A recent lively discussion on LinkedIn’s Ex-Felon’s Employment Resource group brings up the issue of the validity of lists, in this case Ranker.com’s List of Employers Who Hire Felons.
The discussion was launched when a member who works for Goodwill Industries in Texas posted a link to the Ranker site, which includes an extensive list of companies – ranging from Abbott Labs and Ace Hardware to U.S. Cellular and United Airlines, 134 in all – who hire ex-offenders. Or do they?
Reponses from members varied, but about twice as many respondents didn’t think using the list is a good idea as those who did. Here are a few examples of what people wrote:
- This list is a good idea, and I plan to use it for my clients.
- These lists are often outdated, and most employers do not want to be included in them anyway.
- Just because a company said yes – or even no – once, they might have a different response another time. Many companies on the list are large corporations with branches nationwide, and policies and hiring managers change..
- There were concerns about whether employers gave permission to be on the list in the first place or even know they’re on it.
Larry Robbin, a San Francisco, Bay Area-based nationally known expert in the area of workforce development, advises in his workshops for job developers: “If you have a list burn it.” Any contacts where you’ve made placements will not want to be on such a list and may stop taking your referrals, he has warned. All referrals should be case-by-case and never distributed in a list form.
Create your own list
In the end, using a list that someone else put together can be very limiting or even ineffective. First of all you have no idea when the list was created or how. It can also give you or your clients false hope, and there may be other employers in your local community who might be more suitable for a job seeker’s talents than those on the list.
In fact, according to a survey of 2,298 U.S. hiring managers and human resource professionals conducted for CareerBuilder earlier this year, 51 percent of employers surveyed worked for organizations that had hired ex-offenders.
Instead of using a list prepared by someone else, it would be better to put together your own list, doing research on the local companies and small businesses in your area that you may want to work for. A list of 100 companies should be adequate to launch a thorough job search.
Here’s how to do it
Choose an industry. Decide what type of industry you want to work in
Decide company size. Don’t just go after large companies. In fact, in many cases smaller companies – those with 250 employees or less – might be a better choice. It is these smaller companies that hire 75 percent of all workers in the U.S.
Create boundaries. Create the physical boundaries of the area in which you would like to work. For example, you may only want to consider companies within 30 miles, or whatever you consider a a reasonable commute, of where you live.
Search for companies. You can do this in a variety of ways:
- LinkedIn – Go to LinkedIn.com and click on “companies” on the bar across the top of the home page. Then click on the blue “search” button on the left column of the next page. You can choose “industries.” This function brings up companies all over the world in those industries, but if you put in a specific city, it will only call up companies in that area. You can further refine the search by selecting the size of a company in terms of number of employees.
- One-Stop Career Center’s employer locater – Go to www.careerinfonet.org/employerlocator. You can search this database by industry, location or occupation. It will pull up all the companies in a certain area that match your criteria and give you the name of each company and its address, telephone number and approximate number of employees.
- Yellow Pages – If you don’t have a computer, you can search the Yellow Pages for companies.
- Rating sites – If you’re looking for service-related work with a small business, use rating websites like Yelp (www.yelp.com), Home Advisor (https://www.homeadvisor.com/) or Diamond Certified (www.diamondcertified.org) in the San Francisco Bay Area. They offer reviews of various businesses, so you can get a better idea of the products and services they offer, as well as contact information.
To join in the conversation, join LinkedIn and the Ex-Felons Employment Resource Group, which has more than 1250 members and includes thoughtful discussions and insightful information.
Although we recommend coming up with your own list, if you’d like to take a look at what Ranker put together, check out the List of Companies That Hire Ex-offenders
We’d also like to know if you’ve had any experience working with any lists like that at Ranker.com and what you think about them.
I work for CALPIA and I’ve often thought these published lists were probably not that accurate for the reasons you’ve cited here: outdated, a one-time question that doesn’t really apply , etc. Having spent 25+ years in private industry before coming to work for the CDCR, I know that I hired ex-felons who gave a good interview and I would again. Would I have wanted to be on a list? I don’t think so, I don’t want a surge of applicants who have no interest in my business except that I say I’ll hire ex-felons. But I absolutely would and did hire them and I never had a bad experience.
This same kind of thing seems to apply to transitional housing and those types of resources. I’ve supplied inmates with lists to apply for and they’ve come back telling me phone numbers are outdated, they no longer accept ex-felons (drug abuse, etc. only), or they don’t exist at all. I think COVID probably had a big effect on those places, but I suspect it’s the list problem as well.
You’ve got some really good articles on here which I’m getting to guys who will be releasing soon, thanks for that!