The Zappos Way
22 Jun 2009I’ve done it.
I’ve bought shoes online.
And I liked it.
First, let me be clear, I own roughly five pairs of shoes; I am not a shoe aficionado. I have my sneakers, running shoes, brown shoes, black shoes, and my motorcycle boots…hardly a collection to make Imelda Marcos jealous.
However what I was missing was a pair of Nike Aqua Socks, (http://www.zappos.com/product/7525588/color/191561). I haven’t been able to find them since I was ten, and I used to love them. Sure, they never last a whole summer as the tops wear through, the soles have zero cushion, and provide almost zero traction, but I don’t care! My memories of using them in my youth compelled me to find a new pair that would fit my now grown adult foot.
For the past few years I have searched high and low for the Aqua Socks to no avail. That was until I was driven to try Zappos.com after reading an article about them in Inc.
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090501/the-zappos-way-of-managing_Printer_Friendly.html
Sure enough, they had my beloved Aqua Socks and they were delivered promptly with a promise that if they didn’t fit I could return them with free shipping both ways. I was delighted; I finally owned my long lost Aqua Socks in a size I could now use! They arrived just in time for my recent trip to the Poconos for some whitewater rafting.
My foot needs aside, Zappos seems to be generating a lot of interesting press and buzz on the interwebs as of late. What sets them apart from all of the other Web 2.0 companies out there? As I, and others, have said in the past, all they do is sell shoes.
Primarily the focus of the Inc. article and other postings is the amazing customer service, the freedom phone reps have to meet your needs, and the free return shipping if something doesn’t fit. In my mind all of the customer service policies and practices that everyone is praising Zappos for are all necessary evils of selling shoes online. Zappos is attempting to fulfill a shoe need, a need filled by delaying actually acquiring of said shoes by a day or two since they need to be shipped. With this delayed gratification Zappos needs to step it up in terms of customer service over traditional brick and mortar stores to survive.
Let’s face it, if Dick’s Sporting Goods carried Aqua Socks I wouldn’t have thought twice about hopping in the car and driving the ten minutes to the mall to have them that day. I like the mailman and all, but I’d rather not be waiting by the door for him to arrive with a box full of shoes. Call me impatient, but when prices are about the same online vs picking up in the store I choose the store nine times out of ten.
What caught my eye in the Inc. article wasn’t, in my mind, the baseline customer service I believe a company like Zappos needs to thrive, but rather how they go about interviewing new hires,
Prospective hires must pass an hour long "culture interview" before being handed off to whatever department they are applying to. Questions include, "On a scale of 1 -- 10, how weird are you?" and "What was your last position called? Was that an appropriate title?" (The first question makes sure that employees are sufficiently weird; the second, in which the interviewer is trying to goad the applicant into grumbling about his or her title, tests for humility.)
Spending an hour or so interviewing for ‘culture fit’ is a very interesting angle to explore in job interviewing.
I’ve gone on at length about my interview process, (http://benjaminhysell.com/archive/2009/02/the-technical-interview/), however unlike Zappos, I’ve never placed so much emphasis directly on culture fit. I tend to focus on passion…does the interviewee have passion for our craft and life in general? Normally, while exploring someone’s passion we get a pretty good sense of who they are, what they are going to be like on a day-to-day basis, and we as an interview team can see if the prospective new hire is going to click with the team.
Lately I’ve been wondering if I should retool my interview to further explore ‘culture fit’ not only from a passion perspective, but by some other measure needed in our industry. What that measure is I’m not so sure.
I can think back through college and high school where group work was key to many projects’ success. Have you ever found yourself in a group of people where personalities just didn’t mesh? I have worked in a few bad groups from time to time, and compared to groups where I worked with friends the experience of working in a group where we didn’t have a great ‘cultural fit’ was not as much fun.
I took a class at SUNY Binghamton in artificial intelligence my senior year of high school with a group of college seniors. It was spring semester for both the college seniors and me, so we all had senioritis. However, while they were heading off to real world jobs at the end of the semester, I was heading off to Cornell to start my college career in the fall. Let’s just say being 18 years old and hanging out doing a group project with college seniors was an amazing way to spend the spring semester. I had a lot of fun, but that was only after we cleansed the group of “Rick”.
The class was split into groups of four, and our group happened to be a group of five. We were to implement a 100 node feed forward neural network as our final project, a task we were well prepared to code and implement. What we were not prepared for was Rick.
Rick terrorized the group. I’m not sure which was worse, Rick taking tasks and never completing them, or failing to show up to 95% of our group meetings. The four of us who were not named Rick had to spend a lot of calories doing Rick’s work, trying to track Rick down, and in general dealing with ‘The Rick Issue.’
It’s physically and emotionally draining always picking up dropped tasks and trying to chase someone down who doesn’t want to be found. Not like Rick couldn’t do the work, he was more than capable, however we didn’t share his work ethic nor he ours.
Now picture yourself today in your job and take a Rick, if you don’t have one already, and inject him into your normal daily working life. My Rick was gone two weeks after the project started, as he was removed by the professor from our group, however a real world Rick maybe impossible to remove from your daily life. Are you looking forward to Monday knowing Rick is going to be there now? I wouldn’t be.
Life with a Rick is miserable, and from the article it appears Zappos makes a huge effort to ensure Rick never gets through the interview process:
If there is a disagreement between HR and the manager doing the hiring, Hsieh personally interviews the candidate and makes the final call. His strategy is to get the applicant into a social situation to see if they can connect emotionally. Alcohol often figures in the hiring process. "I had three vodka shots with Tony during my interview," says Rebecca Ratner, Zappos's head of human resources. "And I'm not atypical.” I asked Hsieh if this wasn't exposing the company to unnecessary risks. "It's a risk," he says. "But if we're building a culture where everyone is friends with everyone else, it's worth the risk."
For my college project we never had a chance to conduct an interview. Could we have figured out Rick would be a problem with a bottle of Jack and a couple of shot glasses? Should a social situation with a few drinks and attempting to identify an ‘emotional connection’ be the tie breaker in an interview? Can you scale this process as your company grows? Could this be implemented at Apple or IBM? How different would corporate America be if most job interviews started and ended in a pub?
For now I’m going to sit back and watch the Zappos story unfold. We already know for most of the working world the non-alcoholic approach to hiring works pretty darn good. We’ll see how Zappos fares in the long run, and what side effects hiring for culture will have as the company ages and their core culture changes.
I’m hoping for the best, I wouldn’t mind sitting down and relaxing with a nice tasty beverage the next time I conduct job interviews…a taste beverage and maybe a plate full of nachos.