Page 43 - The Apple Experience

that like Apple, Levy has a nontraditional approach to hiring. “I hire for two
traits—I hire for nice and I hire for passion,” he said. “If you sit down with
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me, no matter the position you’re applying for, my first question is going to

be, are you nice? The reactions are priceless. There’s usually a long pause like

they’re waiting for me to smile. Because who asks that question? And then I

say, ‘No, seriously, are you nice?’ ” Of course, no one is going to say they’re

not nice. But the way a candidate answers the question and the stories they

tell about the times they were nice provide Lansing with a good profile of the
candidate. It also forces the candidate to go home and think about the

position. If Lansing determines that a person isn’t nice, it means the

candidate is a wrong fit for the culture. According to Lansing, “If you have a

company of nice people in a service business, that’s going to be a good thing.”

Lansing also asks a question that Steve Jobs had been known to ask:

What are you passionate about in your life? “If this is just a job to you, it’s the

wrong place,” says Lansing. “If you give me someone who’s nice and
passionate, I can teach them everything else. I don’t care what school you

went to, I don’t care where you worked before. If you give me someone with

those two traits, they will, nine out of ten times, be a great success in the

company.”
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Zane Tankel owns twenty-four Applebee’s restaurants in the New York

region, including the Times Square location, which has the highest annual

revenue of any Applebee’s in the world.

Tankel’s locations generate an average annual revenue of $4.25 million,

double Applebee’s nationwide average. “We hire for attitude and
personality,” Tankel told a reporter for the New York Times. “We can teach
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you to cook, to make a drink, to be a server, but we can’t teach you how to be

nice.” When asked how he screens for friendliness, Tankel said, “You see it