Recruiting Prison Leavers: do we need to change our hiring practices?
Written by Lucy Hart
As with so many areas, improving the recruitment process for a disadvantaged group – in this case, those with a criminal record – improves it for everyone else, too. But even if it were for that group alone, it’d still be worth doing, given that one in four working age adults has a criminal record. And if you’re working on diversifying your staff, BAME people, care leavers, and those from deprived areas are overrepresented in the prison population.
Many employers we work with are already interested in how to adjust their recruitment process to make it inclusive to prison leavers, and to increase the chances that those applicants might make it into a role. But they’re often nervous that that means a complete overhaul. In fact, it can be almost the opposite – we often recommend reducing your steps, rather than increasing them, as we’ll explain.
First steps: where and how to advertise
The first step in attracting prison leavers is to advertise where they might hear about you; here are some ways you can highlight your organisation as a friendly employer.
1. Work with inclusive recruiters and jobs boards
If you’re open to working with a recruiter, consider getting in touch with some that explicitly support prison leavers. You could try Bridge of Hope, Working Chance, Clean Sheet or Radical Recruit, find one local to your area, or of course work with Breakthrough.
2. Consider becoming a Ban The Box employer
Hundreds of employers have committed to removing the tick box on their application form that asks about criminal convictions. We’ll talk more about why this might be a good idea for you later on; but if you do go down this path, signing up to be a Ban The Box employer will increase your visibility to job seekers who are purposefully going for companies with more inclusive processes.
3. Even better? Go into prisons
If you want to meet potential candidates, we’d love to introduce you. As well as recruiting our associates for roles in tech, we coordinate prison visits to carry out mock interviews and meet current prisoners. The New Futures Network – an arm of HM Prison and Probation Service – can set up relationships between you as an employer and a prison, to set up workspaces in prison, enable serving prisoners to work on the outside through ROTL, or to find talent in those leaving at the end of their sentence – about 70,000 people each year.
When you’re advertising the role, be as clear as you can be about what the implications might be for a prison leaver. This means making sure if you say it is entry level, it is actually entry level – not requiring a university degree or other work experience. It means specifying what kind of role it is, whether it falls under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 (ROA), and which – if any – DBS checks you’ll be carrying out, from basic to enhanced.
The application: when (and when not) to ask about criminal records
The first question employers should put to themselves is why are they asking about criminal records at all? There are very few scenarios in which you cannot legally hire someone with a record but too often employers – nervous about the perceived additional effort involved – apply a blanket rule to remove anyone with a conviction from the applicant pool. Many worry that the ex-prisoner will reoffend while in their employ, but while it’s true that reoffending rates are high, the stability and opportunity of a career dramatically reduces them. They also often think of prison leavers as a distinct group from their existing employee base, but it’s worth challenging yourself on whether that is true; if you’re not currently carrying out DBS checks, there’s a good chance that one or more of your current employees has a criminal record.
If you decide you do need to ask applicants about their record, consider when to ask. Aim to ask later on in the process, such as when a conditional offer has been made. By not asking upfront, you avoid collecting sensitive data on multiple applicants, and increase the likelihood of application (71% of people think that ticking ‘yes’ to a question about convictions would affect their chances of getting the job). You may also be able to ask closed, rather than open ended questions, like asking about any convictions in relation to finance if that’s what matters for the job.
When you do ask, give the applicant the opportunity to provide context for the conviction. Be clear about who the information will be shared with, and why, from a sensitivity point of view but also in order to comply with data security legislation. Know that any assessment you make based on the conviction can be requested by the candidate. And also know that when you receive the criminal record from the Disclosure & Barring Service, the applicant may not know exactly how their convictions appear on it, because people with a criminal record must put in a (paid) request to see it.
The interview: why we lead with context
At Breakthrough, we get to spend plenty of time with prisoners and prison leavers, and as such, we come to know them as individuals and skilled associates, over and above their history. Yet in most cases, job applicants will be strangers to you.
If you’re working with Breakthrough, we’ll introduce you to our associates with a portfolio of their work from the programme and an assessment of where we see their strengths and areas for improvement. We’ll encourage you to assess them for the job based on a realistic scenario they might face in the role – for example, avoiding timed tasks where you’ll never have them in real life. And we choose to do this instead of presenting a CV, which is so often read as a tickbox list of which recognisable employers an individual has worked for.
What we won’t do is disclose the crimes on their record upfront – in fact, we don’t even know them ourselves. We encourage our employer partners instead to ask applicants to disclose convictions at the point of offer, not before. We coach our associates on how to do this, providing context for what was going on in their life at the time, and the work they’ve done since to redirect their path. An employer can still legally retract the offer, but it means they have a much more real sense of the person as they are now.
When you have that conversation – whether in person, or following up on a written self-disclosure statement – we encourage you to listen to what the candidate has to say. When a crime happened matters; if someone has no new entries on their criminal record for seven years, they are statistically as or less likely to commit a crime as an individual with no criminal record. The circumstances matter too – more often than not, those committing crimes are facing a number of challenges from unstable family environments to substance abuse. And of course, the path they have chosen since their conviction matters perhaps most of all; committing to education, training and a new mindset requires more discipline and determination than most of us will ever know.
Adjusting your hiring process to be more inclusive – and even inviting – to prison leavers can increase the number of applicants you hear from and diversify your hiring. We’d love to help; and can provide extra support setting up your risk and governance processes as well as designing assessment days.