A German startup (Tandemploy - http://www.tandemploy.com/) is trying to establish something similar by allowing two people to "team up" together and apply for a single full-time position at a company. This sounds weird at first but the benefits for both sides are clear:
* The two "job sharers" can freely organize how they want to split their working time between each other, giving them a lot of flexibility and increased work-life balance.
* The company will have filled one full-time position with a team of two people, thereby greatly reducing the risk of sickness and one person leaving the company with all his/her knowledge.
RAID1 surely? Take one out and the array keeps working (though perhaps at lower performance).
This sort of job-share is not uncommon in some office environments, and it is part of how "zero hours contracts" work for companies like restaurants and so forth. Employ more people than you absolutely need for knowledge redundancy but don't give them full time hours. Then as people leave others take up the slack until replacement devices (sorry, people) can be brought online or a temporarily offline device is repaired (i.e. a sick/injured person gets better and returns to work) and resynced.
Sometimes it is very convenient for the workers as well as the companies, particularly those who can't, or don't want to, work full time for one of many reasons. But it can also be used to keep wages/conditions artificially low because from the companies PoV everyone is relatively easy to replace, temporarily from within the rest of the workforce and long term by bringing someone new in who the other part(s) of the job-share train on-the-job (I've actually seen this referred to as a Redundant Array of Inexpensive People - with the sound of the acronym a deliberate statement of how some feel about the situation).
IMO the problem with explicitly taking on two people at the same time to job-share like that is that they are more likely to chose to leave at the same time (or close to) which kills a chunk of the skill/knowledge sharing benefit.
On a side note, this is common in academia (particularly for married couples), and often seen as a negative thing there. The downside is that employers often expect two full-time employees for the price of one. My wife and I both have similar skillsets and looked at applying to a shared tenure-track position. We didn't for exactly that reason.
On the other hand, I think i could be quite nice if employers manage expectations and don't expect to get 2 for 1.
Tandems are also used when recruiting pro bass players / drummers since you often need one and only one of them in a band but it has to be always present for gigs.
Usually they are in duo, backing each others in several bands.
That's interesting. From the hiring company's perspective, are they hiring two employees with limited hours, or are they hiring a company (with two people in it) to do the work?
I think (not 100 % sure) that companies hire each one of the two people on a part-time basis, but with flexible working schedule, I guess other arrangements are also possible though.
* The two "job sharers" can freely organize how they want to split their working time between each other, giving them a lot of flexibility and increased work-life balance.
* The company will have filled one full-time position with a team of two people, thereby greatly reducing the risk of sickness and one person leaving the company with all his/her knowledge.
So, basically it's RAID0 for people :)