Fair Chance Alliance

There is a reason we do this for you for free. It’s delicious (in the business sense), and once you taste it, you’ll be hooked. Hooked in a good way you’ll thank us for. There is a reason the government funds these hiring grants. It’s delicious (in the civics and good governance sense), and our lawmakers want to tempt you to take that first taste. Big businesses already have a team of accountants, lawyers, and HR muckety mucks to snag these free funds. But small and midsized businesses usually do not. We at The Fair Chance Alliance care because we know that the cause is just and win-win-win. You’ll help our focus - returning justice impacted folks – and many other worthy groups the more you help yourself. Let’s start with just the first taste of many of these grants, the WOTC, or Work Opportunity Tax Credit. These tax credits function as real-world grants because they offset not only federal corporate taxes, but withholding taxes that you must pay for each, every and all hires. This government gift ranges from $2,400 to $9,600 for qualified hires who are IV-A recipients (folks taking care of kids), veterans, justice impacted folks, SSI recipients and many others. Let’s say it again. Free: Nab the government’s WOTC of $2,400 to $9,600 per hire for hiring you’re doing already. We’ll put your automatic hiring grant system in place for you and immediately send you your first prescreened and vetted job candidate. Test us out to have your first grant qualified candidate at work within 30 days! You know, you are almost certainly already hiring from WOTC qualified groups. (If not you just might be breaking the law). Worried about hiring the justice-impacted, our focus? Don’t be. Among our many filters is close consultation with Departments of Corrections. Our candidates are specifically cleared to work for you. Ex-offenders who pass the right filters are statistically less likely to commit new crimes than someone without a record is to commit a first crime! Put us to work for you, contact us for a free consult, or at least get the revealing study. Find the links in Featured, or email “free consult please” or “send report please.” [email protected]

"Hiring at scale" is the key. Thanks Daniel Yanisse for setting the bar.

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” This truism has been attributed to Mark Twain, Will Rogers and many other insightful humor writers. No matter who first coined it, it’s funny because it’s true. The damage this blind spot all us humans have sometimes causes isn’t so funny. An example which is costing your business tens of thousands of dollars and maybe much more while hurting real human beings and our whole country’s economy is no laughing matter. What isn’t funny is the almost universal misuse of criminal background checks. The misuse is because we make the mistake of believing something “for sure that just ain’t so.” 70 million of our work force population has a criminal record of some kind. When that record is flagged by a background check they are functionally excluded from being hired by bias. Bias based on the mistaken belief that years or even decades later a person convicted of a crime has a propensity, a persistent moral defect, a continuing character flaw, that makes it likely that that behavior will re-occur. “That just ain’t so.” The truth is the opposite. With the mildest of filters, justice impacted hires are less likely to commit a new crime than a hire from the general public without a prior criminal record. That’s right, less likely. And the belief among risk managers that there is real world increased liability is also something “that just ain’t so.” It doesn’t make headlines, and is the opposite of what crime procedural TV shows have has plot lines, but evidence-based studies from behavioral, social, and criminology science prove it. Among dozens, take a look at studies from the DOJ, Cornell University, Rand Corp., and the NIJ. Or, just search “No Studies Link Criminal Records to Crime on the Job.” How about risk? You might start with the recent LAC study of 50 years of tort law records on businesses being held liable for hiring folks with criminal records. An urban legend. Rarer than hen’s teeth. Search LAC and SHRM studies of “negligent hiring” myths. Yet, by protocol, policy, or algorithm, businesses over weigh the fact of a record and turn it into a barrier or most usually, a locked door. Yes, WE MEAN YOU! STOP SHOOTING YOURSELF IN THE FOOT! Why do we say it’s critically important that you stop it? Well, first it’s crazy not to. Our organization, the Fair Chance Alliance, will install oh-so EZ systems for you, free with membership. And we’ll do a free audit without membership to model the results for you. Second, we’ll certify each hire so that you can get the fed. gov’s $2,400 per hire tax credit, which you can use against either company income tax or payroll withholding tax. Why do we say it costs you tens of thousands or more? Because studies say each fair chance hire is 20% more productive and 4x less likely to job hop. Add those savings to the WOTC of $2,400, and do the math.  

The evidence based benefits bridge political divides to any who take a granular look. Thank you Ana Zamora for leading so many to do just that.

Thanks for a new tool to use to start real conversations Christopher Poulos, Words have power. We have been on so many Bakery Tours, and love the expression. It calls out the dog and pony aspects of so many such efforts, and gives us a vocabulary to counter it.

The data are clear. We know the percentage of the US population with each eye color. 9% green. 18% hazel. 27% blue. 45% brown. We have the eye color data from criminals too. Each booking requires height, weight, and eye color be noted.   What is the correlation between criminal convictions and eye color? What can that data predict as to future re-offense? When we hire, how can that help us avoid high risk individuals, and damage to our company reputation and work environments? Actual liability?   Well, the point is, it can’t. Neither can height or weight, nor time of day a person was born, or a million unrelated things. The point is, one can create data points and correlation metrics on any pairs of characteristics. That is the danger.   Readers, please forgive our underscoring an illusion of connection to underscore this important truth. We humans are pattern seekers. That pattern-phile prejudice has permitted us to survive over the centuries. Rustling leaves may mean a tiger. But just as often, this auto response in our thinking creates illusions.   Which is critical for you to consider as to hiring. There is a pattern illusion that infects over 90% of hiring deciders. That probably means you. The pattern illusion is that a criminal record means a higher than normal potentially difficult or dangerous hire. But the data really is clear here. That is not true. Many social scientists believe this pattern illusion originates from the widely cited “fact” that 50% of offenders recidivate within 3 to 5 years of release.   Even were that baseline assumption true*, hiring changes everything. The cohort of justice-impacted folks (with the mildest of filters**) who are onboarded after hire are different in this one regard: they commit new crimes less often than a hire without a criminal record commits a first crime! Less often than the general public!!! And they have higher productivity and twice the retention of other hires.   Don’t take our word for it. Google studies on the subject; i.e., from the DOJ, LAC, Rand, North Western University, Cornell University, and dozens of others.   This matters to you because businesses that don’t access this 70 million strong pool of job candidates are at a hidden but enormous hiring disadvantage. And that is without considering the WOTC and WIOA and other government funding you can receive just for doing what you do anyway, hire. Check it out. You will thank us for it.   *recidivism definitions are being widely challenged **see how easy filtering can be on our website, or download useful links from our LinkedIn pages.   #hiring #fairchance #fairchancealliance #secondchance #justice  

