Can a hiring process be ‘Zappos customer service’ good?
In my previous life as an education slut, I did both a Masters in engineering at Cambridge and an MBA at Oxford. The application process at Cambridge was all you’d expect from a creaking, 800 year old institution - paper copies, long turnaround times, bound guides - pure bureaucracy. It didn’t make the program any more attractive. Oxford was smooth, quick, and professional. That did influence my choice to go. Why the difference? The MBA program had to compete against all the other MBA programs out there, so they had to be strong or they’d lose students.
The point here is that the dynamite application process gave me a sign of the experience to come, and probably disproportionately influenced my choice.
I bet this could be a competitive advantage for startups.
I don’t mean just cutting out hiring process weaknesses. That’s table stakes. No, I mean building a recruiting process to be mind-blowingly good. So good that applicants can’t help but tell others. Like ‘Zappos customer service reputation but for hiring’ good.
The metric I’d use would be strong applicants who were referred by previous applicants who were not selected.
The bar for startup recruiting processes is incredibly low. It could be a powerful differentiator in the current war for top talent.
Has anyone tried this?
B
I like to work with smart people to get great products to the right markets. 