partners.

Jason Azocar
0:05:42
We realized early on that that was probably too small a subset. Gotcha. So we opened up our offering to HubSpot customers, and it crept. That side of the business crept

Jason Azocar
0:05:51
until the CRM really started to pick up some steam. And now, fast forward a couple years, we're 50-50 HubSpot partners to HubSpot customers. Wow. And one of the neat things, as you know, is HubSpot customers can be literally any type of business.

Jason Azocar
0:06:03
Yeah. I mean we've got two person shops and 5,000 person organizations. We don't see a ton at true enterprise like 25,000, 30,000 plus yet. I think that's and that's where this thing is going. As HubSpot starts to continue to move up market, I think that's where we're going. That's exciting. But it's a lot of fun working with all sorts of different businesses with very different needs. You know helping somebody hire their very first

Jason Azocar
0:06:27
marketer who has to do everything, or a really laser focused rev ops, you know, specialist strategist who's really coming in to help optimize some particular part of the funnel. It's pretty neat.

Alex Winter
0:06:39
Yeah. So so for business owners, right, that are trying to hire the specialist, what what would you tell them to look at for like, oh, I want to HubSpot admin, I'm trying to like, look for specific skills. How do you start to use your company and the tools that you have to find these very niche skill sets or these specific things where this person will pair greatly with this company

Alex Winter
0:07:01
and we need to plug and play these people versus just going into this open sea for not knowing? How do you pair those people correctly and what does that process look like for you?

Jason Azocar
0:07:13
Yeah, okay, so that's an awesome question. So recruiting is just as much art as it is science. I mean, we're dealing with the most difficult thing there is to deal with, which is human beings, human capital, I mean, the way that our process runs is on the client side, we start with a kickoff call,

Jason Azocar
0:07:28
some discovery, some alignment, and this may or may not surprise you, but we hear often, I don't know what I need. I know I need somebody great, they have to know HubSpot or this particular component of HubSpot, but beyond that I'm not really sure. So we get to do a lot of scoping to help our clients crystallize on like,

Jason Azocar
0:07:44
what do you actually need this person to do? What are they going to do for the business? What are you hoping the outcome is?

Alex Winter
0:07:48
Yeah, they know there's a problem, but they don't really know fully what the problem is and how to fix it.

Jason Azocar
0:07:52
Yeah, right.

Jason Azocar
0:07:52
So we help define that stuff and we map title and salary and all these things and they're always super niche, super tough to make hires. I say this to our clients all the time. Like if you could just post a job for a HubSpot admin with specific skills and you could get somebody incredible in some reasonable amount of time, we wouldn't exist.

Jason Azocar
0:08:09
Right, that's why we exist as a business because you can make a post and if you have eight months to wait for somebody incredible to land on the post and apply, then that might actually work. But that's never what we hear, right? We get pulled in and we get tapped on the shoulder

Jason Azocar
0:08:23
when urgency is high. I need somebody amazing, we need them as soon as we can find them. Our business is suffering or we're not able to capitalize on the opportunities in front of us because we don't have this person in place. So we get to jump in and do our thing and we were very fortunate that we've been at this long enough now that almost

Jason Azocar
0:08:37
all of our placements come out of our database, which is HubSpot, by the way. That's amazing. Side story, we hacked HubSpot to become an applicant tracking and candidate management tool. It's been amazing. That's really cool. But like early on it was a ton of incredibly heavy lifting LinkedIn recruiter work. Right, like any in-house corporate recruiting team is doing. Right, and that's where LinkedIn is like where it's at.

Jason Azocar
0:08:58
That's where you have to start. And we've spent years building the best network of HubSpot pros of any company in the world. You know, that's the thing that makes us different. And again, I say this to prospects all the time. They're like, why would we work with you?

Jason Azocar
0:09:09
I say, there's only one. We've got the best network of HubSpot experts and professionals of any company on the planet.

Alex Winter
0:09:14
Yeah, wow.

Alex Winter
0:09:15
So front-facing client side, it's like you're looking for companies that are trying to place, but then also on the back end of it, how do you attract talent and how do you find, I know you have the database that you were just saying,

Alex Winter
0:09:25
but are there other resources or ways that you source your talent and you find these specialists?

Jason Azocar
0:09:29
Yeah, we're so fortunate. We have this unbelievable candidate audience. I mean, I think we just passed something like 8,000 candidates in our system that we've interviewed. These aren't just people that we're aware of.

Jason Azocar
0:09:38
Like, these are folks that my recruiting staff has interviewed. They've given them the check mark, like, this person convinced me they knew HubSpot well enough to be dangerous at varying levels. And it's an incredible luxury. And we get that through a number of ways. I mean, the salary guide, for example, is by far the most successful piece of content

Jason Azocar
0:09:55
we've ever released. And we do it every year. So we take all the data that we get from the thousands of conversations that our recruiters have with candidates and the couple of hundred conversations that I have with companies. Aggregate all that stuff together

Jason Azocar
0:10:06
and report back to the ecosystem on, here's what we're seeing for standard pay rates for HubSpot admin, HubSpot developer, growth marketer, whatever, just the common titles. And then we do a bunch of stuff for candidates also, which is essentially like, am I being paid what I'm worth?

