Career Hustler 8: How Sam Mallikarjunan Got Hired in 3 hours & 26 mins
This is the eighth interview in our ‘Zealify Career Hustlers’ series. To learn more about the series and why we are sharing these interviews, have a read of the series launch post.
Note: This post was originally published on December 16th 2015
Our eighth interview is with Sam Mallikarjunan. We actually first found out about Sam’s hustle when we came across his website hiremehubspot.com (now redirects to a copy of what was there, but on his personal site). You can probably guess from that what his hustle was, but Sam has a great story that shows how you can land an awesome job without too much experience.
In this interview we talk about how Sam hustled his way to a job, the importance of listening and advice given by none other than Yoda!
Hi Sam. Let’s start with a bit of background about yourself?
Well, my name is Sam Mallikarjunan and I’m the Head of Growth at HubSpot Labs. I work with a few of our projects, but my main area of focus is the inbound.org community site.
Can you give us a brief outline of what you did to hustle your way to a job?
Being someone with almost no actual experience in inbound marketing and no college degree applying to a startup that invented inbound marketing in a city where they could recruit at will from Harvard, MIT, and other top schools — I never actually thought that I’d get hired here.
This was actually quite liberating for me! It meant that I could do whatever weird things I wanted to do. Since I wasn’t going to get hired anyways, it didn’t really matter if people thought I was bizarre or were irritated by me not going through the normal channels.
So I built a basic (and terriblly optimized, now that I know what I’m doing) landing page at HireMeHubSpot.com and used free credits for AdWords, Facebook Ads, and LinkedIn Ads to target HubSpot employees to “Register for the Free Webinar on Why You Should Hire Me”.
3 hours and 26 minutes after I pushed the ads live I got a call from their recruiter. About a month later I had moved from the sunshine state to a state where #Snowmageddon seems to trend on Twitter every year.
Why did you do it? Where did the idea come from?
I did it because I had been a fan of the company for years and was in the middle of a misadventure as an independent consultant working with very small businesses to build and launch websites. I knew I didn’t want to keep doing that, and since I had nothing else in mind I figured I’d swing for the fences.
The idea came from basically just ripping off what HubSpot had done to me many times: Draw me in with the offer of an interesting piece of content.
Were there any unexpected outcomes from your hustle?
Yeah — they actually hired me! I didn’t expect the campaign to work, much less work that quickly. I had actually just been hoping that the campaign would attract enough attention that it might open some other interesting doors.
What’s the top skill that you have learned outside of education, that will help you in your career?
Listening. Seriously, listening to people is hard. Understanding someone’s goals and priorities and then figuring out how helping them can help you hit your goals has been the single largest driver of my career success thus far.
Why do you think it’s important to hustle your way to a job?
In general if you do what everyone else does you’ll get what everyone else gets. Since almost everyone else is in a job they hate, I’d carefully pick and choose what aspects of their career strategies to follow.
Have you started any other projects or initiatives that might help your career in the future?
I need to write more. I need to write more. I need to write more.
Sorry, I figure if I write that three times it will stick with me. I need to write more to sharpen my edge against the harsh criticism of the world. I enjoy speaking at events and conferences as well, and I should say yes to more of those.
Do you have a plan or a strategy for future career growth?
“All his life as he looked away to the future. To the horizon. Never his mind on WHERE. HE. WAS. HMMM? WHAT. HE. WAS DOING! Hmph.” — Yoda
I’m focused on crushing the goals I have now and helping as many people as I can. Helping people is the key to bringing you the best career success in the future. Whether it’s meeting for lunch to talk about careers with a newer employee or doing a web interview for a startup’s blog :)
How important do you think your personal brand is to you / your career?
My brand is my career. So is yours. It’s what people say about you when you’re not around and someone says “We really need someone to help us solve this problem.”
What tools / apps do you use on a daily basis?
Let’s see, looking around: HubSpot (obviously). Gmail. Gcalendar. Twitter. Slack. Chrome. Android phone.
I’m a simple guy.
What is the one best tool you would recommend to a job seeker?
A blog. I don’t care which you use. WordPress, SquareSpace, whatever. Get your thoughts out into the interwebs and let people prove you wrong.
What are the steps you would recommend to someone currently looking for a job?
Do the thing they want to hire for. If you’re interviewing for a sales position, find the contact information of the decision maker and ask them about their goals and then work through a sales process. If you want to be in marketing, show that you can generate leads from their company. If you’re an engineer, build a cool tool that people at their company will use — show that you can understand users and ship code.
#JFDI (Just F*cking Do It).
Do you have any daily or weekly routines that help keep you productive / focussed?
Man, I really should. I bet I’d be more productive if I did.
Who inspires you most and why?
You know who inspires me? Go to India and try and negotiate with a guy on the street for a handmade wooden chess set. When you want anything as badly as that guy wants to sell you that chess set, you’ll get whatever you want.
What’s the one book or piece of content that has shaped your thinking about your career?
The Innovator’s Dilemma. If my career is my life expressed as a business model, then I need to be disrupting the incumbents ahead of me.
What would be your biggest piece of advice to someone starting off in their career journey?
Always be learning. If you’re not growing, you’re dying. Also, no one cares that you followed the rules and failed — Hit. Your. Goals.
What does a successful career look like to you?
Live the life you want and be content with it. Do something you get some joy and challenge and validation from. Making tons of money is doable, but there are a lot of ways to do that and end up hating your life.
What would your dream job be?
Not sure. I’m happy where I am and routinely turn down offers with lots more money because of it. I want to be surrounded by people smarter than me. Not just a little, a lot smarter than me. And I have that here at HubSpot. I also have the opportunity to work on a diverse set of interesting challenges because our business model is one that favors strategic width vs. depth (meaning that we do lots of things so that lots of people can build their entire business using us instead of trying to solve for the infinite horizon of niche use cases).
Where can people best find out about you? Personal links etc.
You can find my writings around the web (not many Sam Mallikarjunan’s, just Google me).
I’d also strongly encourage you to join inbound.org. Not just because I manage the team that built it. The people there are smarter than either you or me. One user described it as if there was a site about hip hop where Dr. Dre and Jay-Z stopped by once a day to give everyone feedback and advice. Go there and get better.
My personal website is terrible. Cobbler’s kids going unshod and all that. So check it out if you must, but I promise it’ll get better soon.
