Abstract
This study primarily seeks to explore the antecedents and types of people who changed from a customer to a frontline service employee, which is referred as a “customer-frontline employee” in this study. In recent years, many companies started to hire customer-frontline employees. For example, among enterprises such as Lavender Cottage, Starbucks, and Eslite, a proportion of frontline service employees came from customers, who could help companies to understand the employer branding (means to be understood as the set of distinctive images of a prospective employer, which are manifest in the minds of the target groups) in the customer’s mind. The existing literature indicated that employer branding could attract potential employees, and those employees usually have higher job engagement. Therefore, probing into this issue is beneficial for businesses to design the strategies to attract more potential employees. There was little research on this topic of customer becoming frontline employees, so this study took the exploratory research. Fifteen hospitality frontline employees who used to look for the frontline service jobs in the company they were once customers, were interviewed. The methodology started with understanding the reasons of their job choice and work attitude via questionnaire, and then explored their employment considerations, work attitude and service experience by in-depth interviews. Lastly, results were generalized and discussed after the qualitative analysis of verbatim. The aim of this research is to explore the phenomenon of customer-frontline employee through the exploration, description, and classification of the types and antecedents of changing from the customer to a frontline employee. There are also some findings about the job engagement of those customer-employees. . The findings provide several implications for researchers and managers. From a managerial perspective, this study provides human resources department some ideas about the design of the recruitment program, and employer branding. From the academic perspective, realized why the customer-frontline employees cause of choosing jobs by taking the “service experience” into account. Keywords：job choice；service experience；customer-frontline employee；job engagement；Qualitative Research