We read with some interest this week an article about New York based Greyston Bakery which hires people on a first-come, first served basis saving applicants from the usual and traditional recruitment processes and conversations. Now, whilst we’re all for embracing change at Laudale HQ, in the sense of our day to day ‘recruitment’ business we’re pretty traditional and whilst we take the time to really get to know our candidate, asking them for a CV is usually one of our first few conversations.
However, Greyston’s unique hiring approach – which they’ve coined ‘open hiring’ and which has been working for them for thirty-six years, did if you’ll excuse the pun gave us some food for thought.
It’s important to mention at this juncture that Greyston aren’t filling senior management or specialist knowledge positions in this manner but for the tech industry, in particular, we question whether this method of hiring could be given real consideration in the fight to encourage greater diversity.
Greyston’s approach in removing barriers around experience, background, gender, race and more mean they’re bringing a wide range of people into their business who previously may have never considered a career accessible at all, imagine if tech entry-level roles offered the same opportunity to be so inclusive? How many more women would be in tech? How many people who hadn’t followed a ‘tech’ education route would consider it an option, what would the tech workforce look like in years to come?
But could it really work, in practice?
Greyston hire 75% of their employees in this way and once they start they embark on a 10 month job training programme and life skills course, only then are they assigned an entry-level role, as such there’s little risk to the business and with revenues having doubled in the past four years it’s clearly an approach which seems to be delivering results.
We genuinely think ‘open hiring’ is a method which could work for the tech industry but let’s be clear it can only be for certain roles, where there’s reputational or commercial risk at stake, of course, a more sophisticated approach needs to be taken to finding talent but with application processes for entry-level roles particularly in tech firms becoming ever more complicated, the only question we’re really asking is why in an entry-level technical role where you learn on the job anyway and in an industry which is crying out for more diversity would this not be a possible solution?