“You have to give someone a chance to fail in order to give them a chance to succeed”
How The Recruitment Junction and Breakthrough take the good with the bad when supporting people with convictions
Written by Lucy Hart
As we see more and more associates successfully complete programmes with Breakthrough, we’re keeping track of how their journeys evolve in the weeks and months following their graduation. And while our success rates of candidates in jobs far exceed national averages, we can’t ignore the reality that some of the people we work with fall out of contact, or don’t show for job interviews, or get let go from the jobs they’re recruited for.
So when we saw a post from Beverley Brooks, Founder & CEO at The Recruitment Junction, sharing her disappointment and frustration around three such no-show candidates in a month, it struck a chord. The Recruitment Junction also works with people with convictions, helping those in the North East into sustainable paid work. And it got us thinking: is there a way to tell our story that takes the good with the bad? That speaks compellingly about the successes, but doesn’t gloss over the times when things don’t go smoothly?
I spoke with Beverley and our Partnerships & Growth Lead, Liv, to see if we could find any answers.
When employers begin working with an organisation like Breakthrough or The Recruitment Junction, it’s often taken some persuasion to get them there. They are – or they feel they are – taking a bit of a punt by working with us. So the stakes of failure, in the shape of a candidate not turning up for an interview or on the first day of a job, can feel a lot higher.
Beverley: “We’re so desperate that employers just give this a go. And for the vast majority, they will be pleasantly surprised at how well it works out; we know that job retention for people with convictions is higher than average. But if that’s not the evidence they see on the day, it doesn’t mean much to an employer. And that can jeopardise the relationship, especially if it’s our first time working together.”
When a candidate does let an employer down, in whatever way, Liv and Beverley agree that you need to take a measured approach – one that protects the reputation of the organisation, and the opportunities for future candidates, but that also considers the wellbeing and future chances of the individual.
Beverley: “At the time, yes you can be a bit annoyed. Mainly you are embarrassed. But I can’t get cross when it’s a sad story – when someone has broken down in relation to past trauma, or has had a family or health crisis. You can understand all that. I don’t expect people to always be able to seize the opportunity that they’ve been given
It’s a balance, knowing when to vouch for a candidate or not. You can never be 100% sure, no matter how long you’ve known them, no matter the indicators. The thing is, you have to give someone a chance to fail in order to give them a chance to succeed.
And sometimes – thought it definitely doesn’t feel like that in the moment – a bad experience can eventually lead to good. Experiencing that let down and discussing it honestly can actually deepen our experience with an employer.
But you do have to have boundaries, in order to maintain your credibility with employers. And just because I don’t put the person forward for another job right now, it doesn’t mean we won’t stay in touch and keep supporting them in other ways, until maybe the time is right again in the future.”
Liv: “For me, it’s so influenced by the perspectives of the Breakthrough team as a whole. Like Beverley, my first worry is always for the person we are supporting. My mind jumps straight to ‘are they ok’, but my second thought is for our relationship with the employer. I’m always worried they may typecast all our candidates based on the behaviour of one; that this incident will reinforce any existing negative beliefs they have about ex offenders. Part of my journey to getting them to the point of offering our associates the chance to apply for a role in a diverse manner, has been challenging these biases, so it’s hard to block out the concerns.
But then I’m very lucky to have a lot of wise supportive colleagues – like TJ, who’s our coach but also has lived experience from his own journey, he will help me reframe it positively. Like, “it’s not that person’s time right now, but it will be one day”. I’ve come to understand that sometimes it’s not all about what Breakthrough can do, it can be about the candidate's wider situation. That's tricky when your natural reaction is to try and fix the problem. Breakthrough can be one intervention on their journey, but not the final one. We’re honest with them about how not showing up has affected that opportunity for them but also potentially for those coming afterwards – but we also want to keep the door open for them, avoid too much pressure and never make it a hard stop ending.”
Liv points out that as an organisation like ours, there is occasionally a limit on the support you can offer – you’re playing one part in a cast of many players and you can’t solve everything at the same time. At Breakthrough, for example, we’ve seen that it can take weeks rather than days for those graduating from our prison programme and being released to get started on job applications.
