Hiring With Conviction
An employers' guide to recruiting and supporting people with convictions
Your guide to hiring people with convictions
Hiring people with convictions makes sense on so many levels. It’s good for the individual, it’s good for their family, it’s good for society because it reduces reoffending and it’s good for business.
Working Chance has been partnering with employers to help get thousands of women with convictions into work since 2009. Hiring With Conviction draws on this extensive knowledge and track record to create a comprehensive guide, equipping you with everything you need to hire people with convictions fairly, safely and effectively.
This go-to guide for hiring managers, HR professionals, and recruiters presents compelling reasons why you should be pro-actively hiring people with convictions, and outlines practical strategies to ensure equitable and risk-managed recruitment practices.
The Timpson Group has been employing people with criminal convictions for many years now, and it's become a key part of how we do business. ‘Hiring With Conviction' contains some incredibly practical advice that can be implemented straight away, and also clears up some old myths and preconceptions about people who have been through the criminal justice system.
Darren Burns Head of The Timpson Foundation
How can employers recruit and support people with convictions?
Why hire people with convictions?
Increasingly employers across all sectors are seeing the benefits of proactively and strategically hiring people with convictions. The number of employers who see advantages in hiring someone with a conviction has doubled in the last seven years (24% in 2023 compared to 12% in 2016).
The top three potential advantages these employers cited were:
- people with convictions would provide different perspectives
- recruiting from this pool would help to tackle skills and labour shortages
- it would improve the organisation’s diversity and inclusion record.
These employers are spot on. Hiring people with convictions isn’t just about ‘doing good’ and giving people a chance; it makes sense from a business point of view too.
