How to Get a Job at IKEA: Application Process, CV Tips, and What They Actually Look For

IKEA employs over 220,000 people across more than 60 countries. The IKEA Group — technically the Ingka Group, which operates the majority of IKEA stores — is one of the largest private employers in the world. Despite its global footprint, IKEA has maintained a remarkably consistent culture rooted in its Swedish origins, its founding story, and a set of values that are explicitly taught and assessed throughout the hiring process. Getting a job at IKEA means understanding not just what you want to do but whether you genuinely align with how IKEA thinks about business, people, and purpose.

How IKEA's Hiring Process Works

IKEA's process differs significantly by role type — retail co-worker roles, corporate functions at Inter IKEA (the franchise owner, based in Delft) or Ingka Group (the retailer, based in Leiden), and tech roles at IKEA Digital (Stockholm) each have distinct hiring pipelines.

Retail roles (store-level co-workers): Application via the IKEA careers portal, followed by a behaviorally structured phone screen, and one or two in-person interviews. Competency-based questions map directly to IKEA's eight leadership capabilities. Many store-level roles also include a brief values alignment assessment at the application stage — a scenario-based questionnaire that filters candidates who are misaligned with IKEA's people-first philosophy.

Corporate and specialist roles (Ingka Group / Inter IKEA): The process is more extended — typically four stages over four to ten weeks: application screen, recruiter phone screen, competency-based interview with the hiring manager, and a panel interview or final conversation with a senior stakeholder. Some specialist roles include written cases or presentations. The corporate culture at IKEA Leiden and Delft is relatively formal by IKEA standards — decision-making is by consensus, timelines are long, and the culture is genuinely multinational.

IKEA Digital (tech roles, primarily in Stockholm): IKEA has invested heavily in building internal technology capabilities — moving away from SAP and toward cloud-native, microservices-based architecture. The digital hiring process is more similar to standard tech company hiring: application screen, recruiter call, technical assessment, and a two-to-four interview loop covering technical depth, cross-functional collaboration, and values alignment. IKEA Digital competes for talent against Spotify, Klarna, and other Stockholm tech employers.

What IKEA Actually Looks For

IKEA's values are more deeply embedded in its hiring process than at most companies of its size. The "IKEA Spirit" — a concept first articulated by founder Ingvar Kamprad — includes humility, cost-consciousness, simplicity, will, and a genuine belief that good design should be accessible to everyone. These are not decorative.

Values alignment is non-negotiable. IKEA interviewers will directly probe for whether you align with the company's democratic design philosophy, its commitment to sustainability (IKEA's People & Planet Positive strategy is a genuine operational priority, not a PR position), and its belief in treating co-workers as the company's most important asset. Candidates who come across as primarily motivated by compensation or prestige, without genuine connection to what IKEA is building, consistently fail the values assessment.

Humility and simplicity. IKEA's culture is notably egalitarian. Senior managers are expected to demonstrate the same values as store co-workers. The company's founder traveled economy class and encouraged managers to stay in modest hotels — this ethos persists. Candidates who communicate with humility, who credit their teams and acknowledge their limitations, and who can describe complex things simply are valued. Arrogance — even backed by strong performance — is a culture misfit.

Sustainability commitment. IKEA has binding commitments to become climate positive by 2030 and to use only renewable and recycled materials by 2030. These are not marketing goals — they are operational constraints that affect procurement, supply chain, product development, and store operations. Candidates for roles in supply chain, product development, operations, and sustainability functions will be assessed on their genuine engagement with these goals.

For IKEA Digital: architectural thinking, willingness to challenge legacy systems, and commercial understanding are key. The digital transformation agenda involves replacing decades of SAP infrastructure with modern cloud services. Engineers need to be comfortable with greenfield design alongside legacy migration — and to understand that IKEA's scale (hundreds of stores, global supply chain, 775 million store visits per year) means that performance and reliability have direct revenue consequences.

CV Advice Specific to IKEA

Reflect the values in the language of your CV. IKEA is one of the few employers where explicitly mentioning sustainability, accessibility, or democratic design in your CV is genuinely appropriate — not generic filler. If you have led sustainability initiatives, designed for inclusivity, or contributed to accessible product development, these are relevant and should be visible.

Quantify cost consciousness. IKEA's cultural obsession with cost efficiency (Kamprad famously agonized over unnecessary spending) extends to how they evaluate candidates. Evidence that you have found cheaper, simpler, or more efficient solutions — reducing costs, eliminating waste, simplifying processes — resonates specifically at IKEA in a way it might not at a company with a different culture.

For IKEA Digital roles: include your technology stack explicitly. IKEA Digital's current stack includes Google Cloud Platform, Terraform, Kubernetes, Apache Kafka, and a Python/Go/Node.js backend mix. The platform teams are actively migrating from legacy ERP to cloud-native services. Engineers with GCP and event-driven architecture experience are in demand.

Demonstrate long-term thinking. IKEA is privately held (through the Stichting INGKA Foundation) and operates with a multi-decade planning horizon unusual for its size. Candidates who demonstrate patience, long-term thinking, and comfort with processes that prioritize durability over speed fit the culture. This does not mean slow — IKEA Digital moves quickly by IKEA standards — but it does mean that candidates who chase novelty without concern for sustainability (of decisions, not just the environment) are misaligned.

Include languages for international roles. IKEA's corporate language is English, but Swedish proficiency is a genuine advantage for roles based in Helsingborg (Ingka headquarters) or the Stockholm Digital Hub. Dutch is useful for the Leiden and Delft offices. Other European languages matter for regional market roles.

Common Mistakes Candidates Make

Treating IKEA as interchangeable with other retail or home goods employers. IKEA's culture, values, and operational model are distinctly unlike H&M, Zara, or general retail employers. Candidates who approach the process with retail-generic preparation — without engaging with IKEA's specific values framework — consistently give flat answers in the behavioral interviews.

Underestimating the values assessment. IKEA's scenario-based questionnaire at the application stage filters more candidates than most applicants expect. These are not trick questions, but they do have wrong answers — answers that reflect self-interest over team interest, speed over quality, or cost savings over people's wellbeing.

Being overly formal. IKEA's culture is warm, accessible, and deliberately non-hierarchical. Candidates who show up to interviews in formal corporate dress, with overly rehearsed and corporate-formal language, create distance rather than connection. The culture is professional but human.

Ignoring IKEA's scale for digital roles. Engineers applying to IKEA Digital who treat it as a small tech company are surprised by the complexity and scale of the systems. IKEA's e-commerce platform handles tens of millions of orders globally. The supply chain logistics system is one of the most complex in retail. The digital challenges are genuinely hard — treat them as such in your application.

Not demonstrating commitment to the mission. IKEA's purpose — "to create a better everyday life for the many people" — is not a tagline in their culture. It is a test. Candidates who cannot articulate why this purpose connects to their own values tend to fail the final-stage values alignment conversations.

IKEA's hiring process is built around culture fit as much as competence. NextCV helps you tailor your CV to the specific language, values, and requirements of IKEA's job descriptions — so your application signals both the skills and the alignment they are looking for.