Zappos: would you fit into this company?

My attention was captured by an article in The Wall Street Journal called “Zappos zaps its jobs postings”, about the Las Vegas-based online shoe and clothing store’s innovative approach to recruiting, selection, and talent searching. The company is developing its own social network that will allow candidates interested in working for the company to participate with current employees to assess whether they would fit in with the company’s culture.

There’s no doubting that this is an innovative and aggressive idea: put candidates in touch with company employees so that the latter can decide whether they would like to work with them. Needless to say, this isn’t an approach that is going to work for every company or sector: anybody who doesn’t know anything about Zappos might wonder why a person with serious potential would spend time being part of a social network in order to get part of their entrance ticket to a job.

But those who do know something about Zappos will understand that we aren’t talking here about just any old shoe store, but rather a company that applys new management philosophies such as holacracy, based on a business culture where employee and client happiness are not mutually exclusive, where informality is the order of the day, reflected in an relaxed approach to work, where newly hired staff are offered $2,000 to leave as a way of establishing their real desire to stay and fit into the culture.

The idea of setting up a social network makes a lot of sense in this case: instead of spending its time looking for candidates on the conventional social or professional networks such as LinkedIn, the company not only sees that candidates are proactive, but has them vetted by the people with whom they are going to work, and who can best see whether they will fit in to the company. For a company, being able to count on a regular supply of good candidates through such as system is the ultimate litmus test: it must be doing things right if the market sees it as a place where it is worth taking a lot of trouble to get a job there.

Zappo’s experiment also benefits people who are more comfortable in the digital environment and removes any doubts about whether using the social networks is good for our personal development: using them can help you find work in the sectors and companies that most interest you. My feeling is that a lot of companies are going to be watching Zappos closely from now on…

(En español, aquí)