Need a HubSpot Admin? Here’s How to Find and Hire the Right Candidate

HubSpot has a way of getting bigger. What starts out as a marketing system soon becomes woven into the very fabric of your business. 

Companies of all sizes and types keep finding themselves in the same situation: 

HubSpot is playing an ever-widening role in our business, with different teams using various tools to automate, track, and improve their efforts.

Rather than have a patchwork system of ownership, many organizations are springing for a dedicated HubSpot owner who can unify the efforts of multiple team members and ensure a smooth customer experience.

At IMPACT, our clients come to us with a variety of levels of HubSpot expertise, from expert to novice. But regardless of where they start, many soon begin looking to hire that single HubSpot authority who can help their entire company use the platform better.

After all, HubSpot is a big investment that can touch all corners of your business. You want to be sure you’re getting your money’s worth.

The process of hiring a HubSpot admin is unfamiliar to most business leaders. You’re looking for someone with technical expertise, a growth mindset, and the ability to work between teams. This person will likely need to do things you can’t do yourself — and they will be the only one in this role at your company.

So, how do you hire a HubSpot admin?

The first step is knowing for sure that you need to hire this person. For some help determining whether this hire makes sense for you, check out this resource: Do I need to hire a HubSpot admin, or can someone on my team handle it?

If you’re sure about this hire, read on. We’ll cover:

• How a HubSpot admin is different from a marketing manager
• The types of experience you should look for
• A situational activity your candidates should complete to demonstrate their aptitude

Let’s dive in.

HubSpot admin vs. marketing manager: What’s the difference?

A HubSpot admin could be called a HubSpot specialist, an operations manager, a revenue operations specialist, or something else entirely. Titles like “operations manager” are an important indicator that this person is not a marketer, per se. 

HubSpot expert Carina Duffy advises her clients to not think of their HubSpot admin as a digital marketer. “This person should really understand databases and how the CRM is structured,” she says. “They need to manage the CRM to enable all of the teams to use it to its fullest potential.”

As such, a HubSpot admin will likely float between teams, helping people on both your sales and marketing teams use the platform better. 

This might look different at each business, but this role could include:

• Creating dashboards to show a high-level overview of organization initiatives
• Solving team questions and troubleshooting HubSpot challenges
• Building and monitoring workflows, sequences, and automations
• Database hygiene and maintenance
• Email campaign set up and analysis
• Data analysis and reporting
• Data privacy compliance
• Organization assistance for sales, marketing, and service
• Training new employees to reach HubSpot proficiency
• Assisting with sales enablement

While a marketing manager and HubSpot admin will likely work close together, their skill sets should be complementary, not overlapping. 

“Your HubSpot admin,” says Carina, “is somebody that has the knowledge of what everybody is doing, and wants to help them do it better.” For this reason, interpersonal skills and creative problem solving are critical skills, nearly as important as solid platform knowledge.  

Your ideal HubSpot admin candidate

If you’re bringing in someone to run HubSpot, they’re going to need experience. But not all HubSpot experience is created equal. HubSpot experience from several years ago might not be as useful as you think due to the changing nature of the platform.

HubSpot trainer Jess Palmeri has this advice: Be ready to compare different types of CRM expertise.

If Jess were to have a list of resumes in front of her, here is how she would rank different types of experience:

1. Current HubSpot experience. If the candidate is currently working in a role in which they’re using HubSpot to automate marketing, this can be very valuable.
   Still, you’ll need to make sure they’ve been doing similar tasks to what you’ll need.
   The HubSpot platform is so large and complex that just because they work in it every day doesn’t mean they’re familiar with what you’ll need them to do. Someone who knows Marketing Hub Starter inside and out might be useless when it comes to Sales Hub Enterprise.
2. Current experience with another CRM. While HubSpot offers many unique features and functions, there is significant overlap with other CRM platforms. If a candidate has experience with Pardot or Marketo, for example, it can be almost as helpful as HubSpot experience.
3. HubSpot experience from several years ago. HubSpot grows, changes, and evolves frequently. Says Jess, “Hiring someone with HubSpot experience from a few years ago might mean that they come onboard and find themselves in an unfamiliar HubSpot work environment and can’t do the work you need them to.”
4. No experience. Hey, we all start somewhere. A new hire who is willing to learn can quickly become adept at HubSpot, especially if your organization is new to the platform. This way, they can train with the basics and grow with the platform. However, you might have to factor in additional training costs and extended onboarding in this case. 

As with any hire, experience costs money, and you will likely pay an employee more depending on how well they know the HubSpot platform.

If you need someone to come in and manage a huge, chaotic portal used by dozens of people at your company, you’ll want someone who’s done something similar before. If you’re just getting started with HubSpot and want someone who can lead the charge and grow with the platform, someone who’s more green could be the perfect fit — and much more cost-effective. 

HubSpot admin: Salary expectations

Salary ranges are always problematic. So much can depend on what part of the country you’re in, your industry, and what you’re expecting your new hire to do. 

According to Glassdoor, a HubSpot admin in IMPACT’s home city of New Haven, Connecticut, can expect an average salary of $73,000, with a range from the 40s to over 100K,  depending on experience. Granted, that's a big range, but it gives you some idea.

It’s worth noting that your HubSpot admin could be a remote employee, so you don’t have to limit your search (or your salary range) to your geographic area. 

How to evaluate your finalists

Before you make an offer, you want to see how your candidates do with a real life situation that’s similar to the work they’ll do each day. Although any hiring process activity is artificial, the right series of tasks can show you a lot about how the right candidate can come in and immediately contribute.

Try this:

Send over a few screenshots that show your last email marketing campaign. These should include statistics, contact exclusion criteria, and email copy. 

Give your candidates a set amount of time (24 or 48 hours, say), and then have them submit their feedback in a video or in a meeting with you.

Ask your candidates:

• Walk me through what the email stats mean.
• What are the most promising stats you see? 
• What are the most disappointing stats you see? What’s one idea for improving that specific number?
• What modifications would you recommend for our next email?
• How could the email copy be better?
• Was the email sent to the right people?

You can certainly modify this task to suit your needs, but something similar that asks the candidate to evaluate a past effort and make suggestions is a great way to see the way they respond to real-world scenarios.

Making the right HubSpot hire

Digital marketing is an ever-changing game, so finding the right candidate can be tricky. Remember, though, that an employee’s skill set is not static.

If you select someone who has demonstrated a commitment to professional development (and your company values this as well), you can expect them to grow into a role. This is especially true if your organization is in the early stages of your HubSpot journey.

By contrast, if you’ve been using HubSpot for years and expect this new hire to quickly jump in and take some ownership of marketing automation, look for relevant and recent experience to be sure they can hit the ground running.

Remember, HubSpot experience from 2016 is not nearly as useful as experience from within the last 6-12 months. 

Whomever you hire, plan to use HubSpot Academy and IMPACT+ courses to help round out their knowledge base to guarantee that they can do the work you need.