Question

If you were the head of an HR organization, would you recommend ban of box policy for your company-- and provide your specific reasons why you would or would not adopt this policy

Answer 1

• Helping ex-offenders find jobs is a top policy priority for liberals and conservatives alike, for good reason. Without a stable job, it’s tough to build a life free of criminal behaviors and influences. When fewer jobs are available, re-entering offenders are more likely to reoffend. This increases crime and incarceration rates, which is costly to all of us.
• A major obstacle to changing this status quo is that employers are reluctant to hire individuals with criminal records, often discarding applications from anyone who has a record. You might think this is unfair to individuals with criminal records who would make good employees.
• Perhaps it would be better to prevent employers from asking about criminal backgrounds up front, so that everyone gets a fair chance at an interview. This is the motivation behind “ban the box” policies.
• “Ban the box” forbids public and often private employers from inquiring about an applicant’s criminal history until late in the hiring process.
• I think I would apply this policy. As an HR and as an employer I definitely want good and honest employees to be working in my company who won’t be taken off the job by an arrest or conviction.
• But these characteristics are largely unobservable when reading through job applications.
• A single checkbox about criminal history offers little room for context. Answering "yes" to having committed crimes in the past puts a job seeker on a fast track to the rejection pile, regardless of the nature of the offense and its relevance in relation to the job opening. Candidates who acknowledge their criminal history are approximately 50 percent more likely to be declined.
• Sorting people based on whether or not they have a criminal record is far from perfect – some ex-offenders are more job-ready than others, just as some college graduates are more job-ready than others.
• But the employer can’t see which ex-offender is more job ready, only which applicants are ex-offenders. They know that the average ex-offender is less job-ready than the average non-offender, and so base their hiring decisions on that.
• Statistically discriminating based on criminal history is unfair to the ex-offenders who might be more job-ready than the average.
• Taking information away in this context hurts more people than it helps. Just because as an employer we can’t see an applicant’s criminal history doesn’t mean we don’t care about it. Under “ban the box”, we will avoid ex-offenders by avoiding groups that are more likely to contain ex-offenders.
• In this phase of lack of good employees, by using this policy,we can simply giving people an opportunity--sometimes a second one--to prove themselves while helping to grow our company.
• Just because the box is "banned" doesn't mean that employers are kept in the dark. The specifics of ban-the-box policies vary, in terms of when or how criminal records can be requested, or background checks performed. The goal is not to sugarcoat history, but to insist that candidates are seen more holistically. This can indeed require more work from our hiring managers.