A New Tool to Help Employers Offer a Fair Shot to All

It’s not rocket science: Good jobs are a big part of health – for individuals, for families, and for America as a whole. So it’s important to make sure everyone has a fair shot at jobs, and that includes the 70 million people with criminal records who have rejoined their communities and are working to make positive contributions to our society.

Take Dexter Harris, who has gone from serving time as a teenager to literally saving lives in Alameda County, Calif. Just five months of training, tutoring and leadership classes in the EMS Corps offered him a second chance as a certified emergency medical technician– and so did Paramedics Plus, which makes a point of recruiting young men like Dexter.

When it comes to supporting second chances, our nation has taken big steps forward in recent years, through both community-level programming and policy changes. Now, more than 150 cities and counties and 24 states have “banned the box” or embraced other fair-chance policies, along with employers from Facebook to Coca-Cola to Walmart. The White House and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission have called for judging applicants by their qualifications before asking about criminal records. And earlier this year, the “Ban the Box” Philanthropy Challenge added the voices of more than 40 philanthropies – including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation – to the chorus.

Over the summer, though, we started seeing headlines about studies claiming to show that removing questions about criminal histories from employment applications was doing more harm than good: Without that filter, researchers said, employers were calling back fewer applicants with black- and Latino-sounding names.

But these studies don’t show that fair-hiring policies are costing job opportunities – they are simply highlighting the underlying problem: entrenched racism in our country that often criminalizes black and brown people. We won’t fix that problem by rolling back successful policy remedies. Instead, we need to double down on getting discrimination of all kinds out of the hiring process.

So we and our Philanthropy Challenge partners are standing by our commitment to fair-chance hiring practices, and renewing our call for other employers to do the same. The Fair-Chance Hiring in Philanthropy guide, released yesterday, can help businesses of all sizes make deliberate changes, like:

• Creating a “fair chance” culture at your foundation or employer, starting with educating the board and cultivating buy-in from the staff.
• Building strong relationships with organizations dedicated to helping people with criminal records, and sharing all job postings with those groups.
• Breaking down barriers beyond banning the box, by using skills-based job announcements and limiting the use of background checks.
• Establishing clear goals – and checking progress against them.

The benefits of these changes extend from the workplace to the health of the nation: a bigger pool of potential applicants, more gainfully employed workers, and a happier, healthier population. Join us in committing to opening doors instead of closing them, and get started right now.