We recently made some changes and commitments at HubSpot to pay transparency. Earlier this year, we shared with all global HubSpot employees their compensation range and starting July 13th, we’ll disclose compensation ranges in all of our job postings across the United States. To ensure we’re delivering on our commitment to being transparent with our employees, candidates, and community, we’ve outlined our compensation philosophy here. 

Over the course of HubSpot’s 16 years, transparency has always been a core value to our business. As our Culture Code states, remarkable transparency helps us make decisions and take ownership. From publicly publishing our annual Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging Report, to our Sustainability Report, we’ve always defaulted to share where we are as a company and our areas of improvement. 

With all of our growth and change the past few years, we needed to ensure our compensation philosophy and accompanying enablement and clarity met the needs of our growing organization, and we needed an approach to transparency that mirrored that. To that end, I'm excited to share what our team has been working on. 

Paying fairly has always been important to us. In 2018, Massachusetts passed the Pay Equity Law, making HubSpot’s hometown one of the first states in the country to ban employers from asking prospective workers what they made at their last job. Instead of just adopting this at our headquarters in Massachusetts, we decided to use the local law to make a larger change to our global approach. Instead of asking about compensation history, we ask candidates about compensation expectations to ensure conversations around compensation are fair and consistent. 

As states such as Colorado, New York, and Washington recently moved to require companies to disclose pay ranges for their positions in these states, I suspect that legislation around compensation will quickly move from the exception to the rule, which is a great thing. Ultimately, being transparent about our pay philosophy is much more than a legal requirement. In fact, we saw the emerging legislation as an opportunity to accelerate open dialogue around compensation and drive towards consistency and transparent pay across HubSpot. We’ve made some recent commitments and changes to our culture and recruiting process to ensure we’re making meaningful, long-term change from pay opacity to pay clarity, and they are as follows: 

Anchoring Compensation Bands to One Major City per Country

As HubSpot continues to grow as a hybrid company, we’ve decided to anchor compensation to one predefined major city per country. That means if you’ve historically lived in New York, but decide to move to Illinois, your salary wouldn’t be changed or calibrated based on the move. Your compensation would be anchored to New York City, the major city we've chosen for compensation alignment in the U.S.

This decision reflects our commitment to flexibility and mobility. Moving to another part of the country is a decision an employee should make based on what’s best for their work and home life, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of their compensation.  

We’ve already been operating this way with anchoring to a major city since 2021 and we will review our ranges and approach regularly as part of our annual process. 

Compensation Fluency Education and Training 

Whether you’re a new manager, experienced leader, or an individual contributor, we know that everyone has a different level of understanding around compensation. We noticed that within HubSpot, there was a mix of comfort levels when it came to compensation fluency, and it was important to create a level playing field to help employees and managers have better conversations. That’s why we worked with our Learning & Development Team to build both live and self-paced training modules on these topics in order to help everyone understand compensation beyond just the base salary number and the salary range. 

We also came up with tools for folks to feel comfortable and empowered to have conversations around compensation and put into place mechanisms to help with psychological safety. To date, we've built training that covers the mechanics of compensation inclusive of our overall compensation philosophy. We have also built topic-specific training to understand salary ranges, for example, how they are set and used and how someone should think about where they land in the range. These are available as self-paced training and have both video and text supporting them to accommodate different learning styles. 

Transparent Access to Compensation Ranges

We strive to offer compensation that is fair, as well as competitive in our industry. That’s why we take a “market-based compensation” approach using data from trusted third party compensation sources to set compensation ranges that are consistent and competitive. Each range includes a minimum and maximum of compensation and employees are paid within that based on their skills, experience, qualifications, and other job-related reasons. Our ranges are purposefully broad so that HubSpotters have the scope and ability to grow their compensation within their role. For example, someone starting their career in a role might be at the lower end of the range due to their limited experience, while someone with more experience relevant to the job might be paid higher in the range. We also keep focused on market precision and evaluate compensation annually, identifying any swings in the market and making adjustments as needed to keep us competitive. 

In March 2022, we had all HubSpot managers meet to discuss compensation with their team members, specifically the current compensation range for their employees, to help everyone understand where they land in the range and why. It was important to us that we not only make compensation ranges visible to individual HubSpotters, but that their managers could have meaningful conversations about compensation and performance. In advance of those conversations, we provided training and tools for our managers to feel confident going into these conversations. Their fluency in compensation can really help build the psychological safety needed to have conversations around compensation.

Publishing Compensation Ranges for All Job Postings in the U.S. 

Starting July 13, 2022, we will disclose compensation ranges (including any applicable commissions and bonuses) in all of our job postings across the U.S. This is our first step in our multi-phased approach to achieving pay transparency globally. 

When we think of total compensation, there's a lot more than just your salary. It includes benefits such as healthcare and global employee assistance programs, parental benefits, tuition reimbursement, employee stock purchase plan (ESPP), and a lot more. Some roles are also eligible to participate in HubSpot’s equity plan to receive restricted stock units (RSUs). To help paint a clear picture of the full compensation package, every HubSpotter has access to their Total Rewards Statement, which is a one-stop spot to view the various components attached to compensation packages depending on their role and work location. What candidates and employees will now be able to view is the total cash compensation range for the specific role, which includes base salary, on target commission for employees in eligible roles, and annual bonus payments under HubSpot’s bonus plan for eligible roles.  

As we continue to build a company future generations can be proud of, we have an opportunity to build long-term and sustainable solutions focused on the systems that drive pay transparency, which in turn help fuel inclusion and equity, especially for historically underrepresented talent. While I’m proud of the progress we’ve made so far, we know we have a long journey ahead of us and I look forward to iterating and evolving our compensation philosophy to ensure we’re being transparent with our employees, candidates, and community.