Should You Hire Anyone And Everyone Who Wants To Work For You?

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This company does:


Greyston was founded 36 years ago in Yonkers, New York, by Bernie Glassman, who practiced Zen Buddhism and pioneered the practice of Open Hiring (which Greyston has since trademarked). “Greyston was founded on the idea that a profitable business could be the backbone of ethical practice,” Brady says. The company’s slogan reads “we don’t hire people to bake brownies, we bake brownies to hire people,” and indeed the concept is that simple. Anyone who asks for a job at Greyston’s Bakery will get one. It may take a little while–people sign up on a list, and when there’s a job opening, they’ll be contacted in the order in which they signed up. That’s it. The company does not use background checks, drug tests, or interviews; hiring is done on the basis of faith that if someone is given a job, they will do it, and their skills and salaries will grow as they work.

At Greyston, which currently employs 130 people, open hiring creates a pipeline for careers on the bakery’s manufacturing floor and throughout the rest of the company’s operations. 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.

The company helps individual employees develop a career path, and provides them the support–whether it be additional job training or a GED course–to follow it. Dion Drew, for instance, joined the team as an apprentice in 2009, and, after a number of promotions, is now a supervisor and new-hire manager. Delaney Philogene started as an apprentice at Greyston, moved on to the assembly line, then secured a job as an accountant with the company, and now works as an accountant for another. The idea, Brady says, is to equip people with both life and job skills that they could use to advance at Greyston, or take on to other companies. Either way, when people advance, it creates more space for more people to join as apprentices and begin their own careers.


Of course, Brady says, it doesn’t always work out–a number of people have passed through Greyston’s open hiring system to find that the work was not for them, or that they couldn’t keep up with the demands of a fixed schedule.

But more often than not, open hiring leads to the same type of dedication Hookway saw in his own practice of giving people a chance. Brady feels that there are numerous, often overlooked avenues for introducing open hiring at companies. Janitorial services companies like CleanCraft are an obvious fit, but for larger companies, mail services, cafeteria staff, and other administrative work could all potentially work with an open hiring model. Specifically, he says, if companies are now choosing to outsource jobs to third-party contracting agencies, they should instead consider bringing them back in-house to provide a pipeline of opportunity to a wider range of people.

In doing so, they might see some benefits: While the annual employee turnover rate in similar manufacturing and production industries hovers between 30 and 70 percent, at the Greyston bakery, it’s just around 12 percent. Furthermore, because Greyston does away with the typical hiring process–which, between background checks and drug tests, can cost up to $4,500 per hire–it’s able to use the money saved to pay its employees a higher wage. While apprentices start at minimum wage, production supervisors, like Dion, earn a salary of around $65,000 with full benefits.