JC_Strategies to Engage Employers in Conversations about Hiring Applicants with Criminal Records

STRATEGIES TO ENGAGE EMPLOYERS

IN CONVERSATIONS ABOUT HIRING

APPLICANTS WITH CRIMINAL RECORDS

early one in three adults in the U.S. has a criminal record that can appear on a routine background

check for employment.

Furthermore, in a recent survey, men with conviction records accounted for

about 34 percent of the nonworking men of prime working age.

Studies have shown that the existence of

a criminal record reduces the likelihood of an employer calling an applicant back by 50 percent on average,

rising to 60 percent for black male job candidates.

iii

These statistics demonstrate both that involvement with

the criminal justice system is a fairly common experience in the U.S. and that a criminal record impacts

employment opportunities.

With the national unemployment rate dipping below 5 percent, employers cannot afford to overlook millions of

qualied workers.

The economy loses $78 to 87 billion per year in gross domestic output due to the number of

people with criminal records that are unemployed or underemployed.

Many employers have expressed a desire to provide fair access to job opportunities for this population but are

unsure how to do so while still addressing safety and liability concerns, such as negligent hiring. To bridge

this gap, a wide range of organizations and agencies—including parole and probation agencies, reentry service

providers, and educational and occupational training programs—work to provide support to people with

criminal records who are seeking employment. This tipsheet offers these organizations suggestions on how they

can engage employers in conversations about hiring people with criminal records, which will help improve the

employment outcomes of the people they serve.

Tip One: Do Your Research

Before reaching out to employers, learn about their industry’s employment practices and the barriers that people

with criminal records may face when trying to enter or advance in those industries. Research the local, state, and

federal hiring policies that regulate when in the hiring process employers can inquire about criminal records. It is

also important to understand specic employers’ hiring needs; they will be more responsive if you can frame the

discussion around their company’s need for qualied workers.

•

Identify the industries in your region that are expected to grow. This will help you target your efforts on

employers with the largest number of job openings, as well as the sectors that are expected to have the most

job openings in the future.

•

Learn about the career paths available in certain elds, including the education and training

requirements a person would need to meet in order to advance in a specic career.

vii

MAY 2018

Strategies to Engage Employers in Conversations about Hiring Applicants with Criminal Records 2

•

Note the legal and regulatory sanctions—or collateral consequences—that limit or prohibit people with

certain criminal convictions from obtaining occupational licenses and accessing employment in specic

industries. This will help you better gauge which elds to consider exploring. For example, states—and in a

few cases, the federal government—require licenses for particular businesses or occupations, including some

health care professions, commercial drivers, and cosmetologists.

viii

•

Understand the state and local hiring policies aimed at the consideration of records in hiring decisions. A

broad menu of reforms, which some localities have deemed “fair-chance” laws, incorporate “ban the box”

policies

and build off the best practices detailed in the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s

guidelines on the use of arrest and conviction records for employment decisions.

Policies run the gamut from

simply removing questions about the applicant’s conviction history from the job application to more robust

alternatives, such as not asking about criminal records at all in the process or only inquiring about criminal

history within a certain time period, e.g. the past ve years. The scope of the policies also varies as to the

level of government, the legal mechanism used, and the type of employer chosing to “ban the box.” As of

August 2017, 29 states and more than 150 cities and counties had adopted policies to delay inquiries into a job

applicants’ criminal history during the hiring process.

Delaying this inquiry encourages the employer to focus

on skills and qualications rst and allows the potential employee to get a foot in the door and explain their

record during in an interview.

Tip Two: Listen to Employers

Talk with employers to learn about their hiring practices. Ask them about their willingness to consider new ways of

recruiting workers, and identify what interests them and what concerns them about this process.

•

Understand what skills employers are looking for in employees so you can refer qualied applicants for

the appropriate job openings. It is also important to understand the challenges of employers’ recruiting and

hiring processes. For example, if employers report a constant turnover of entry-level workers, they may need

help in establishing a more effective screening process. If employers report that new hires do not have the

required skills for their positions, you may need to connect them with workforce partners who can provide

training in the needed areas. For more information on this, see Tip Four.

•

Ask employers about their hiring practices and if they currently hire qualied workers with criminal

records. If not, explore why and respond to their questions and concerns. Be prepared to counter myths

and misunderstandings concerning state and federal laws, professional regulations, and the use of

background checks.

•

Explore opportunities for employers to provide input on the development of correctional education and

training programs, as well as to participate in job shadowing or mentoring programs. Their involvement

will ensure that these programs train job seekers to meet the needs of the employer, and will engage

employers on a foundational level in the process of hiring people with criminal records.

Tip Three: Promote Peer Learning

Employers listen to other employers, so you should create avenues for them to communicate with one another.

Employers will value your role as a convener or intermediary.

•

Identify and build relationships with employers who have had success hiring people with criminal

records. Encourage them to share their stories with other employers in their industries and communities.

•

Convene a meeting of employers in the same sector to discuss their hiring practices and the resources

they use when considering a criminal record in hiring decisions.

xii

If employers work together, they can

collaborate to create useful resources such as industry standards in occupational training programs,

common applications, and shared hiring events. Industry associations, such as the National Association of

Home Builders and the National Association of Manufacturers, have already established programs to train

current and formerly incarcerated workers for jobs in their industries.

