The company’s open-hiring model helps break the cycle of poverty.
By Christopher Marquis
Greyston Bakery — the maker of gourmet brownies, cookies, and those chunky bits in Ben & Jerry’s ice cream — has recruited employees through open hiring for nearly 40 years. Its program helps break the cycle of poverty by hiring nearly anyone who wants to work — minorities, dropouts, refugees, the formerly incarcerated — without requiring resumes, interviews, or background checks.
Shawna Swanson, a Black single mother of five in Yonkers, New York, says the company gave her the chance she needed, as her financial situation became so dire that she considered putting some of her children up for adoption.
While Swanson’s story may seem extreme, it is all too common in the United States today, where marginalized groups have disproportionately high unemployment rates, financial instability, and food and housing insecurity. Black and Hispanic communities have continued to experience the highest poverty rate for the past three decades, reveals 2021 data released by the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
To address the systemic nature of the underlying issues, it is important to start with companies.
Corporate hiring processes that disproportionately screen out candidates based on race, gender, ethnicity, and other factors are pervasive. For example, studies have found that when HR managers screen resumes, Black first names receive much lower call-back rates, indicating an unconscious bias. A 2019 World Economic Forum study calculated that because of the low rate of change in recent decades in women’s participation in the economy, we would need 257 years to achieve gender parity on economic factors like income and workforce participation.
But through Greyston’s opening hiring, people who face situations like Swanson’s can be offered employment opportunities and community support. Instead of conventional vetting processes, open-hiring positions are filled on a first-come, first-served basis, giving opportunities to those who might otherwise face significant obstacles in finding employment. Open hiring ensures that candidates are judged solely on their willingness to work rather than on potentially discriminatory criteria.
When individuals often excluded from the workforce gain employment, the positive effects ripple through their communities.
Families become more stable, local economies strengthen, and social services face less strain. The practice encourages companies to rethink their hiring criteria and actively works against the systemic discrimination embedded in traditional hiring processes.
Greyston president and CEO Joe Kenner shares, “It’s opportunity. It’s access. We’ve been bringing folks into the mainstream for decades by investing in their potential with no judgment.” The bakery’s demographics reflect its community. Since 2017, approximately 95% of its open-hire employees are people of color, and a third are women. Latinx representation has risen steadily, consistent with the growth of the Latinx population in Yonkers, the company’s location. There has also been a significant increase in non-white employees in management positions.
Kenner explains that the company’s founder, Bernie Glassman, was overwhelmed by the myriad of unemployed and homeless people he saw daily in the Bronx. “The genesis was Bernie’s belief that we lose as a society when folks are not realizing their full potential,” Kenner states. “Open hiring isn’t charity; it’s a talent management strategy. We offer jobs to people, no questions asked. But at the end of the day, we still need to run a business that needs to make a profit, that needs to supply a product for Ben & Jerry’s. There’s accountability there.”
Glassman started open hiring by pulling unemployed people off the streets, saying, “Do you want to work? Do you want to learn a new skill? The skills are manual, and you can learn them on the job.” Greyston provides resources to help with childcare, mental health, housing, and other obstacles perpetuating poverty and inequity.
“We want to invest in bringing you in and keeping you here, as opposed to expending resources on keeping you out through, for example, interviews and background checks,” Kenner notes. With about 100 bakery employees, including 70 or so from open hiring, Greyston operates with an eye on employees’ long-term success.
The Greyston Employment Opportunity Center shares its hiring model with businesses large and small around the world. “We want to educate as many people as we can on the possibility of open hiring,” Kenner states. “If a business is skeptical about open hiring, we tell them to open up just one job. It is low risk. It can be whatever position you think works for your organization.”
Ten million Americans face a barrier to employment such as homelessness, substance abuse, or a criminal record — yet, there are roughly eight million jobs available, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports in 2024. This hurts all of us.
Data show that open hiring is working. In 2022, Greyston filled over 2,000 new jobs through open hiring, with 95% of open hires being people of color and over one-third being women. Its board of directors has almost equal representation of men and women. Kenner concludes that the practice is “good for business, it’s good for the economy, and there are some societal implications. It’s good for the hire; it’s good for their family; it’s good for the community the family lives in.”
An important element of Greyston’s model is changing the broader employment system across the globe, and it recently began scaling the open-hiring model internationally. Kenner says, “If we fill 40,000 jobs through inclusive hiring and open hiring by 2030, that computes to about $3 billion of economic impact — and that’s before you consider the savings from corrections, people getting off public assistance, and the tax revenue that they generate from their wages. That is a huge opportunity.”
This article was adapted from Christopher Marquis’ book The Profiteers: How Business Privatizes Profit and Socializes Cost.
