"but an awful lot of people don't want to take that kind of a risk"

I would agree with and extend your remarks in that its a window into how the company handles risk. There have been companies that have blamestorming meetings to punish the people who selected employees that didn't work out. I had an experience with that leveraging an inside contact for info, and I was pretty pissed off at that time, but now that I'm older and wiser I am so unimaginably happy I didn't get a job at a company mismanaged like that.