•

Work with your chamber of commerce. Chambers of commerce regularly provide peer learning

opportunities for their members and are trusted by the business community. Chamber member

organizations are mainly small and medium-sized businesses, which often seek out their chambers of

commerce for solutions to common business challenges. In this vein, the Association of Chamber of

Commerce Executives has developed a Smart Justice Program, which provides tools and assistance to

chambers interested in promoting the hiring of people with criminal records.

xiii

Tip Four: Create Win-Win Opportunities

Employers are more likely to consider hiring people with criminal records when doing so addresses their business

needs and serves their bottom line. Focus conversations with employers on the benets of broadening their pool

of qualied applicants.

•

Position your organization as a pre-screener of applicants, which can reduce human resources costs

for the employer. You might offer to meet with potential job candidates to conduct mock interviews, review

their credentials, and assess their skills and reliability.

EMPLOYERS LEARN FROM EACH OTHER IN WESTERN MICHIGAN

Employers in Michigan are teaming up to create a community of practice around hiring people with criminal

records. Talent 2025, a collaboration of more than 100 CEOs in western Michigan focused on strengthening the

local labor force, is facilitating a process where senior human resources managers and directors can learn about

hiring people with criminal records. Participants meet ve times over the course of six months to discuss their

experiences and strategies for hiring people with criminal records, including relevant laws, insurance liability,

understanding criminal records, and developing fair chance hiring policies. Talent 2025 has paired with 30-2-2, a

joint initiative between Butterball Farms and Cascade Engineering, to identify 30 local employers that will each

hire two workers with criminal records and track their employment outcomes for two years.

Strategies to Engage Employers in Conversations about Hiring Applicants with Criminal Records 3

•

Partner with employers to identify marketable skills and to create effective training programs that can

result in job-ready employees.

•

Connect employers with American Job Centers to establish on-the-job training programs with

wage subsidies provided by the government. This will allow employers to reduce costs and give them the

opportunity to evaluate workers on the job before making a hiring decision

xiv

and, as discussed in Tip Two,

ensures applicants have the skills employers are looking for.

FROM ON-THE-JOB TRAINING TO PERMANENT EMPLOYMENT

Project Empowerment–launched in 2002 by the Washington, DC, Department of Employment Services—partners

with employers to provide on-the-job training to those facing barriers to employment, including people who have

been incarcerated. The job-readiness program includes an intensive three-week training course, skill development,

supportive services, and permanent job search assistance as well as subsidized on-the-job training.

Notes

i. Maurice Emsellem and Michelle Natividad Rodriguez, Advancing a Federal Fair Chance Hiring Agenda: Background Check

Reforms in Over 100 Cities, Counties, & States Pave the Way for Presidential Action (National Employment Law Project, 2015).

ii. Binyamin Appelbaum, “The Vanishing Male Worker: How America Fell Behind,” New York Times, December 11, 2014, https://

www.nytimes.com/2014/12/12/upshot/unemployment-the-vanishing-male-worker-how-america-fell-behind.html?_r=0

iii. Devah Pager, “The Mark of a Criminal Record,” American Journal of Sociology 108 (5):937-975.

iv. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000.

v. Cherrie Bucknor and Alan Barber, The Price We Pay: Economic Costs of Barriers to Employment for Former Prisoners and

People Convicted of Felonies (Center for Economic and Policy Research June 2016).

vi. CareerOneStop has industry proﬁles and other useful information, available at www.careeronestop.org/ExploreCareers/

Learn/research-industries.aspx. The U.S. Department of Labor funds each state to compile short and long term employment

projections available at www.doleta.gov/business/projections/InternetLinks.cfm. In addition, each state is required to

develop a Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) Plan, which includes employment projections, available at

www2.ed.gov/about/ofﬁces/list/osers/rsa/wioa/state-plans/index.html.

vii. Society for Human Resource Management, Developing Career Paths and Ladders (2015).

viii. Task Force on Over-Criminalization of the U.S. House of Representatives (June 26, 2014) p. 8. Because the majority of

occupational licensing laws are state-regulated, this paper does not contemplate local laws.

ix. “Ban the box” refers to the removal of the check-box on job applications inquiring about conviction information.

x. https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/arrest_conviction.cfm

xi. Michelle Natividad Rodriguez and Beth Avery, Ban the Box: U.S. Cities, Counties, and States Adopt Fair Hiring Policies

(National Employment Law Project, 2017).

xii. Employer engagement planning guides and sample materials are available through The National Reentry Resource Center at

https://csgjusticecenter.org/nrrc/hiring-people-with-criminal-records/

xiii. http://www.acce.org/clientuploads/directory/magazine_archive/spring2016/Spr2016_05_PEW.pdf

xiv. www.careeronestop.org/businesscenter/trainandretain/fundingemployeetraining/on-the-job-training.aspx

Strategies to Engage Employers in Conversations about Hiring Applicants with Criminal Records 4

This project was supported by Grant Nos. 2016-MU-BX-K011 and ED-ESE-15-A-0011/0001, awarded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance and the U.S. Department of

Education, respectively. The Bureau of Justice Assistance is a component of the Department of Justice’s Ofﬁce of Justice Programs, which also includes the Bureau of

Justice Statistics, the National Institute of Justice, the Ofﬁce of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, the Ofﬁce for Victims of Crime, and the SMART Ofﬁce. Points

of view or opinions in this document are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the ofﬁcial position or policies of the U.S. Departments of Justice or Education.