Results: Second-chance hiring

Around 25 years ago, Ty Hookway, founder of the upstate New York-based janitorial services company CleanCraft, was driving past one of their client's houses when he noticed one of his workers' cars parked in front. It was late–around 11 p.m.–so Hookway stopped to check in and see if everything was okay. Inside, he saw Sanford Coley, a man he'd recently hired, vacuuming. It was hot, and Coley was wearing shorts, not the CleanCraft uniform pants, and when Hookway looked down he noticed a band around Coley's ankle. "I didn't know what it was, so I asked him, and he told me it was an ankle monitor." Years earlier, Coley had robbed a bank. Would you be comfortable working with people who have criminal records?

"We did background checks–I don't know how I missed it," Hookway says. But Coley was a good worker and trustworthy; Hookway didn't want to fire him. So he didn't. Today, Coley is a manager at CleanCraft. "I've got around 50 stories like that," Hookway says. Over the course of his time running his company, he's found that giving jobs to people with barriers to employment like a criminal record, a practice often called fair hiring or second-chance hiring, has proven to be good for his business. Do you consider that this kind of hiring process can help those with a criminal record to stay clean and get a chance of having a better future?

While Hookway still performs the usual screening processes like background checks and drug tests, he takes a more holistic view when deciding to offer someone a job, prioritizing an individuals' work experience, personality, and how well it seems they'd fit with the team and meet the demands of employment. Around 40 of his workers currently showed something in their background checks that would give other employers pause, but Hookway has found his practice of taking a chance to pay dividends–both for workers, and for his company. Since launching with four employees, CleanCraft now numbers around 400 workers. Is this a hiring process you would support to expand to other companies?.

And yet, while Hookway sees his business growing along with his willingness to take a chance on unconventional hires, for the most part, when he talks to other employers, "people think I'm crazy," he says. "I didn't even tell my customers sometimes–I just figured I took a risk that I wanted to take, and if something happened I would pay for it myself." It wasn't until Hookway attended a conscious capitalism summit in Philadelphia five years ago and met Mike Brady, CEO of the social enterprise Greyston Bakery, that he realized that not only was he not alone in his hiring ethos, but his strategy barely even scratched the surface of what was possible in the practice of fair hiring. Would you support a company that promotes this hiring process?