Alibaba's employee doubling appraisal categorized as a "wild dog hound."

Reporter Wei Heping

The rapid expansion of employees often leads to a dilution of corporate culture, a problem that Alibaba Group, amid rumors of an IPO, has had to face.

“Alibaba employees have grown from 4,000 last year to 6,000 today, and according to the company’s human resources plan, it will reach 8,000 by the end of the year.” Deng Kangming, senior vice president of Alibaba Group, revealed in an interview with reporters a few days ago that after the rapid growth of the number of employees in the past few years, the number of employees in the group will double this year compared to last year.

“The doubling of Alibaba’s employees will not dilute the company’s corporate culture.” According to Deng Kangming, this is mainly due to the fact that Alibaba has formed a set of recruitment, training and assessment system, as well as a distinctive corporate culture.

According to Alibaba’s hiring process, new employees are generally required to go through several interviews with the business department in charge, the HR department, and the vice president in charge before they can be officially hired.

The core question in these interviews is “seeing the person”. Alibaba’s corporate culture, known as the “Six Veins of Sword”, includes six main aspects: customer first, teamwork, embracing change, integrity, passion and dedication.

“When hiring new employees, we mainly look at their integrity, their ability to integrate into the company, and their acceptance of the company’s sense of mission and values. Business issues are not the most important.” Deng Kangming said Alibaba advocates a team spirit of sharing and sharing and “doesn’t want employees to have individual heroism.”

As a company growing up in an emerging industry, Alibaba’s business model is also being explored, and the requirement for an innovative and entrepreneurial spirit in talent is an important reason for Alibaba’s success, according to Guoan Yang, a professor at CEIBS.

“Alibaba’s unique value proposition is the dream of starting a business together, the dream of changing history together, the dream of creating wealth together, and the dream of sharing wealth together. This requires Alibaba to look for many people with the same values in its hiring practices.” This is also why Alibaba has a low employee turnover rate, Yang said.

According to Alibaba’s human resources survey, it usually takes one to three months for new employees to integrate into the company culture.

In order to implement the corporate culture, Alibaba provides a series of corporate culture training for new employees, including the Hundred Years Ali and Hundred Years Taobao training for ordinary employees, as well as the Hundred Years Integrity and Hundred Years Plan training for salespeople.

In addition to selecting the right people in the recruitment process, Alibaba’s B2B president, Wei Zhe, sees that a very important procedure for the continuation of the corporate culture is employee training. This year, Alibaba is ready to recruit 4,000 people, there are 2,000 people are Alibaba B2B to recruit.

“No matter how good the values are, the addition of so many new employees will also face the problem of corporate culture being diluted, and we hope that through recruitment and training, the corporate culture will be diluted a little less, and then slowly come back.” In order to solve this problem, Alibaba has set up a 3-month mentorship and HR care period for new employees, with an option to “return” for retraining 6 to 12 months into the job, according to Wei Zhe.

Surprisingly, Alibaba has not only made efforts in recruitment and training for this common entrepreneurial dream, but also in the quarterly review of employee performance, the values assessment accounts for 50% of the total.

“If an employee has excellent performance, but he still can’t pass the assessment if he doesn’t meet Alibaba’s values, he not only can’t get a raise, bonus, or promotion, but he may even be fired,” In fact, almost all companies say they value values, but it’s rare to find a company like Alibaba that ties values assessment so closely to earnings, Deng said.

In Alibaba, employees are divided into three categories through the assessment: First, those who have performance, but not in line with the values are called “wild dogs”; Second, those who are good at everything, but have no performance, are called “white rabbits”; Third, those who have performance, but also have teamwork spirit, are called “wild dogs”; Second, those who are good at everything, but have no performance, are called “white rabbits”. “Hounds”.

What Alibaba needs are “hounds,” not “bunnies” and “wild dogs,” said Deng. The ‘bunnies’ will be trained to improve their professionalism through business training, while the company is generally determined to remove the ‘wild dogs’ when they are unable to be taught."

“Our vision of attracting new employees to join us remains a joint venture,” Deng said, “Everyone has different values, and as a company with a sense of mission, it’s very important to get employees to identify with the corporate culture or the values and mission of the company from the heart, to start a business and fight for a common goal, rather than just treating work as a profession or a place to raise a family.”

In the face of the pressure brought by the multiplication of employees, Deng Kangming said that the rapid development of Alibaba’s business needs a lot of fresh blood to join, “We can only cross the river by touching the stones, because there is no example for us to learn from in front of this industry.