When you start hiring employees you notice quite a diverse selection of backgrounds, especially when they’re coming in from all over a large metropolitan area like New York City. The 5 boroughs of Manhattan, Queens, Bronx, Staten Island, and Brooklyn each have their own unique population subset that produces some very high quality candidate, albeit mixed in with an enormous volume of duds.

One of the employees we recently hired had an interesting background as a hood cleaner. If you’ve never heard of that before, it’s the person you call to sanitize a restaurant or commercial kitchen’s range hoods over the ovens in the cooking area. He was responsible for hood cleaning in Queens. Restaurant owners would call in and he and his crew would handle everything from cleaning the vent hoods to grease trap installation, all in preparation for the restaurant’s New York State health inspection. We ended up hiring that employee because he’s a hard-worker and had a strong background.

After about a week of work, it was clear we made a great choice, so we started to look for other people with a background in hood cleaning. It’s tough to find people who are willing to change careers, but so far, we’ve seen tremendous success coming from this subset of people, mostly from Queens county.