Say you want to staff your call center with friendly, high energy, intelligent people who want to help customers and who enjoy their job. How do you find them? Well, apparently you hire people, train them, then offer them $1,000 to quit.
From Harvard Business Publishing:
It’s a hard job, answering phones and talking to customers for hours at a time. So when Zappos hires new employees, it provides a four-week training period that immerses them in the company’s strategy, culture, and obsession with customers. People get paid their full salary during this period.
After a week or so in this immersive experience, though, it’s time for what Zappos calls “The Offer.” 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.)
Zappos employees also have no scripts, no call time metrics, and are empowered to do whatever it takes to make you happy.
Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit—And You Should Too [Harvard Business Publishing]
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I don’t even know what Zappos is. But now I am curious. I know I love shopping at Newegg since they’ve never done me wrong…
@verucalise: “Like my old boss said “1 good employee making $15 an hour is better than 2 shit employees at $7.50″
Word.
And my wife loves Zappos. Fortunately, we give each other a heads-up before buying things online (so we can plan which frequent flyer or hotel account to put the points in), so I’m never surprised by a big box of shoes waiting on the doorstep when I get home.
@darkryd: On Zappos’s part, probably strict screening criteria. On the applicant’s part, maybe investment on time spent towards career goals. Reading that again, the latter made me chuckle a bit; I’m sure not everyone thinks like me, but it’s a possibility.
No call-time metrics?
That kind of infuriates me to hear. I work in tech support and my base salary is $115k. I spend my days working with customers who spend millions on licenses for our enterprise products and hundreds of thousands of dollars per year on support contracts for those products. Support that could include everything from me quoting the manual at them to writing code patches or submitting bugs up the tree for someone else to wrote a patch for.
And even we have very heavy call metrics.
No wonder customers hate us.
Zappos is good- another company for the Best Company in America contest many of us have been agitating for.
@kathyl: ITA. Most people who get jobs do so because they want jobs. The slackers and con artists are the 10%.
@ahwannabe: Most people need jobs, because they need money to live. Some people want the job.
@Taed:
I really wish this never came out, because here in Vegas Zappos is generally referred to as the google of the desert and now this will attract alot of dumbasses looking for a quick payout…
Well, I just called them with a question and the lady who I talked to was awesome. Sounds corny but she was definitely not on a script. I just bought a pair of shoes now.
Good job Consumerist. I blame you. I’m trying to pay my credit card off.
@dugn: I have had to do returns, and I have never had a single issue. I found them to be just as friendly and helpful as Zappos.
The thing is, when you can do things like pay out a grand to get rid of problem call center workers and (I assume) offer top salary in that field, you can be choosy about who you’re hiring. I’d be really surprised if their hiring process was a warm-body cattle call; those just showing up for two weeks just to collect their $1,000 would probably get screened out in the interviews or washed out for not taking the training seriously.
A. B. C.
A always
B be
C Closing!
at Disneyworld, new hires are encouraged to “self-select” as in walk out if they don’t think it’s a good fit for them. I think $1k would make that decision a little easier.
The $1k thing is absolute genius. It’s a pretty rare company whose leadership is agile enough to enact such a seemingly risky policy (what if 50% of new hires took the money? 75%?).