Zappos Hiring Decisions: Culture Fit and Recruitment Strategy

Introduction: Culture Over Credentials at Zappos

Given the company's emphasis on the Zappos Insiders group, a recruitment strategy that is likely to be a good fit would emphasize referrals from existing Zappos employees. A good-fit recruitment strategy would also be structured to allow candidates to spend time with members of the team they are interested in joining. Zappos takes pride in being a company focused on corporate culture rather than customer service, claiming that excellent customer service simply happens when the company successfully hires people who are a good fit with that culture. Essentially, what the company may be doing — without full self-awareness — is creating a corporate culture that enables well-matched employees to be happy at work and satisfied with the work they do each day. This is more or less an avowal of the old adage that happy employees make for happy customers.

Traditional job postings do not exist at Zappos. Rather than the transactional exchange that typically occurs between job seekers and job posters, Zappos' current recruitment strategy proceeds in a manner similar to joining a country club. The company emphasizes getting to know people who want to work for Zappos through processes and events that are only vaguely associated with actual team positions — and they are never pegged to a specific job posting. The hazard of conducting recruitment this way is that the employee pool tends to be homogeneous in the extreme. Whether this is a problem for the company depends on the type of work being accomplished, the rate of growth the company experiences, and the characteristics of its customer base.

The Zappos Insiders Recruitment Model

The steps in Zappos' recruitment process are not dramatically different from those used at other companies, but what is distinctive is the establishment of a candidate pool rooted in the Zappos Insiders program. The company defines Zappos Insiders as:

"…simply people who might want to work for Zappos someday… now, tomorrow or sometime down the road. It's like a special membership for people who want to stay in touch with us, learn more about our fun, zany culture, know what's happening at our company, get special insider perspectives and receive team-specific updates about the group you'd like to join" (McIlvaine, 2014).

At some point in the recruitment process, the approach shifts from the passive candidate pool toward the more active matching of candidates with positions that need to be filled. This is when the more conventional components of the recruitment process are put into play. Candidates from the online Insiders pool are first interviewed by phone. Those who advance to second interviews participate in behavioral interviews designed to assess what candidates know about Zappos culture, how they might handle difficult situations, and whether they demonstrate the humility and collaborative spirit the company values (Nisen, 2014).

Stages of the Zappos Selection Process

The Zappos selection process incorporates several unconventional evaluative steps. If a candidate was driven to the Zappos facility by a company shuttle, a human resources representative will contact the shuttle driver afterward to learn whether the candidate was polite and considerate during transport (Nisen, 2014). Candidates are also invited to lunch so that observers can note how they interact with others (Patterson, 2000). These informal touchpoints are treated as meaningful data points in the overall evaluation.

One important dynamic shaping these decisions is well documented in recruitment research: "People have an instinctive propensity to hire those who remind them of themselves, and one has to imagine that this tendency is even greater in people who aren't trained as human resource professionals" (Solomon, 2014). This tendency becomes particularly consequential when the evaluators responsible for cultural-fit assessments are not HR professionals operating within structured, standardized frameworks.

Conclusion: Strengths and Hazards of Culture-Fit Hiring

The selection process leans heavily in the direction of personal impressions and seems somewhat uncertain with regard to matching candidates' qualifications to open positions. That said, Zappos personnel claim that finding employees who are a great cultural fit is more important than finding employees who look good on paper, in terms of their resumes relative to job descriptions. As often as not, however, what is determined to be a good cultural fit is really more of a personality assessment — a way to gauge whether the candidate will contribute to the enjoyment of social events and the general atmosphere of the workplace. The challenge for Zappos, as for any organization that places cultural fit at the center of its hiring model, is ensuring that enthusiasm for culture does not come at the expense of fairness, legal compliance, and genuine organizational diversity.

References

Cutts, A. (2001). Hiring, motivating, and training "for success." Cutts Group Newsletter. Retrieved from

McIlvaine, R. A. (2014, June 16). Giving job postings the boot. Human Resource Executive Online. Retrieved from http://www.hreonline.com/HRE/view/story.jhtml?id=534357229

Nisen, M. (2014, November 22). Tony Hsieh's brilliant strategy for hiring kind people. Business Insider. Retrieved from http://www.businessinsider.com/tony-hsieh-zappos-hiring-strategy-2013-11?op=1

Patterson, M. (2000, Autumn). Overcoming the hiring crunch: Tests deliver informed choices. Employment Relations Today, 27(3), 77–88.

Richards, D. (2010, August 24). At Zappos, culture pays. Strategy+Business. Retrieved from http://www.strategy-business.com

Solomon, M. (2014, March 5). The hazards of hiring like Zappos: The use and abuse of "corporate culture fit." Forbes. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/micahsolomon/2014/03/05/do-you-really-want-to-hire-like-zappos-cultural-fit-and-its-very-dangerous-pitfalls/