Founded in 2006, HubSpot is a leading customer relationship management (CRM) platform for growing companies.
The company was in a state of hyper-growth, and was actively hiring across its 13 global offices. HubSpot’s rapid scaling led to increased manual work for HR—at their peak of hiring, HR had to onboard more than 200 hires per month.
The onboarding process involved 50+ employees across 7 teams, and over 15 different tools and systems were used to manage the entire workflow. The teams had 20 to 30 tasks per new hire that needed to be done, which totaled up to about 4,000-6,000 tasks to complete, including emails that had to be sent out every single month manually.
In addition, the teams lacked a centralized place to track communications, integration failures, and team-specific tasks. They had no insight into inter-team dependencies, and integration failures caused delays of up to a week without clear directly responsible individuals (DRIs) for each part of the process.
Compounding the problem, the existing platform they were using did not support critical functionalities that HubSpot needed. Some of these key functionalities included having a large set of connectors, security, access management, version control, and great UI/UX. This platform also struggled to enable and support integration builders organization-wide, including those from non-technical teams.
As a Technology Strategist at HubSpot, Jasper Madrone knew that they needed to consolidate all these tools into one centralized location for better organization-wide collaboration. This would allow them to distribute the onboarding workload to different teams in a more scalable and efficient way.
Want to learn more?
Madrone walks us through his automations during his recorded session from Automate.
The solution? Using a centralized enterprise collaboration platform to track and manage the onboarding process from pre-hire to hired
The HubSpot IT team leveraged Workato to extract and sync data across multiple apps, like Greenhouse and Workday, with their enterprise collaboration platform. Now, their HR teams collectively track and manage the onboarding process for candidates from pre-hire to hired, all via a dashboard in the enterprise collaboration platform.
In Jasper’s words, “We dynamically tag different records with visual indicators to highlight key scenarios to pay special attention to, and at the front of the board, we also display a summary of the overall onboarding task status for each person, so teams can quickly see who may be stuck in the process, and which team is responsible for following up. The benefit of using this tool is that each person has an update log attached to their record where teams can collaborate and communicate when necessary.”
The tasks themselves are also stored on this separate board, and the different teams can create customized views to suit their needs. They can also see a broad overview of every single new hire task that flows through their systems.
With a centralized enterprise collaboration platform, several other workflows that make up the overall onboarding process were automated:
1. Auto hire process
Using Workato, the HubSpot IT team connected Docusign, Workday, and Slack to HubSpot’s enterprise collaboration platform. When a candidate signs their offer in Docusign, Workato connects to Greenhouse on the backend, and automatically marks a new candidate as hired in Greenhouse.
Once a new hire status is detected in Greenhouse, Workato integrates Greenhouse with Workday to upload the offer letter directly into their employee profile.
When an offer fails to upload into Workday, Workato triggers a Slack notification on the backend with a summary of the issue, resources required, links to the relevant record, and employees responsible for getting the problem resolved, which is sent to HR or the recruiter to resolve the issue. This information is synced with HubSpot’s enterprise collaboration platform for better integration failure visibility.
How the process looks now:
2. Visa assessment process
For candidates that require visa sponsorship, recruiters will have to submit a visa assessment form to HubSpot’s Global Mobility team.
Before Workato, they had to fill out over 15 form fields.
Now, the process is streamlined and split into two parts:
a. Work Authorization Form
With Greenhouse and Workbot for Slack connected via Workato on the backend, when a candidate gets moved to a particular stage in Greenhouse, for example, a Manager Phone Interview, the recruiter in charge of the candidate is automatically notified to fill out the Work Authorization Form. This form captures data points that are used to determine if a Visa Assessment is necessary for the candidate.
b. Visa Assessment Form
If the candidate requires a visa, the recruiter is notified to fill out the visa assessment form. This is where the HubSpot IT team can limit the number of fields that the recruiters fill out, as repeated data like candidate’s name, job description, and more, are automatically mapped when the form is submitted. Recruiters can also track the form submissions via a dashboard on HubSpot’s enterprise collaboration platform.
How the process looks now:
3. Laptop distribution to new hires
The HubSpot IT team built a custom Workato connector to leverage on HubSpot APIs. With Workato integrated into the various systems used for new hire onboarding, the platform picks up on candidates that are ready for pre-boarding and sends an automated email via HubSpot to request their preferred shipping/working address.
Once the candidate submits the information, Workato syncs the information into the HelpDesk team’s dashboard in the enterprise collaboration platform and automatically sorts the candidates by new hire class (For e.g. Class of 21’ new hires). From there, the Helpdesk team can then send the appropriate email with the laptop tracking information to the new hires, at the click of a button.
How the process looks now:
4. Validate new hire data
Using Workbot for Slack, Workato sends a summary message with details on their incoming new hires to each recruiter. Recruiters will have to confirm via the click of a button if the details are accurate. Automated reminders are scheduled to be sent out every day until they confirm the details.
If they need assistance, recruiters can also submit a help request, which is immediately redirected to a shared channel with the relevant people that can help to resolve the issues quickly.
How the process looks now:
5. Leverage Workato and HubSpot’s enterprise collaboration platform to manage task assignment
The HubSpot IT team also created a self-service HelpDesk Assignment Rules dashboard by leveraging Workato to map data – region, office, and team members responsible for completing the tasks – to HubSpot’s enterprise collaboration platform on the backend.
When new tasks are created, the HR teams refer to the configuration from this board to determine which team member to assign the task to.
How the process looks now:
After implementing Workato, the business impact and return on investment for HubSpot was evident:
- Internal systems’ usability score increased from 62 points to 86 points
- 68 hours saved per month on new hire emailing
- Communications are more streamlined: No. of emails sent to new hires reduced from 24 to only 8 emails
- 71 hours saved on task management: Within the first 3 months of implementation, 855 applications were automatically marked as hired
- Time to resolution for integration failures reduced from an average of 3 days to about 2 hours
- Automatically closed 1,700 tasks on behalf of HelpDesk team
Now, whenever any new hire data attributes are changed, the information is automatically synced to Snowflake. In addition, with a centralized enterprise collaboration platform for onboarding, Jasper is able to generate insightful visualizations to present important data like total hires in a given month, how many notifications are being sent, the breakdown of which teams own which tasks, and the statuses of them, showing the percentage of tasks that were closed out using automation rather than requiring a person to do it, and more.
