How This One Hiring Practice Hurts Your Business

The most essential resources to a growing business are valuable employees who are devoted, passionate, and hardworking to advance the mission of their company. Modern day employers face the unenviable task of locating, assessing, and hiring these individuals, often with very few tools available. As a way to overcome these challenges, there is one tactic that employers rely heavily on: background checks. In fact, one survey conducted by the National Association of Professional Background Screeners found that 96% of employers perform some type of background check as a part of the hiring process.

The logic behind these screenings is very straightforward. Background checks are used as an easy determination of aptitude and trustworthiness for assessing a person the employer is not familiar with. They are a haphazard method of speeding up the selection process.

The Big Picture

To understand the perspective of an individual with a criminal record, it is important to first understand the system that labelled him or her as such. Incarceration has been a well-documented issue in the United States for decades, but few people understand the full weight of the problem.

Did you know that the incarceration rate in the U.S. is the highest in the world, at roughly five times the global average? To put that in perspective, according to the research conducted by the International Centre for Prison Studies, this rate is higher than that of Russia and China combined. In addition, despite having only about 4.25% of the world population, the United States houses about 22% of the world’s prisoners.

If the American incarceration rate is 5x above the global average, this means that out of the roughly 77 million Americans with criminal records, about 61.6 million individuals, would not be held back by a criminal record and may be considered extremely hirable in other parts of the world and a valuable asset to your company.

Records Don’t Define Character

But what does it matter if the checks are flawed? Isn’t it better to be safe than sorry when it comes to hiring employees? This is actually another misguided perception. As it turns out, people with criminal records can actually make more loyal, devoted, and hardworking employees than those without. Laureen Asseo, CEO of a successful food delivery startup and a member of Forbes 30 Under 30, described why she chooses to hire people with criminal records in saying, “When people realize they have a chance to turn their lives around and make it better, they often take it. Based on my experience, this translates to loyal employees who are willing and happy to go the extra mile for the company.”

In other words, showing someone that you believe in them will make them more hardworking, devoted, and loyal. And Asseo is by no means alone in second chance hiring. Hundreds of massive, global corporations offer employment to ex-offenders, including American Airlines, Apple, Coca-Cola, General Mills, Microsoft, Walmart, Uber, American Express, and many more. These companies understand that obstacles that an individual has overcome do not limit their potential as an employee, but expand it.

If passionate employees and improved productivity weren’t enough to motivate you, there are also financial incentives for employers. A Federal program called the Work Opportunity Tax Credit will reimburse up to 40% of an employee’s first year salary for businesses who hire formerly incarcerated individuals. This money can be claimed as tax credits on your income tax and only requires a few basic forms.

Here is how it works: The more hours they accumulate in their first year as an employee, the more incentives you qualify for. For example, if your employee works 120 hours per year, you can claim 25% of their first year salary., and if they work 400 hours or more per year, you are eligible for the full 40% that is available. Imagine everything that you could do to grow your company and achieve your goals with tens of thousands of extra dollars every year. At SquareOne Jobs, we can help employers navigate these important tax incentives.

How SquareOneJobs is Helping

All in all, background checks are an ineffective method of judging whether or not someone will make a valuable employee, but this is still an enormously important task that can be extremely time consuming to do in person. What employers need is a fast, reliable way to accurately determine the knowledge, skills, and experience of their job applicants. That is why, at SquareOneJobs, we are trying to create a job service that works better for both the businesses and applicants.

When you post a job listing with SquareOneJobs, you will also be able to post a questionnaire that applicants will fill out in order to apply for the job. These questionnaires can serve as a vetting opportunity and can range from programming tasks, to language tests, to simple questions of how the applicant would deal with a distraught customer.

What about testing skills that applicants already possess? As a part of building their profile, all applicants that sign up to SquareOneJobs will be given the option of filling out quizzes related to fields they are experienced in. The quizzes that they pass will be displayed on their profile when they apply for you to view right away.

Finally, in order to demonstrate their experience, we will also collect employer reviews and references from prior employment so that we can offer personal recommendations for specific individuals that we feel demonstrate real drive and promise.

So join us at SquareOne Jobs! Hire highly dedicated professionals, collect meaningful tax benefits, and be part of the solution to an enormous socioeconomic issue!