Liv: “We’re still figuring out the best way to engage with our associates on their release from prison. Because there are some hurdles you just can’t move. Like their housing situation – it doesn’t always make sense to go straight into job applications. And just because they haven’t applied for a job, it doesn’t mean they’re lazy, or that they’re getting back into crime. It can mean they’re sorting somewhere to live, healthcare and very understandably, reconnecting with family. It’s easy for employer to focus on the stats of how many move into employment without truly understanding the narrative behind those stats”.
Beverley works with a wide array of people with convictions. She says: “It really depends. Those who have served longer sentences come out and they’re maybe ill-prepared for professional life in some ways – particularly on the tech front, and we provide a lot of help with that – but in other ways can be much more ready to work. They’ve broken ties with their old group, they’ve been in recovery from addiction for quite some time.
On the other side, you have those who serve shorter sentences who may be better at using a phone but are only newly clean, are surrounded by the same people, are not that long out of the habit of low level petty crime – they haven’t yet got the stability yet.
We spend a lot of time with these guys. And we keep in touch over the long term and can see 72% staying in the same job; 76% in a job, if a different one. That’s really high – on a par if not higher than the general public. But that’s the point in itself – they’re still people. And I know from my experience in commercial recruitment, and from my friends in that industry, that 100% success never happens. ‘There’s nowt so queer as folk’, as they say up north.”
Given the inevitability that not everything will work out every time, we try to focus on what we can do as organisations working with people with convictions. The Recruitment Junction leans heavily towards face-to-face contact, and what’s often called ‘wraparound’ support. This means not just preparing candidates’ CVs and helping them practise for interviews, but also making sure they have their bus fare to get there, and their birth certificates as proof of work, and an outfit to interview in.
For Breakthrough, the 8-week training programme gives an opportunity to come to know individuals fairly well.
Liv: “We spend eight weeks building a relationship with these people, so we come to understand their pressure points. We’re very careful about how much pressure we apply – enough to make it likely they’ll turn up to interview, but not so much that they'll get overwhelmed. It also means we’ve built a solid foundation of trust with them, so if they get into work and struggle, they turn to us for support. We continue to work with them for twelve months once they get into a new role”
Candidates with convictions may have little experience of the application and interview process from their earlier lives, and there’s an important role to set expectations through the steps.
Beverley: “Often people we work with will have unrealistic ideas of the jobs they could get, because they don’t understand the workplace dynamics – they don’t have experience of them. Their hopes get raised, because they get offered an interview and see it as a guarantee of a job. So there’s a battle around transparency. We need to help our candidates understand what the deal really is.”
The other thing that’s frustrating, that we can’t always talk about openly, is when we have disappointing experiences with employers. We have both experienced employers not showing up to interviews, or leaving candidates hanging for months with no feedback.
Beverley: “It can really set our candidates back; it knocks their confidence. I don’t know if they think they are doing us a favour, so don’t behave to their normal professional standards, but it reinforces our candidates’ assumptions that they’ll be treated poorly or it’s just not worth trying.”
We’re always evolving how we tell an honest, yet persuasive, story about employing people with convictions. And it can be challenging, as Liv says, when “the first thing that employers want to see is the numbers; or one blanket success metric. I can find myself hurriedly trying to provide context, an explanation. To defend those who I know are trying their best, but the hurdles aren’t hurdled just yet”.
Sometimes we all fall into the trap of wanting our prison leavers to be superlative; to fully embody the “I turned my life around” hero (and some do). But it’s important to remember, that those with convictions are not obliged to be superhuman – they can let themselves down just as anyone else can. And in many cases, their histories have not equipped them to seize opportunities, so any success – or another failure - has even more gravity.
So perhaps in our storytelling we can remember that the aim isn’t – and can’t be – 100% success, in the shape of interviews secured and jobs stuck out. Instead, success can be an individualised and evolving thing. We have to accept that there will be disappointments along the way for the individuals, and for our organisations, and see that overall they are outweighed by the wins. And, of course, communicate that persuasively to employers. Wish us luck.