At Southwest Airlines, our world-famous culture and reputation for putting our people first allows us to recruit the best. We know we’re lucky to have inherited this culture from our legendary founders, who entrusted us to maintain what’s special about the LUV Airline. It might surprise you to hear one of the most important ways we approach employee engagement — to be a Best Place to Work, start with the people who don’t work for you. We’re talking about hiring the right people.
At Southwest, we view engagement as a two-way street. Yes, an employer must work to keep employees engaged by offering good pay, benefits, opportunities for development and advancement, plus a collaborative, mission-driven culture. But you also have to hire people who are engaged from the start, whose values are in sync with yours. You have the power to hire the right people who will be engaged. So start focusing your hiring process on becoming a Best Place to Work.
In 2015, we received 371,202 resumes and hired nearly 6,000 new employees. It is not unusual for us to interview more than 100 people to fill a single position. We intentionally spend an inordinate amount of time on the recruiting and hiring process. Since we believe that our employees are the key to our success, we hire tough at Southwest. Here’s how you can do the same.
Develop strong values
The values we’ve identified at Southwest are actually expectations. We call it “Living the Southwest Way,” and it has three components:
- A Warrior Spirit. Southwest’s Warrior Spirit was born from years of legal battles just to earn the right to fly before our first flight ever took off. Those early battles shaped our Warrior Spirits, which help us overcome the constant challenges we face in our brutally competitive industry. It’s taking pride in working hard. It’s a desire to be the best.
- A Servant’s Heart. At Southwest, we live by the Golden Rule, so we look for people who actually take pleasure in serving others. In essence, it’s treating others with respect, putting others first, demonstrating proactive customer service, and embracing our Southwest Family.
- A Fun-LUVing Attitude. We take our work seriously, but not ourselves. Whether that’s a joke-telling flight attendant on your next flight, a Pilot who waves at a child from the window of a Boeing-737, or a CEO who dresses as Snow White for Halloween, together we have FUN, celebrate successes, and enjoy our work.
Hire tough to those expectations
We look for people who, even before even joining our Southwest Family, are already living “The Southwest Way.” Our expectations are thoroughly defined, and we’ve built our interviewing methodology around these expectations. It’s not simply a mentality of, “we’ll know it when we see it.” We always say that we hire for attitude and train for skill, but we’re not looking for just any attitude. We have a very specific attitude in mind.
Behavioral questions help us determine someone’s ability to Live the Southwest Way. For example, to determine someone’s ability to be a passionate team player, we will ask the candidate to describe a time at his or her current or previous employer in which he or she went above and beyond to help a co-worker perform his or job. We also use what we call a career motivation interview to determine if the candidate really understands the job he or she is applying for and if the job is aligned with the candidate’s career goals.
Tie performance to expectations
Once we hire the right people, we hold them to the same expectations for which they were selected. Southwest Employees are required to enjoy their jobs! Employees are measured on their behavior—not just results—in performance appraisals.
Measure results
Employee engagement impacts bottom line results. And here’s how:
- Our turnover is low – less than two percent voluntary turnover.
- Our employees are committed. When employees are asked on our biennial survey if they feel like their job is “just a job,” “a stepping stone,” or “a calling,” nearly 75 percent of Southwest employees selected, “It’s a calling.” Our consultants said that’s the highest score they’ve ever seen on that question.
- In an industry that has cumulatively lost more than it has earned, Southwest has been profitable for 42 consecutive years – a feat unheard of in the airline industry.
- Our company is consistently ranked as one of FORTUNE’s most admired companies (21 consecutive years).
So, Southwest’s people-centric formula is really quite simple: hire happy employees who will make happy customers, which will mean happy shareholders. It’s been working for us for nearly 45 years.
