Checkr’s Expungement Service: from Hack Week to MVP
How did a scrappy Hack Week team build one of the simplest, fastest, and most affordable record expungement offerings in the nation?
First, let’s define expungement
An expungement removes or “seals” prior criminal records from public access. Many states are passing legislation that mandates expungements of certain records. Unfortunately, that process can take years due to court backlogs and administrative barriers. Among those legally eligible for expungement, only 6.5% obtain one within five years. Those impacted by prior records continue to be denied key opportunities, including access to employment, housing, and licensing.
Expediting expungements has proven too expensive with the average cost for a lawyer at about $1500. Individuals are able to file for expungement on their own, but the process is difficult to navigate and it’s hard to even figure out if their record qualifies.
What’s Checkr’s involvement?
In the fall of 2019, Megan Goddard led Checkr’s Candidate Experience team in launching a manual expungement pilot that removed 124 peoples’ records. The manual nature made it difficult to maintain and scale, but the pilot built a successful partnership with Lawyaw, a trusted partner that offers automation technology for legal services to file the petitions.
That same fall, we hosted a mission-driven design sprint to figure out how we can normalize fair chance hiring within our product experience. By “fair chance,” we mean that candidates should have the right to be assessed based on their qualifications in relation to the role. One of our top ideas was to leverage the manual pilot’s success and create an automated way to identify candidates eligible for expungement and help expedite the process.
Building momentum during a Hack Week
In January 2020, Checkr hosted a week long Hack Week. As soon as we were able to submit project ideas, I excitedly added “build an automated expungement service.” 11 people joined the expungement team and we spent the week bringing the idea into fruition.
Our goal was to reduce the manual work from our support teams and from the job seeker. We wanted to educate job seekers and customers about eligible charges and give people the opportunity to expunge their record.
During that week, we spent long nights creating a workable expungement offering with test data. We also outlined what we needed to launch a quality MVP. Seventeen teams participated in the Hack Week and the Expungements team won first place!
However, we weren’t just in it for the competition. In researching the expungement space, we found that there’s a real need for our service in the market and that we could have a huge impact in helping more people get a clean slate. So, over the last 9 months, our team stayed motivated and spent volunteer hours closing the gap to launch the MVP.
Keeping motivated to get from Hack Week to MVP
With our clear next steps of what we needed to launch the MVP, our energized team in Denver and SF built on the momentum from the Hack Week with a weekly check-in every Wednesday and hack night every Thursday. We had a delightfully cross-functional team with dedicated representatives from Product, Design, Legal, and Engineering. Our team spent their volunteer time over the last 9 months making the expungement service a reality.
Here’s how our expungement service works:
Our current expungement service targets marijuana charges in both California and Colorado, where we have identified nearly 55,000 marijuana charges that may qualify.
We only surface the expungement service for charges that we have high confidence in being able to expunge. We automate the expungement process for the job seeker, reducing the paperwork and intensive back-and-forth previously required.
The engineering behind our service:
Brett Caudill led the engineering team in building our Expungements service. Our expungements service operates on several different parts of the Checkr app, including a stand alone back-end service, database, and front-end.
We created a worker in the Monolith that scans background checks as they complete, looking for any criminal records that match our expungement criteria. When the worker finds an expungeable record, it notifies the expungements service, which keeps track of all expungeable records and communicates with the candidate. The service has a few other responsibilities: it works with both the dashboard and candidate portal to display the status of existing expungements, receives answers from the candidate questionnaire, and integrates with Lawyaw to process the expungement and Stripe to handle payment.
Educating our customers about expungeable records
As long as these records are accessible, employers may be biased by seeing them. Like job seekers, employers often find it difficult to know which records qualify for expungement. We also built tools that educate our customers on potentially expungeable charges, as well as pending expungements, to help them avoid dismissing qualified candidates.
What’s next?
Our team, more excited than ever, is quickly looking to expand our service to cover additional charges and locations. Our near-term goal is to offer the expungement service for all charges that qualify for mandatory expungement by the State.
We’re looking forward to the next Hack Week, where we can further expand on our Expungement service or build a new feature that embeds our mission into the product experience.
