What's it like to "work for" a company?

In preparation for our ENG 3353 resume and cover letter assignment, we talked a little about workplace culture and about whether or not a paycheck is (should be?) enough. Of course, any time I think about workplace culture, I'm reminded of some of CBS' coverage of Zappos.

60 Minutes covered the company a few years ago (5/25/08) in the context of hiring millenials. A big part of their claim is that workplaces have to offer young talent more than just a paycheck. Well, there's more to their claim than just that, so watch the video.



In addition to the 60 Minutes segment, CBS covered the launch party of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh's new book, Delivering Happiness. In the video, you can hear evidence again of Hsieh's workplace mentalty, speaking of which, I just found out that Zappos has a "family" of employee-written blogs.




I also had my numbers wrong in class when I talked about Amazon's purchase of Zappos. It turns out that Amazon only paid the measly sum of $850 million, about $40 million of which went directly into employee's pockets.

So, as my students are putting together their work-related compositions, I want us all to ask ourselves, "What kind of company do I want (hope? ideally?) to work for?" Put another way, you want to think about crafting documents based on those fundamentals we've discussed about audience awareness, and that depends on lots of variables, including theorizing about ideal audiences, researching real audiences, logos, pathos, etc.