Who are these Liars When They Hire? Not who you might think. In fact, they are among the best of the best, who become liars only unknowingly and against their good intentions. Folks like you.   We are talking about Fair Chance or Second Chance employers. These are good folks who are whole-heartedly behind the concept and goals of equal opportunity, and a path for successful re-entry among justice-impacted returning citizens.   Did Pinocchio know he was a liar? Do you know that you are? What does not knowing cost you?   It’s really not your fault. The great tragedy of the second chance or fair chance hiring movement is that we in the advocacy end of things have let down businesses like yours by focusing you on the intention rather than the result. And worse, almost every “system” of on-boarding we in the pro-active side of this space have offered businesses like yours has the same fatal flaws.   Want an easy hack to check if this is true of your business? Here it is. How many of your employees have criminal records? If it’s less than 10%, red flags should be waving.   We at the Fair Chance Alliance noted through mega-data that despite the almost universal acceptance in the business community that fair chance hiring was morally, civically, and business-case necessity required, the actual numbers of folks offered work were negligible. Why?   As we prove in our now well-known report, there are ubiquitous fatal errors that cause the disconnect. The basic one is all hiring ends with HR or the hiring owner or manager, being required to make a decision on a case-by-case basis as to someone with a prior criminal conviction. While this sounds good in theory, in practice without a protocol to determine risk versus good outcomes, the burden weighs heavily and usually results in a default “no.”   The good news is, with the information offered free to our members, the path is cleared to take risk assessed action. This, and hacks to clear the procedural hurdles which kill 90% of potential hires, explodes successful and fabulously profitable fair chance hiring. (See our website or download our pdf report for more detail).   Justice impacted folks are 35% or more of the available work force. If your real numbers of these folks actually onboarded by you are rare as hens teeth, that means that your claim of being a fair chance hirer is a lie. Don’t let that be you.   Get the results your deserve, and tap into this huge best of the best justice impacted pool of eager job candidates. Good business. Good civics. Reflecting your values.   #hiring #fairchance #fairchancealliance #secondchance #justice

Are you opposed to starting the New Year by turning on a Superpower you already have? One that yields immediate increases in good results by multiple 100%s? 2000% in one well known example?   The Superpower? Simply framing your choices so that you must “opt-out” of beneficial behavior rather than “opt-in” to do it. The Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman in “Thinking Fast and Slow” famously cites that with similar cultures Denmark has only a 4% opt-in result as to organ donation, while Sweden, where one is assumed to be a donor unless one opts-out, organ donations are 86%. A 2000% increase. Same disproportionate result for Austria using the Superpower of opt-out (100% don’t) and Germany (only 12% opt-in). 700% better result there.   HR studies show that 401k participation leaps from 18% to over 85% when an employer changes participation from opt-in to opt-out, even for employers who have no matching plan in place. An over 400% change. The same result occurs in every category, from charitable giving, to exercise and diet plans, to actually getting around to spring cleaning. Like gravity, requiring us to opt-out of the better result versus opting-in for it works to our great benefit every time. Like gravity is to physical science, opt-in versus opt-out is behavioral science. Using it, especially as to our own behavior, just is leveraging an advantage. Smart.   You should care because one area where evidence-based data shows you can make an enormous difference in lives and make an enormous profit at the same time is fair chance hiring. Most businesses – even those that are self-identified as “second chance” hirers – make the mistake of looking at justice-impacted job candidates through an opt-in perspective. That is, hiring that individual only by consciously choosing to do so.   Flip that script by turning on your opt-out Superpower. Hire every time, unless there is a reason not to, not the other way around. Please start with this fact, provided with deep empirical studies and authority cites for free with our included FCHE™ system: With the mildest of filters to weed out the tiny minority of bad actors, the remaining pool are less likely to commit a new crime than the general population is to commit a first crime. We show you how easy it is to know the difference. Enormous profits? Yes. Go to the Dollars and Sense page on our website to see how each justice impacted hire delivers that and more to you, without even considering the $2,400 to $9,600 WOTC back from the federal government per hire.   We’re all about the cause, but we at the Fair Chance Alliance stress how profitable it is to do the right thing because we want fair chance hiring to be contagious. When doing good is profitable it becomes viral when folks know the facts.   #hiring #fairchance #fairchancealliance #secondchance #justice  

Great and important mind food. May we also recommend two books: Until We Reckon (re repairing mass incarceration, balancing restorative justice) by Danielle Sered; and The Meaning of Life (abolishing life sentences) by Marc Mauer and Ashley Nellis. Thanks Vera.

About damn time!