Jason Freedman was looking to hire a new employee at his startup, and he knew just the applicant he wanted for the job.







“Every other company he was talking to was asking, ‘How soon can you start?’ ” says Freedman, co-founder and CEO of 42Floors, a San Francisco-based commercial real estate search engine. Freedman wanted the guy, but he didn’t want him coming in haggard and beleaguered. So he made him a job offer with one stipulation: The candidate had to take a two-week paid vacation—his first day. Delighted and relieved, the candidate accepted.“We called it a pre-cation,” Freedman says. “It was only a couple of weeks, but he just came in so refreshed and energized, it was amazing.”

“The day they get their offer letter, it’s kind of like Christmas morning, in that they have a new job and they’ve already thought through the vacation they’re about to go on. We have a guy who’s about to start next week, and he’s in Thailand right now. It’s like, ‘Yeah, have a great time! And when you get back here, work your ass off.’ ”

Some well-off employers, including many Silicon Valley startups, have responded by offering their workers unlimited vacation. Atlassian, a San Francisco- and Sydney-based enterprise software company, does not track vacation days for its 300-plus U.S. employees. Yet it says it has seen no significant uptick in the total amount of time its workers take off. “We want people to bring their best every day, and we want them here for the long haul,” says Jeff Diana, Atlassian’s chief people officer. “Changing jobs is an important shift, and we want to give people time to recharge, spend some time with family. Because once you start a new job, you kind of jump all in.”

David Lewin, professor emeritus at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, says the concept is a new one to him. But it reminds him of a somewhat similar practice that’s common among companies that hire MBA graduates: “Especially in economic growth periods as opposed to recessions, they will negotiate over their start date. It happened a lot in 2006 and ’07, it happened in the late ’90s, and it’s starting to happen again. It probably reflects the same underlying notion: ‘We’re working our butts off, and gee, wouldn’t it be good to have a couple months off to go do whatever one does with free time, and then start fresh and ready to roll?’ ”