Jason Azocar
0:10:20
You know, hey, candidate audience, this is what we see your counterparts, your peers earning in the market. Make sure that you're close. And if you're not, we always put in some content on like, here's how to talk to your manager about resources.

Jason Azocar
0:10:33
Right, I think I'm worth this. And if you get a no, okay, well, let's build a plan together to get me there. So there's all sorts of interesting resources, both for companies and candidates.

Alex Winter
0:10:42
Yeah, it's both sides of the equation. So it sounds like a win-win for really everybody.

Jason Azocar
0:10:47
Honestly, that's the fun part. I mean, that's the why part, right? I mean, why do we do this thing is ultimately we get to help people land their dream jobs, which is incredibly rewarding. And we get to help companies make the key higher

Jason Azocar
0:10:56
that may be the thing that unlocks, you know, the next level for them.

Alex Winter
0:10:59
That's a good segue to it. I was gonna ask you, you got my wheel spinning where I'm like, could you, you don't have to name names or anything like that, but could you share maybe a story where a company came to you, was looking for a specialist, they were kind of reactively going like,

Alex Winter
0:11:11
we're hitting a wall, we need help, help us. And then it just took them to the moon.

Jason Azocar
0:11:15
So we love big, big companies are great. Big market is great. Frankly, I get the most satisfaction out of working with really small teams. We've done this on a number of occasions where I'm meeting with an owner or a group of owners,

Jason Azocar
0:11:26
like one person, one or two people companies that are saying we've got this unbelievable opportunity in front of us. We are working 16 hours a day. We are the sellers, we are the delivery team, we're the customer success, like it's all on us.

Alex Winter
0:11:39
Do it all.

Jason Azocar
0:11:39
Yeah, how in the world do we go from this to a distributed team that's got the right skills. And like, those are the projects where I personally get to have the most fun because I get to, I mean, literally change the balance of somebody's life with with talent. I mean, we get to obviously help someone find an incredible opportunity to build an organization get in early

Jason Azocar
0:11:57
have massive impact. And these owners are like, you know, they get their lives back in many ways where they get to stop working 16 hour crazy days and actually focus on building the business versus delivering for clients. Versus having the business work then.

Jason Azocar
0:12:13
That's exactly right.

Alex Winter
0:12:14
Yeah, totally.

Alex Winter
0:12:15
And we hear that a lot.

Alex Winter
0:12:16
A lot of startups, there's great people, great ideas, but then when there's limited resources and limited budget, you start to hit that ceiling and it's hard to break through to that next level sometimes which is exactly why you need somebody like Upsearch to come in and help you find that right person to.

Jason Azocar
0:12:31
Well, it's chicken and the egg stuff, right? It's like you've got to have some money in the bank as a small or early stage business before you can go make that hire. And it's like at one point, how much cash do you stick in the bank before you say,

Jason Azocar
0:12:41
okay, I'm ready to bring somebody on a payroll, which will of course negatively impact that cash for some very short period of time. But the goal obviously is you know to leverage that new bandwidth to expand business, right?

Alex Winter
0:12:53
And from an ROI standpoint, I know this is hard to define because every industry and company is a little different But it's really an investment and it does cost money

Jason Azocar
0:13:02
But the goal is to get a rich a huge return on this and I understand that that you see that happening more often than Not 100% that that's actually how I talk about our feet, right? I mean we the thing we do isn't free We obviously charge a success fee for what we do. And the way I talk to business owners about rationalizing that is it's a capital expenditure.

Jason Azocar
0:13:18
You know, it's like, are you investing in machinery? Of course not, you're not buying a thing. You're investing in the ability to hire somebody incredible. And you gotta do the math, right? If you sit down and add our fee to this person's first year salary, take that number.

Jason Azocar
0:13:31
And if you aren't very confident that you're gonna earn multiples on that number, it's probably not worth it. The math isn't there yet. But when the math is there, it's a no-brainer, right? Whatever our fee plus this person's salary, if you're very confident you're going to earn 3x that in revenue

Jason Azocar
0:13:46
because you've now got this person, it's a complete no-brainer. Exactly. Yeah, who's going to say no to that? Yeah. So I'm curious too for business owners that are, it sounds like you're either proactive and you know about this and you have the strategic mind to be like, here's the roadmap, and in a few years we're gonna need a specialist and we need to talk to a company like Hubsterts that can help us. For people that aren't thinking like that, that are a little bit more reactive, which it seems like that

Jason Azocar
0:14:08
that seems to happen quite often, how do you get the understanding or get them to see it's important to invest in this and it's important to move your business forward? When you're reactive, it's harder to make decisions because sometimes you're backed up against a wall and that's when you make more mistakes. And when you're proactive, you have the time to think and get a chance to get ahead of

Jason Azocar
0:14:32
it.

Alex Winter
0:14:33
But it doesn't seem like that's happening all the time.

Jason Azocar
0:14:34
Most of my world is reactive. And so there's two sort of primary paths to our service. The fun one, which is we've got this incredible opportunity, we want to build our team and add bandwidth. The less fun one is my, I'll just use account manager as the example, our account manager just gave her notice.

