Not all jobs are right for all candidates. Second chance initiatives, however, are helping to ensure that there is a job that’s right for everyone, including people with a previous criminal history.
To match prospective new hires with a suitable position, many employers are now implementing personalized review processes (also referred to as individualized assessments) for background reports. Taking a close look at each candidate’s results can be time-consuming but Asurint is helping to make the process easier.
A Shift in Hiring Practices
Today’s job market is compelling employers to look in new places for job candidates. Companies need qualified individuals who are willing to show up and perform at a high level, but in many areas, such talent is in short supply.
Second chance hiring, offering employment to individuals with a prior criminal history, has helped numerous companies expand their talent pool. As this practice has caught on, many employers are reporting that individuals who have had some issues in their past go on to become their most loyal, productive, and trustworthy employees. They may end up giving more to the business and stay in the job longer.
Success stories are inspiring other employers to look into second chance hiring, not only to find great workers but to do their part to reduce recidivism and address social justice and quality issues. At a time when approximately 70 million Americans, about one-third of adults nationwide, have a criminal record, it makes sense to look more deeply at each individual’s circumstances.
Adjusting Hiring Criteria
Employers today recognize that there are different concerns and sometimes legal requirements for drivers, daycare workers, or delivery professionals who will be entering customers’ homes, for example, than for forklift operators or customer service representatives. Likewise, a prospective CFO may be held to a higher standard for financial stability than the average new hire.
As a result, human resources professionals and recruiters are adjusting their hiring criteria for various positions. Whenever legally required, employers are also making sure that criminal issues revealed by a background check only influence a hiring decision if the records have a direct bearing on the job or represent a meaningful safety risk.
This more personalized review process may sound complicated to implement but it needn’t be onerous. In fact, Asurint offers a Candidate Adjudication Assistant to manage position-specific hiring matrices. Using this technology, your team can enter and update hiring criteria for any position or group of positions. When you launch a background screening, you simply select which hiring matrix to use and our system will automatically flag relevant records for your review.
The Candidate Adjudication Assistant helps HR teams eliminate “noise” in background reports so hiring managers can quickly identify information that needs a closer review. This doesn’t just save time, it also helps HR teams concentrate time and attention on conducting an individualized assessment looking at various factors such as the relationship between the offense and the position.
Seeing each prospective employee as an individual is part of any high-performance talent acquisition strategy. We at Asurint are proud to provide tools that help our clients treat candidates as the unique people they are and thereby hire smarter, better, and fairer than ever before.