5.21 Case Study: Zendesk Recruitment: A Fictional Example
Case Study: Recruiting at Zendesk
Over the last few years, Zendesk, the company where Melinda works as an HR manager, has seen plenty of growth. Zendesk builds software designed to improve customer relationships. The company has a strong culture that encourages employees to grow and innovate. At the beginning, Zendesk recruited simply on the basis of the applications they received, rather than actively searching for the right person for the job. The first thing Melinda did when arriving at the company was to develop a job analysis questionnaire, which she had all employees fill out.
The goal was to complete a job analysis for each position that existed at the company. This happened to be at the point where the organization started seeing rapid growth, as a result of increased demand from their client base of small and medium businesses. Luckily, since Melinda followed the industry closely and worked closely with management, part of her strategic outline planned for the hiring of several new positions. Keeping in mind the employment laws and the company’s position on a diverse workforce, Melinda set out to write new job descriptions from the job analysis she had performed. She also used a significant part of her budget to produce a slick recruiting video that emphasized the strong culture of Zendesk.
She aggressively pushed this video through Twitter and Instagram. After a three-week period, Melinda had 345 applications for the different positions, a 146% increase from last year. Pleased with the way recruiting had gone, she started reviewing the resumes to continue with the selection process.
Questions:
- Do you think Melinda’s approach was the best one? Why? Why not?
- What other social media advertising could the company have included?
“Chapter 4: Recruitment- Recruiting or the search for talent at Zendesk” from Human Resources Management – 2nd Ontario Edition by Elizabeth Cameron is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
