Greyston Bakery hires on a first-come, first-served basis, no questions asked
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Re: Greyston Bakery hires on a first-come, first-served basis, no questions asked
#2I've half joked about doing this for technical positions. I think to make it work you'd need:
1. A strong management system in place that's committed to helping folks succeed. 2. A willingness to honestly evaluate people and let them go if they aren't working out.
I've seen enough bad hires even in places that have well planned hiring processes that I'm having trouble believing this would be any worse.
Re: Greyston Bakery hires on a first-come, first-served basis, no questions asked
#3Can we not replicate click-bait headlines on HN?
Re: Greyston Bakery hires on a first-come, first-served basis, no questions asked
#4I've half joked about doing this for technical positions. I think to make it work you'd need: 1. A strong management system in place that's committed to helping folks succeed. 2. A willingness to honestly evaluate people and let them go if they aren't working out. I've seen enough bad hires even in places that have well planned hiring processes that I'm having trouble believing this would be any worse.
You forgot #3: A company with a lot of cash, and a lot of time to waste.
I really don't think this can work. Whenever we post for a position, I get flooded with a bunch of garbage resumes from people who barely have an idea what programming is. We have work to do, and deadlines. We literally can't afford to turn ourselves into a technical training school.
Re: Greyston Bakery hires on a first-come, first-served basis, no questions asked
#5I've half joked about doing this for technical positions. I think to make it work you'd need: 1. A strong management system in place that's committed to helping folks succeed. 2. A willingness to honestly evaluate people and let them go if they aren't working out. I've seen enough bad hires even in places that have well planned hiring processes that I'm having trouble believing this would be any worse.
I don't know how this would scale for any non-entry-level position. Even desktop support requires more knowledge than a random person on the street has, so unless you're willing to spend a lot of money on training every new hire who may or may not pan out, you'd need to think about some qualification screen at a minimum.
Re: Greyston Bakery hires on a first-come, first-served basis, no questions asked
#6> People who are given a job start off as apprentices, during which they go through a 10-month job training and life-skills course. Around half the people who begin an apprenticeship choose to complete it and stay at Greyston, and when they do, they’re then assigned an entry-level job–working the mixing machines or overseeing the slicing and packaging of different-sized brownies for distribution.
They pay minimum wage to the apprentices. I can see how a system like that would work. Just being able to show up and do the bare minimum to pass the apprenticeship period is more than an awful lot of low skill workers are capable of, whether due to life circumstances, low conscientiousness or other characteristics that make keeping a job difficult. The population of job seekers for badly paid, low skill jobs is full of the unemployable.
Re: Greyston Bakery hires on a first-come, first-served basis, no questions asked
#7If pay started at $10 per hour and you had an incredible amount of staff to find actually talented people, this is maybe a bad idea. If you thought you'd "disrupt" hiring at your small company this could be a solid company-ending idea...
Re: Greyston Bakery hires on a first-come, first-served basis, no questions asked
#8I've half joked about doing this for technical positions. I think to make it work you'd need: 1. A strong management system in place that's committed to helping folks succeed. 2. A willingness to honestly evaluate people and let them go if they aren't working out. I've seen enough bad hires even in places that have well planned hiring processes that I'm having trouble believing this would be any worse.
You forgot #3: A company with a lot of cash, and a lot of time to waste. I really don't think this can work. Whenever we post for a position, I get flooded with a bunch of garbage resumes from people who barely have an idea what programming is. We have work to do, and deadlines. We literally can't afford to turn ourselves into a technical training school.
The idea here seems like it would be best suited to a working environment that has a deep pipeline, from unskilled to semi-skilled to skilled or specialized workers. People can be hired unconditionally to the unskilled pool, from which they can move up to the higher tiers either through training (either internally or externally) or through natural ability.
A bakery, like in this example, seems like it could pull this off, since janitorial work at a bakery is straightforward but unlikely something you'd want to subcontract, and presents a natural place to interact with other workers in more specialized positions, through management or through learning more.
In software this is more difficult, because there's no longer a pipeline for things like data entry, assembly, or basic IT support (traditional inroads), especially at a smaller company, much less janitorial or food prep work that presents an opportunity to advance.
I think the hidden cost here, though, is that progression from one stage to another starts to resemble interviewing at a new company, with all the same biases and problems that result from hiring processes in general, with the possible exception that there's more direct information on personality and work ethic that can feed into the pipeline (for better or worse).
Re: Greyston Bakery hires on a first-come, first-served basis, no questions asked
#9The companies who hire illegal immigrants do essentially the same thing. No background check (how could they) or drug test. They just shuffle people in, pay them minimum wage, and they if they mess up or quit showing up they just find some more people off the street. Just bodies to do low-skill, low-paying work.
Re: Greyston Bakery hires on a first-come, first-served basis, no questions asked
#10I've half joked about doing this for technical positions. I think to make it work you'd need: 1. A strong management system in place that's committed to helping folks succeed. 2. A willingness to honestly evaluate people and let them go if they aren't working out. I've seen enough bad hires even in places that have well planned hiring processes that I'm having trouble believing this would be any worse.
I don't know how this would scale for any non-entry-level position. Even desktop support requires more knowledge than a random person on the street has, so unless you're willing to spend a lot of money on training every new hire who may or may not pan out, you'd need to think about some qualification screen at a minimum.
just because you hire anyone who applies doesn't mean just anyone will apply. people don't actually want to get a job they have no idea how to do. applicants will filter themselves. the question is how much better is a company's filtering process, really, than the applicants' self-filtering? would be embarrassing if it were no better, or even worse.