Jason Azocar
0:14:50
We have got to figure this out or we could start shedding clients. Like that's the less fun version of help I need talent, which is always gonna be a reactive, right? Getting a resignation notice is incredibly difficult and stressful, but we deal with it.

Jason Azocar
0:15:03
That's a part of how we help organizations.

Alex Winter
0:15:05
And it happens, it's business.

Jason Azocar
0:15:06
All right, people are gonna change jobs. The other side of it is personnel planning, team planning is really hard. Most of the companies that we work with don't have somebody like a head of people or people ops or honestly maybe zero HR presence whatsoever. We actually built a people ops service inside of HubSpot, so we do a bunch of

Jason Azocar
0:15:25
consulting on people ops. Very cool. Which is a lot of fun. I've got a program manager on our team who is the fractional head of people for a couple of elite HubSpot partners right now. It's a really cool service offering that we yeah it was just it was just a no-brainer extension of what we do. I love that. And a big part of what she does is this.

Jason Azocar
0:15:41
Like, don't think about hiring when you need to hire today. Look, forecasting is very difficult, as we all know, but in an ideal world, forecast out, assuming you see the trends that you're seeing continue, I'll need to hire in Q1, I'll need another hire in Q2,

Jason Azocar
0:15:54
and then do your best to plan it and see how closely reality maps your plan. Yeah, wow, fascinating. So you're here at impact life. You got you got your booth here. You're sponsoring the event What what it's like to be an impact live? Are you having some good conversations? Are you getting we were talking earlier right before we started recording here that you've got some good opportunities happening

Jason Azocar
0:16:16
How's it going for you? It's been it's been a it's been a complete success for us so far So it's like we we haven't done to to deeply into conferences just hasn't been our bread and butter. We do inbound every year because, of course, we do. Honestly, I think I like this feel better. The smaller, more intimate setting, we're having more meaningful conversations,

Jason Azocar
0:16:34
there's less distraction. Everybody here is somebody we should know. I mean, everybody out there walking around is working for an organization that leverages HubSpot, and at some point, that company is gonna need to make a hire.

Jason Azocar
0:16:44
So this is just a perfect opportunity for us to network and meet folks and be at an event that is just so well aligned to what we do and our mission,

Alex Winter
0:16:53
that it was an easy choice. Yeah. No, that makes sense too, because the HubSpot community, everyone's pretty plugged in. There's a lot of nerds. I'm a nerd. I love going to Inbound. That's one of my favorite events. Same. But people that are going to that are usually plugged in and know what's up, and a big part of the community are aware of these tools that are out there. But these types of events, there's a lot of businesses that are great businesses but aren't maybe as plugged into the digital side of this space. So it's like almost what's in the carton for them, right?

Jason Azocar
0:17:19
It totally is. I mean, I think we've done a really good job with awareness sort of in our bubble. Like the HubSpot partners for sure know we exist. Some portion of HubSpot customers know we exist and it's, you know, that the awareness challenge is difficult. There are for sure tens of thousands of HubSpot customers in the U.S. that have never heard the word Hub Search. And anything we can do to come to events like this and help

Jason Azocar
0:17:40
companies understand like there is support, there is a service that helps you acquire the talent you need to leverage the tool you just bought, right? Most of the companies we work with are going, hey, we just bought HubSpot. How the heck do we get from zero to super useful for our business? And usually a part of that answer is, well, you need someone to run the thing. Right. Help me maximize this tool that I just spent a lot of money on so I can get a return on my investment.

Alex Winter
0:18:04
Yeah, got it.

Alex Winter
0:18:04
Excellent.

Alex Winter
0:18:04
Well, it's awesome having you on the show. Before we go, how can people find out more about HubSearch or if they have questions, how can they follow up with you? Great question.

Jason Azocar
0:18:11
So HubSearch.com is always the easiest way to find us. I'm super active on LinkedIn, so reach out to me on LinkedIn. My email is Jason at HubSearch. Pretty easy to remember. We just put up our 2024 salary guide, which I would encourage everybody listening, if you haven't seen it, check it out. It's super valuable for companies and for candidates.

Jason Azocar
0:18:26
Like I said, understand what you have to pay to get somebody great, understand your worth. It's sort of that dual audience thing.

Alex Winter
0:18:32
Yes, absolutely.

Jason Azocar
0:18:33
And I love to have conversations about the HubSpot ecosystem. I mean, it's what I talk about all day, every day. I'm passionate about it, so.

Alex Winter
0:18:39
I can tell, I can tell.

Jason Azocar
0:18:39
So anybody in this space can reach out to me at any time. I'm happy to be helpful.

Alex Winter
0:18:43
Excellent. Jason from HubSearch, everybody. Thank you for being on the show.

Jason Azocar
0:18:46
I really really enjoyed talking with you, man. It's been great.

Alex Winter
0:18:48
Excellent. All right, we're gonna get back to the show. For everybody watching and listening, this is Endless Customers. this is Endless Customers. We will see you on the next episode.




Transcribed with Cockatoo