Don’t Start With Applications—and Other Job-Search Advice From a Top Talent Executive

When Becky McCullough joined HubSpot more than a decade ago, the company had fewer than 1,000 employees. Today, the customer relationship management platform provider has offices in 14 countries and a largely remote global workforce of more than 10,000.

As HubSpot’s vice president of talent acquisition and workforce strategy, McCullough, A06, has helped design the strategies behind the company’s growth. That has included determining how to assess potential candidates and build teams in a world shaped by rapid technological change, economic uncertainty, and evolving expectations of work.

“We’re on the lookout for curiosity, adaptability, and an ability to work smarter, not harder,” McCullough says, “We’re building our hiring processes around identifying those qualities.”

That work makes her acutely aware of how candidates can position themselves in a market that often feels crowded, automated, and opaque. She sees firsthand how often job seekers—especially recent graduates—treat the process like a numbers game, defaulting to high-volume applications instead of taking time to understand the work and build relationships.

On February 26, McCullough will return to campus as a featured panelist at Beyond the Hill: Alumni Luminaries and Career Connections, an event inspired by Jack Derby, professor of the practice at the Gordon Institute. The event has been designed to connect Tufts students with accomplished graduates. Along with her fellow alumni, she will share her career story and discuss what she sees from inside a global hiring operation—a perspective grounded in years of thinking about how careers take shape

Ahead of the event, McCullough sat down with Tufts Now to share her top tips for Tufts students preparing to enter the job market.

Build Relationships Before You Apply

As the first step, McCullough advises first-time job seekers to identify four or five people in roles that genuinely interest them and ask each of them for a “virtual coffee.”

At this stage, McCullough emphasizes, the goal isn’t a job: it’s a relationship. The conversations you have with your chosen people will help you begin to understand what work actually looks like and start to move you out of the anonymous applicant pool, she offers.

She took a similar approach early on, using internships and exploratory conversations to talk with people about their work and how they had arrived there. Creating relationships helped her connect her interests to real opportunities, she says, and eventually to a career path.

From the hiring side, she now sees how decisive such networking is. In high-volume recruiting environments, applicants blur together, according to McCullough. “The way you differentiate yourself in a noisy market is to make it personal and bring the human out,” she says. “Relationships are what allow that to happen.”

Specific is Terrific

If relationships open doors, McCullough notes, specificity is what makes people walk through them.

One of the most common mistakes she sees is broad, unfocused outreach: for example, messages on LinkedIn that express general interest but little evidence of research or direction. Notes that reference something concrete—a specific role, project, or career path, or a thoughtful question—stand out much more, she says.

“Do your homework. It’s a sign of respect,” she adds. “Then make your questions as specific as you can.”

The principle of specificity also applies to applications. McCullough strongly discourages the scattershot approach, noting that applying to dozens of roles—especially within one organization—often signals uncertainty rather than enthusiasm.

“I would so much rather see someone build relationships and ask thoughtful questions and then apply to two jobs they feel confident about,” she says. “That tells me they understand the work and have reflected on what they can contribute.”

Stay Curious, Stay Agile, and Start Early

McCullough’s career has been shaped less by rigid planning than by curiosity and a willingness to adapt as circumstances changed.

After Tufts, a few years ahead of the 2008 recession, she took a corporate strategy role in financial services. She stayed through layoffs, leadership upheaval, and repeated restructurings. What struck her most were the effects on people. “I saw how quickly culture eroded and morale dropped,” she says. “Employees were kind of forgotten.”

That experience redirected her path, sharpening her curiosity about how organizations support people through change. It led her to pursue an MBA focused on human resource management and into recruitment and talent strategy roles.

In those roles, her work has continuously evolved. “Curiosity shouldn’t stop once you have a job. You need it to stay agile. My role has never looked the same two years in a row. I see a new problem and I say, ‘Great, I’ll take that on.’”

For students, she encourages a similar mindset—along with an early start.

“Every experience becomes a data point: internships, work-study roles, project-based work,” McCullough says. “Try everything and adapt as needed. And it’s never too early to get started so that you give yourself time to understand what you enjoy, what you don’t, and where you actually see yourself growing.”

Once You Land the Job, Focus on Impact

For McCullough, the search doesn’t end with the first offer letter. It’s what comes next that actually builds careers, she says. It’s also where many people begin to fixate—erroneously—on titles, compensation, and other external markers of success.

She encourages new hires to focus instead on contribution: What problems can you help solve? What skills can you build? How can you make the people and systems around you better? “If you are putting your energy into answering those questions, the markers of success follow,” she says.

Starting with a focus on impact shapes the rest of your trajectory, she adds. “It gives you agency. It helps you not just land a job but build a career.”

Come hear McCullough and other prominent alumni speak in person at Beyond the Hill: Alumni Luminaries and Career Connections, on February 26, from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m., in the Cabot Center, ASEAN Auditorium:

• Tufts undergraduates can register now for the event via Handshake.
• Alumni, faculty, and staff can register for the event via this RSVP form.