Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

by Dan Lyons

“You all must be pretty special to be here,” Dave, our trainer, tells us. “HubSpot gets thousands and thousands of applications. Just to be sitting here in this room means you’ve climbed past a lot of other really exceptional people. Did you know that it’s harder to get hired at HubSpot than it is to get accepted at Harvard?” That line about Harvard is one that gets tossed around a lot. I hear it over and over again. Halligan likes to tout it. I have no idea how they came up with the claim, but Harvard has a 6 percent acceptance rate, so I suppose they just figured out that in a certain year HubSpot had hired fewer than 6 percent of people whose resumes they had seen, so that makes HubSpot more exclusive than Harvard. This is ridiculous, and oddly enough not that big of a deal: McDonald’s and Walmart have at times also hired fewer than 6 percent of job applicants. Nevertheless, people at HubSpot take it seriously. I suppose it makes the new hires feel special.