Home > Management and Careers > Careers

Computerworld - Bonus trips to Las Vegas. Free slushies, cappuccino and popcorn. Weekly ticket giveaways to concerts and sporting events. An in-house rock band that livens up every meeting.

If it sounds like a throwback to the dot-com era, it is. Quicken Loans Inc., which earned the top spot on Computerworld's Best Places to Work in IT list this year, is a decidedly unbureaucratic online mortgage lender that's infatuated with its workforce.

While the aforementioned perks, solid benefits and competitive pay certainly contribute to the strong employee morale at Livonia, Mich.-based Quicken Loans, it's really the company's employee-empowered, success-driven environment that led its 200 IT workers to give the firm such high marks in their Best Places survey responses.

"The thing that's so great about this place is the culture," says Kevin McCallum, Quicken Loans' chief systems architect, who joined the company eight years ago. "We bring in people who are passionate about what they do and free to do what they want, and it breeds that sense of ownership." McCallum should know -- he previously worked for a large IT services company where, he says, "it took months and months to get anything done."

Why They're Tops • Ranked No. 1 in retention • 15% of IT employees promoted in 2004 • Ranked No. 2 in benefits • Ranked No. 9 in training • Training budget of $2,500 per IT employee

Whether it's in the IT department or other parts of the organization, workers at Quicken Loans "know they're part of the team and that they make a difference in client lives," says CEO Bill Emerson. "When people come to work and feel like they make a difference, they feel so much better."

Whenever staff members join the company, they spend three hours with chairman Daniel Gilbert and 90 minutes with Emerson to discuss the company's philosophy. The organization is extremely flat -- Gilbert, Emerson and other executives are seated throughout the office with everyone else. And that staff is growing fast: Quicken Loans now has more than 3,000 employees, including nearly 300 IT workers. Employees are so highly valued that Emerson hand-writes birthday cards not only to each of them but also to each of their children.

	Staffers at Quicken Loans, Monica Gilewski, Bill Emerson, Todd Lunsford and Kevin McCallum Image Credit: Michelle Andonian

Of course, it takes more than personalized birthday cards to keep IT workers happy. One of the things that makes Quicken Loans such a magnet for IT professionals is that the company develops nearly all of its software applications internally, save for a handful of off-the-shelf systems. For instance, the IT department developed its own CRM system that's "100% geared" toward the firm's online mortgage business, says McCallum.