Zappos offers new employees $3000 to quit after a week

I've always seen this policy as a way to lubricate the quitting process, rather than implicitly instil commitment from those that don't take it (like they're giving up something, so they must like what they're doing).

By paying people that arent committed to leave, you increase the proportion of good, loyal employees. Fewer half-assed people stick around.

Looking from an economic search cost perspective, if $3k > cost of searching for new job with payoff (both implicit and explicit) = working for Zappos, then you take the money and leave. Thus, the only people that stay are those that have higher search costs (and given a constant pay rate and 'hire-ability'[1], the only those with a higher implicit payoff, ie enjoyment) stay .

This only works as long as the pay to quit is less than the search cost for the threshold level of employee that you're trying to keep. It's also reliant on holding the 'hire-ability' of accepted applicants constant. But it means they can pretty much dictate the minimum level of 'enjoyment' that employees get from their jobs by adjusting the pay-to-quit figure.

Pretty cool.

With unemployment so high, search costs go up, which mean that they're probably getting a threshold level of enjoyment that is lower now than it was when unemployment was less. I dont know when the $3000 came into effect, but it could make sense to raise it again.

[1] By this I mean checking the boxes, qualifications, etc. How easy would it be to just find a job without any extra factors. Ie, hiring a non-skilled worker vs highly-skilled worker. If quality of accepted applicants was very low, then it would be relatively harder to find a job, raising the search cost and screwing up the incentive.

when did they start doing this? Was it in the initial days too?

$3k or even $10k (as another commenter suggested) to bail out on a company that you just started at, is a way of making the people who really don't like the company not feel bad about leaving. Even at great companies, there are people who join who hate the environment, culture, or whatever. They are miserable. But they stay because they need a job. The walking money of $3k is a matter of getting rid of them, which is a great investment for the company.

For people who like a company, or who really want the job, a quick $3k isn't worthwhile. And in the case of Zappos, I'm sure that they've generally had people stay longer, lower attrition rate, etc., primarily because they've gotten rid of the people who would generally be a drag on the company, because they've already bought them out.

Likely any benefit is a cognitive dissonance type effect. The article says that only 2-3% take the offer (so not much of a filtering effect) and that while you would think people would come in and abuse the offer HR doesn't seem to have a lot of special pre-screening. So likely the idea is to get the new employee to value the position as the internalize the lost value of the money they just turned down to continue the position. Not so much filtering people as attempting to nudge them a bit.