Last month, Pallet Enterprise identified the potential of second-chance workers to help with your labor woes. But you may be thinking that you don’t know how to start or where to look for these eager employees.
If you are thinking about hiring reentrants, this second article in the series will provide more insight on how to begin your process. You likely have questions like “How do I know who to hire?” “Where do I find these people?” “How do I advertise to them?” and “What else should I know when including these men and women as part of my business?”
Starting the journey of hiring these non-traditional employees may seem overwhelming. The good news is that the right reentrant can become a long-time employee and may prove more loyal than a traditional worker looking for the best gig on Indeed.com or ZipRecruiter.
You need applicants who you know will show up to work, won’t complain about their paychecks, and who truly believe that there is no work beneath them. Here’s how you recruit them.
There are a handful of different ways to promote your job openings to inmate reentrants and parolees. The fastest and most reliable way to find and hire an applicant is to post flyers and marketing materials at your county parole office. Many parolees have to meet with their parole officers at their local or county parole offices for a number of different reasons. Because of the seemingly inherent sluggishness that government employees often embody, the parolees regularly sit around in the waiting room forever while they wait to be seen by their agents. Those waiting rooms are loaded with paperwork that includes job postings, pamphlets, marketing materials, and informational flyers for other citywide resources and hiring employers. The parole office is a great place to leave paperwork promoting your company and potential jobs.
Similar to promotion at a parole office, you can contact the local jails or state prisons and ask them about sending job-seeking information to inmates through the administration building, school buildings and visitation rooms. Frequently, prisons will hold job fairs and invite local businesses onto the compound so that employers can directly interview inmates and offer networking options to guys who otherwise wouldn’t be able to attend a job fair. The primary way that inmates will communicate with the outside is through the post office. Sharing your address with inmates, no matter at what point during their incarceration, is something that will make it easier for them to contact you so that they can send their resumes to you. Most of these guys who are in the process of earning their parole won’t get out for a month or two, which might hinder you if you need to hire someone urgently. But the inmate networks throughout the prisons are strong, and phone numbers and addresses are shared with each other so that they can help each other get paroled and start working.
Perhaps you might need to fill a spot in a very short time at some point in the future. When that time comes, your contact information will already be circulating throughout the prison, at the prison’s education building and administration building, and the flow of candidates will come to you just as steadily. Added bonus: there won’t be any fees to incur in order to receive resumes, like you would otherwise have to pay to job promotion websites or recruitment services.
It never hurts to develop relationships with prison staff who are in charge of inmate education, reentry and pre-parole preparation. These people can help you connect with the right candidates before they even leave the prison so that the parolee has a good job upon reentry.
They also know the inmate candidates very well on a personal level, since they have been interacting with these adults for years. These prison staff can act as an additional vetting tool when you are inquiring about guys who you might be interested in hiring but aren’t sure whether or not they would be an asset to your company.
Most of these guys don’t have any formal training in interview preparation. They’re often given third grade reading-level materials that only introduce the existence of resumes, CVs, and instructional materials on how to write cover letters, because they often lack experience when looking for jobs. Remember, most of these guys were making their money illegally. All this to say: don’t expect a stellar interview. Inmates can be crass, tough, crude and blunt. They may not speak with flowery language or use platitudes in their everyday conversations when they are out in the prison yard. But even these tough individuals get nervous, and if they’re interviewing for a job, it’s because they might be able to get out of prison soon, and that prospect alone is something that produces a lot of anxiety along with hope.
Before you interview reentrants and parolees, read their correspondences with you and begin to assess their overall cohesiveness with your company. You should consider how they spent their time in prison. In my experience meeting these folks, there are two kinds of reentrants: people who wasted their time doing nothing but playing card games in the prison yard or the cellblock’s day room, and others who spent their time in the library doing research and reading. How an inmate spends borrowed time is a good way to measure his productivity, drive, motivation, and eagerness to better himself through hard work and education. Inmates who provide intelligent conversation and paperwork throughout your interview are serious about hope in their redemption. Being in touch with prison staff or parole supervisors can also help you understand whether or not the person you are considering for hire might be a good asset or not. It’s important to note that although they might not be up to speed with social conversation, you can still assess their eagerness through their attempts to impress.
Once you have initially set up your advertising programs with the prisons and parole offices, you won’t need to do much follow-up, because there’s a revolving door of potential employees who will have access to the marketing materials and hiring flyers that you’ve already left with them.
There will always be a steady flow of people coming in and out of the prison system. That’s a good thing, because to err is human. One day, any given person’s victimizer will be released. And when the day comes when your community has another felon living in it, you can be part of the reason that your community is safer. Americans have always believed in redemption. We have always rooted for the underdogs. We have always figured out ways to make positives out of negative situations. Lending a helping hand to those who need it most – to those who need someone to believe in them the most – is easy to do. It requires patience, understanding and forgiveness. Everybody, felon or not, benefits from hard work. Offering someone who needs it most the ability to develop fortitude and integrity is a blessing that you can bestow upon reentrants and your community. And these employees may become loyal, long-term workers if you are patient and show them respect and give them opportunities to succeed.
Editor’s Note: This is the second article in a series about hiring second chance workers. Alex is an expert on this topic. He can be reached at alexanderbrengle@gmail.com.
