How Zappos Onboards New Hires Weirdly (but Effectively): Detailed Breakdown & Tips

When researching successful onboarding programs of companies, Zappos shows up pretty high on most lists. This is because they have a unique onboarding style.

Where have you heard of engineers asked to take customer service calls? Or a company offering new hires money to quit? Weird, isn't it?

But it’s effective and, above all, original. It is fun and, most of all, very on-brand. Definitely something worth breaking down and finding out why it works so well.

Discover the ins and outs of employee onboarding at Zappos and how to run an onboarding process like Zappos.

How does Zappos run its onboarding process?

The entire onboarding process at Zappos is quite extensive, with four major components.

1. CLT training

Zappos has ventured into many products beyond shoes, but its core remains the same: customer service is the key.

This philosophy is evident in their onboarding process, starting with four weeks of the Customer Loyalty Team (CLT) training program. Every new hire, whatever their role might be, engineer or accountant, has to start by answering customer calls during this training period. Initially, they shadow seniors and then get on calls themselves.

Apart from handling customer calls, there are many sessions on company history, customer philosophy, culture, processes, and Q&A with seniors. And finally, to top it off, there are some games to make this period engaging and fun for new hires.

Aye Thu, Former Engineering Manager at Zappos | Source: Twitter

2. Pay to quit

After comprehensive CLT training, new hires already get a glimpse of the company culture. Now, Zappos wants to weed out anyone who isn’t a culture fit. So they make them an offer.

If new hires don’t enjoy the work or culture, they can quit straight away, and the company will give them $4000. So only the ones who are 100% sure remain.

3. Graduation party

Those who didn’t take the offer and are excited to continue at Zappos are next invited to a huge party— it’s the graduation party. After all, delivering happiness is Zappos’ motto.

A few Zapponians said the new hire graduation party was even better than their high school graduation.

Zappos Graduation Party | Source: Twitter

4. On-the-job-training

The initial CLT training focuses more on culture and customer understanding. So, when new hires join their respective teams, they receive further training for their project or role. Every department has its own process for developing new team members.

Miles Anderson, Former Visual Designer at Zappos | Source: Twitter

Top reasons behind Zappos’s current onboarding strategy

Discussing onboarding at Zappos, Christina Colligan, former CLT manager, revealed:

There is much thought behind Zappos’ current onboarding strategy. Here are the top three drivers of their onboarding process.

1. Culture comes first

Before Zappos, Tony Hsieh co-founded another company, LinkExchange, which he later sold to Microsoft for a whopping $265 million. In an interview with PBS News Hour, he said:

So when he took over Zappos, he didn’t want history to repeat itself. So at Zappos, culture comes first—from recruiting to culture classes in the orientation program and the final litmus test of the 4000$ offer. Zappos always looks for a culture fit first.

2. Service is everyone’s business

Stephanie Hudec, former Onboarding Manager at Zappos, revealed the reason why every hire, regardless of role, starts with taking phone calls. The idea is to ensure all employees understand the customer, their requirements, and Zappo’s customer service philosophy.

3. Happy employees = Happy customers

Zappos core values | Source: CultureCon

At Zappos, one of the core company values is “Create Fun and A Little Weirdness.” The fun part begins from the onboarding phase itself with games like a scavenger hunt, egg drop, happy hours, and, not to forget, the grand graduation party. As they say, take care of your employees and believe they will take care of your business.

Zappos always keeps it fun | Source: LinkedIn

Why Zappos’ onboarding is a hit

Any company with proper onboarding reaps benefits. Below are the five major benefits of Zappos’s unique and well-thought-out process.

1. Recruiting (and aiming) for culture fit

Every new hire can change the company culture for good (and for the bad). Zappos is known for its culture. And they aim strongly for a culture fit to retain the competitive advantage. Also, having an employee who doesn’t fit in is terrible for their productivity (and the company).

2. Weeding out unsuccessful hires early on

Zappos makes the moving on part easy for the new hires who aren’t fully committed to their vision and culture by offering money to quit. After all, what’s the point of having an employee who would probably be disengaged?

Disengagement directly brings down any company—only 31% of US employees are engaged. Now, imagine there is a 12% productivity loss due to this disengagement. Then, for an employee with an average annual salary of $50,000, the productivity loss would cost $6000. Having 10000 disengaged employees would cost $6 million. Zappos avoids such losses by weeding out employees who don’t believe in their vision early on.

The pay-to-quit offer saves the company money in the long run and ensures that you don’t spend further time onboarding an employee who isn’t fully ready to commit.

3. Gamification increases engagement

Ashley Perry, a newly hired member, shared her CLT experience in the book The Zappos Experience:

This emphasis on making onboarding fun isn’t just to make Zappos look fancy on social media (although that has its own benefits for employer branding). There are business benefits too. Employee onboarding gamification increases new hire training engagement and reduces the time to productivity. Overall it makes the onboarding successful.

4. Keeping the team aware of ground realities

Involving new hires in customer service activities helps them to do their job better.

Mark Madej, a software engineer, explains the benefits of the CLT training in the book Zappos Experience:

5. Onboarding at both company and project level

Zappos has created a perfect balance of both general onboarding and role-specific onboarding. So, the employee adapts to the company culture first and then gets enough information to succeed in their role.

How can you run an onboarding process like Zappos?

Employee onboarding at Zappos is an ideal blend of hands-on tasks, classroom training, and fun activities.

Deel also believes that onboarding now requires more than just handing out employee handbooks and providing one-day orientation sessions.

We believe in the value of experience-based onboarding spread over months so that new hires can soak in the culture, learn, and get up to speed. It’s a journey.

Using Deel Engage and our built-in HRIS, you can replicate Zappos’ way of onboarding right. Here are the steps to follow

Onboarding buddy

With Deel Engage, you can easily integrate buddy programs into your onboarding process. You can send surveys to identify volunteer buddies or have managers nominate the buddy as you prepare to onboard the new hire. The onboarding buddy can help them get familiar with the company culture. New hires can also shadow the onboarding buddy till they settle in.

Orientation events

With Deel Engage, you can onboard employees right where they are most active—Slack. In these onboarding task lists, you can add all upcoming events, such as in-person sessions and graduation events.

General, role-agnostic onboarding

Creating a general onboarding journey for culture, company mission, processes, etc. You can easily upload your pre-existing content and create an onboarding tutorial.

Role-specific training

Once new hires complete the general onboarding, you can further assign them role-specific training. This training can be a mix of recorded videos, templates, guides, etc. Our L&D consultants will share best practices and examples during the onboarding and help you with the setup process.

A continued learning journey with Deel Engage

Once onboarding concludes, new hires don’t just log off from the platform forever. Instead, a new experience is waiting for them. You can use the Deel Engage platform to:

• Build a centralized learning management system to conduct regular training, improve your workforce’s skillsets, and create a strong learning culture
• Create detailed career progression paths to set clear expectations at all levels and roles
• Empower employees with development plans that pave the path for their success in your organization
• Run automated performance review cycles to provide continuous feedback and support improvement

In short, you can bring a system into chaos.