#1418 1982 · Greyston Bakery · food manufacturing / social enterprise
Hiring With No Interviews, No Resumes, No Questions
the problem
The long-term unemployed can't get first jobs: resumes, interviews and checks are filters built to exclude them.
background
Greyston Bakery was founded in 1982 by a Zen Buddhist group led by Roshi Bernard Glassman, with the mission of employing people the labor market had written off, in Yonkers, New York.
Its signature innovation is what the bakery calls Open Hiring: anyone who wants a job takes the next available slot, first come, first hired, with no interview, no resume and no background screening. New workers enter a supported apprenticeship, with foundation services (housing help, childcare, training) wrapped around the job.
what everyone would do
Refine the interview process with better tests and stricter background checks.
what they saw
Interviews predict poorly for people whose records hide them; a paid apprenticeship is the only honest test. Delete the filter, structure the first months, and the 'unhirable' queue becomes a staffed production line.
the move
Replace selection with structure. Instead of using interviews to predict who will succeed, Greyston hires whoever is next in line and lets a supported apprenticeship do the filtering: those ready to work stay, while services address the barriers, housing, childcare, skills, that a screen would otherwise have to guess at. The jobs go to people filters would have excluded, and the bakery keeps its ovens staffed.
why it works
An interview infers future behavior from a past the applicant may never have had a chance to build; open hiring observes actual work directly, support services remove the causes of failure the filter was proxying for, and measured turnover is no worse.
the payoff
Apprenticeship graduates show below-average annual turnover of 33%, versus about 42% across industries (NYU Stern case study).
where it breaks
It fails where the work leaves no ramp-in period for error, where support services are absent (unaddressed homelessness and childcare sink any hire), and if the queue grows much faster than positions, when fairness depends entirely on transparent line management.
what came after
Open Hiring became a studied model of barrier-free employment, with replication guides and a center dedicated to spreading the practice to other employers.
references
- [1]Case Study: Greyston BakeryNYU Stern School of Business, 2018stern.nyu.edu
Widely retold, only partly documented. Filed as hearsay.