To take the proposed model to it's logical extreme, what if you only want 3/10, 2/10, 1/10? Now you're suddenly back to hiring individuals again.

The whole point of hiring a team is that you aren't evaluating individual performance or skills; you're evaluating the groups' performance and skills. If the team is good, the people who can't immediately be helpful will re-train so that they can provide skills that are useful in the new context. The team will evolve to become the exact team that you need.

Right, only wanting to hire 7/10 means the company thinks they're better at evaluating team members in a single interview than the team is at evaluating its members after working together. Or they just can't afford a team that large, and it's not the right one for them.

Unless everyone in the team did the same job it's pretty likely you'd end up in a situation of "we really like you 7 for the application layer, but we have a great front end team already, so we don't need you 3. So, do the 7 of you want a job?"

That seems like a best-case scenario to me, unless the team is 3-4 people and someone is looking to create a capability or product from scratch.

Add a filter for team size? That way you're not looking at teams that are bigger than you can afford.

It's a hypothetical that's only meaningful at all if it's an all-or-nothing deal. If it was anything else, it would essentially just be normal hiring and therefore boring.

Understood, but I also would think finding an 'all-or-nothing' deal for a team of any real size would be somewhat unique at that point. If you have a team of 10, and all 10 are required to come along, there is likely some chance of redundancy unless we're talking about pure greenfield projects and buyers with no staff.

It is inferred that the group would always work together on projects, so their availability would be the same... If you sell yourself as a group but everyone still looks for offers of their own, it kind of defeats the purpose

And this is where the rubber hits the road.

In theory, yes, some actions are 'not allowed'. But this isn't an mathematical excercise it involves real people.

e.g. Who get's told the 'offers'? Do they get separate salary offers, or is it a single pot? If the latter, how do they decide what's fair? What happens if evereyone's extremely happy but one person? Or two people? What happens if there are competing offers that different members perfer unequally? How do the ongoing salary reviews go? Can individual members be fired after being hired?

It's going to be very messy, and I would imagine may not work a good proportion of the time. I would imagine a lot of the answers of the above questions would start looking like the answers given by a union, something that the tech community as a whole has avoided so far.

This is starting to sound more like a good old-fashioned agency.