Best Places to Work: The New Philly Workplace

But most of the design here has been initiated with the employees in mind. There’s a gym and a game room, complete with an air-hockey table. And despite being in a generic building in a King of Prussia office park, Beyond.com’s headquarters have a bright, personal aura.

I notice a rich, warm smell coming from down the hall. It seems that vice president Steve Kraut is sautéing onions … on a grill on his desk.

“We don’t do this every day,” Gerard tells me cheerfully. “This is our end-of-summer barbecue.” An end-of-summer barbecue? These people don’t need much of an excuse for an office party. Sure enough, as soon as lunchtime rolls around, we all go outside to rows of picnic tables set up on a patio, where Kraut and other senior managers have cooked up a buffet line of hot dogs and burgers for the staff.

Food spilling out of my mouth, I hunt down CEO Rich Milgram for an interview. I have some hardball questions for him. “How do you … hire such nice people?” I ask.

“It’s all about fit,” Milgram explains. “Personality plays a key role. Finding people who fit, that trumps skill sets.” This is a paraphrase of what Steve Grasse told me, and I wonder if it’s a new and little-known recipe for business success. Do résumés no longer matter? Did they ever?

The practice of hiring people rather than résumés has achieved results that surprised even Milgram. “When I moved into our first offices, we had a staff of 22,” he remembers. “And I got everyone together, and I said, ‘This is it. This is going to be our staff.’ But we just continued to grow, and now we’ve got almost 50 people working here.” At the end of the day, Milgram says, his corporation really is nothing but people. So keeping those people happy, with the stocked fridge and the barbecues and the open-door policy and the suggestion box, is all part of the plan for success.