Zappos has been making so many headlines lately with its unconventional employment praxis — dumping cube-and-office hierarchy for “holacracy,” nixing traditional job postings, pumping employee zany-tude like a corporate socioemotional dress code — that you almost forget the company sells shoes.
Tossing the time-honored practice of job ads — the bane and the manna of the job-seeker — is the latest shoe-obscuring headline material. As Zappos tells it, the old interviewing process was a blurry, messy, inefficient one. "We spam them, they spam us back," talent aquisition head Michael Bailen told the Wall Street Journal. Now, instead of job postings, they’re taking a social media-inflected approach to finding prospective Zapponistas. Meet Zappos Insiders.
From their revamped careers page — now a smile-beaming portal to possible employment at Zapponia:
Come take a look at the teams Inside Zappos and see what we're all about. Find the one that speaks to you and take a peek inside. Meet our people, get to know us, start the conversation. It's the first step toward becoming an Insider!
It’s brilliant and bruising at the same time. Brilliant because the system works to screen for a quality that rides high on Zappos’ employability wish list, something you might otherwise only get with facetime in the office: cultural fit. They want responsibly riotous outside-of-box-thinkers who can, say, twirl a party favor while commiserating with a customer on line 1 about getting the wrong style of Rachel Zoe flats. And what better way to size up Zappostle prospects than through the unsleeping panopticon of social media? While Zappos Insiders isn’t itself a social network, hopefuls can jack in to the program via LinkedIn and Facebook, presumably so they can score points and curry favor with current employees — who will hopefully remember the job-seeker next time a coveted slot opens up. Though applicants are still asked to upload resumes or CVs, this is supposed to cut out much of the managerial timesuck of slogging through resume slush piles. Displacing the resume from the throne is the new measure: the dynamic profile revealed by the applicant’s online gladhanding. From the Wall Street Journal:
To deal with the new influx, recruiters will use software from Ascendify, a maker of talent-acquisition technology, to help sort the insiders based on skill sets or personal interests, shuffling them into "pipelines" such as merchandising or engineering. Recruiters instead will spend time pursuing candidates in the Insiders group with digital Q&As or contests, events that they will use to help gauge prospective hires' cultural fit. Freed from sorting through applications, recruiters will also have more time to spend on targeted outreach, Mr. Bailen said, such as following up on employee referrals.
That gatekeeping for cultural fit sounds like a ringing boon for Zappos. But what about job-seekers? Applying for a job the Zappos way certainly seems more warm and personal than firing off resumes to a faceless email addy in the HR department, but at least that has the reassurance of a known and understood process: You apply, you land an interview, you get the gig — or you don’t. Some cultural critics worry that the open-endedness of Zappos Insider’s friendmaking hustle marks a troubling tectonic inching of power away from workers and toward Big Employment. The application process itself becomes a form of labor. Not only are applicants expected to work hard at flattering their would-be bosses like simpering digital courtiers, but it also further erodes that crumbling wall between work and private life. Noah McCormack writes in The Baffler:
Part of the horror this scenario presents is that most people who do this social labor won’t actually be hired. But some probably will—and what of them? They will have expended substantial resources developing online relationships with their new coworkers and bosses before they even arrive. It is difficult enough for a new hire to set boundaries and establish an appropriate place in the workplace, but how much more if your new boss is also an established pseudo-friend? That the demands of the office are leaking into all parts of our lives is not news. But how much harder will it be to resist dealing with that late-night email from your boss when he or she is already your Facebook friend, and can see your child’s recital ended thirty minutes ago? The transformation of your job into your social life is largely a one-way street: you may become “friends” with your boss, but not with the shareholders to whom your boss owes primary loyalty. Loyalty flows upstream, just like profits.
The happyfication of work is purely intentional among the breed of companies that value the shiny new shibboleth of “workplace culture” solely as a factor friendly to the bottom line: If the employer satisfies workers emotionally, your boss is now your bro. Zappos’ talent honcho Michael Bailen told the Wall Street Journal the traditional hiring process is too “transactional.” He revealed more than he knew. Indeed, in a world where you don’t go to work every day, but rather to a “workplace culture,” you’re no longer just trading your time and talent for pay. Instead, you’re giving them a lot of you — and now you’re doing it even before you’ve got the job.