No Box Recruiting

Recruiting for many organizations is often times a real crap shoot. Think about what it must be like to find and keep talent in a call center, where high turnover is a fact of life.

So check out Zappos. Their approach is by no means typical, but sounds as if it is proving to be very effective.

The fast-growing company, which works hard to recruit people to join, says to its newest employees: "If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you've worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus." Zappos actually bribes its new employees to quit!

Why? Because if you're willing to take the company up on The Offer, you obviously don't have the sense of commitment they are looking for. It's hard to describe the level of energy in the Zappos culture--which means, by definition, it's not for everybody. Zappos wants to learn if there's a bad fit between what makes the organization tick and what makes individual employees tick--and it's willing to pay to learn sooner rather than later. (About ten percent of new call-center employees take the money and run.)

Bribing people to quit. Hmmm, doubt if that is in the handbook of "how recruiting should be done." Maybe you should consider how you might ignore the way recruiting in your organization has always been done and find similar breakthroughs.

For more detail:

http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/taylor/2008/05/why_zappos_pays_new_employees.html

Steve.