In an era when companies are struggling to find talent, business consultant David DeLong highlights a potential, but often overlooked, source of employees who can make excellent candidates to fill the gap. And he offers an in-depth look at these employees and some of the companies that have successfully hired them in his recently published book, Hidden Talent: How to Employ Refugees, the Formerly Incarcerated & People with Disabilities.
David DeLong begins by making a case for the labor shortage in the coming years. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 12 million new U.S. jobs will be created by 2030 but only 9 million new people are forecasted to enter the workforce. And there will be an even more severe shortage of less skilled workers for jobs that don’t require a college degree. Furthermore, as the birth rate continues to decline and boomers continue to retire, the situation is likely to get much worse
Companies are trying to solve their labor shortage in two ways. Either by spending a lot of time and energy on recruitment, training and retention efforts. Or by attempting to employ automation to replace some of the work. But DeLong says there’s a third way that many business leaders don’t consider. And that’s the talent pool of marginalized potential employees. In other words, those who were formerly incarcerated, immigrants and people with disabilities.
The three marginalized groups David DeLong highlights are:
Individuals who were formerly incarcerated
He reminds us that felony convictions are held by:
- 19 million Americans
- One out of eight American men
- One out of three American black men
Immigrants
Immigrants total 46 million people in this country, making up more than 14% of the total U.S. population. And, at the time the book was written, more than 200 million asylum applications were pending in the U.S. Immigration Courts.
People with disabilities
59% of those who have a disability and are between the ages of 25 and 54 are unemployed.
Hidden Talent tells the stories of companies that are hiring workers from these marginalized groups. It explains how they did it, the challenges they encountered and the success they achieved in finding employees who are loyal, dedicated and long-lasting. DeLong introduces people from these marginalized groups and explains how difficult it was for them to find work and keep it.
And his primary purpose, as he says, is “to convince more employers to take a chance on hiring individuals who have traditionally been overlooked or excluded.”
The section on hiring the formerly incarcerated focuses on three companies that have become well known in the world of second chance employers: Precisely, The Body Shop and JBM Packaging.
Precisely, a company that specializes in data related to call centers, serves as a shining example of how one person can turn their company into a second chance employer by championing the practice. DeLong follows the success of Brenda Kay, a tech sales executive for Precisely, as she worked with the women at Perryville Women’s Prison in Goodyear, Ariz. Her company had contracted with Televerde, a sales and marketing organization that trains women to work in call centers in five prisons. Kay wasn’t happy with the Televerde women’s performance and worked to improve it. As a result, she ended up hiring Televerde graduates to be business development reps for Precisely upon reentry.
In 2019, The Body Shop, which no longer operates in the U.S., instituted the practice of Open Hiring, in which people are hired based on the order they apply to work at a particular company. There’s no resume. No interview. No background check. Or no drug test. In Open Hiring, companies save money on recruitment and have access to a wider range of talent. It remains a practice that hasn’t been widely adopted, but The Body Shop was successful with its implementation.
JBM Packaging, a Lebanon, Ohio, manufacturer of paper packaging, has recruited employees in Ohio prisons since 2016. But the company encountered a high turnover rate and decided to work on improvements to keep people. These included hiring two life coaches to help employees deal with personal development and solutions to problems they may be facing outside of work, whether transportation, housing or dealing with child custody. The company interviews potential employees three times. A regular interview begins the process. Then candidates go through a holistic interview to see where they are in their personal lives. Finally, they spend time in a peer interview, shadowing a person doing the job they would be hired for and quizzed afterwards.
For those interested in second chance hiring David DeLong includes a chapter entitled “Lessons Learned from Second Chance Companies.”
Among what he learned is to:
- Not try to do it alone. Rather find a trusted partner who can supply you with potential job candidates. These can be workforce development nonprofits, employment agencies, temp agencies or government funded agencies like American Job Centers. Some of these partners can also provide wrap around services to help employees who may be facing challenges in their personal lives.
- Get buy-in from four levels of the company: senior management, supervisors, the human resource department and the employees themselves.
- Share with your employees what you plan to do in terms of second chance hiring and let them have a chance to respond.
- Don’t lower performance standards. In fact, employers have found that they don’t need to do this anyway, since many second chance hires make excellent employees.
The rest of the book deals with hiring immigrants and those with disabilities. Although an interesting read, it may not be relevant for most of our readers, so I won’t go into the details here. Those companies that are dealing with labor shortages, however, may find the information very valuable.
Not only does Hidden Talent provide examples of companies that have successfully hired from marginalized groups and why they did it, but it just may convince you to consider instituting similar practices in your own company.
A conversation with David DeLong
Jails to Jobs talked with David DeLong to learn more about his effort to bring attention to hiring employees from marginalized groups. (His comments are edited and condensed.)
How, when and why did you get interested in promoting the hiring of formerly incarcerated job seekers?
I’ve been studying the problem of changing work source demographics and critical workforce shortages for 25 years and wrote a series of books on the changing workforce. I’ve been speaking to executive audiences nationally on these solutions to critical shortages. I got tired of executives complaining that there aren’t enough good people out there. What happened was that simultaneously in about 2019 my wife went to work for UTEC, a nonprofit that works with young adults coming out of prison. We saw firsthand the incredible struggles that young people with a criminal record had starting a career or getting a job. We also saw how complex it was. It wasn’t like all of these people were ready to go into the workforce and be great employees. They needed a lot of coaching.
I’m a story teller at heart. I’ve been interested in learning from businesses and sharing what I learned with others. I thought that there must be companies that have cracked the code of how to hire these employees.
I thought given the chronic workforce shortages that businesses in this country face and are going to face in the coming decades, we have to tap this talent pool. And I realized that there are other talent pools – those with disabilities and refugees that need to be tapped.
I wanted to write a book that tells the stories of companies that have done this hiring and what they’ve learned. If it was easy everybody would be doing it. But it’s not. I wanted to share those lessons to give leaders the courage to go forward and explore these opportunities. And it took me four years to research and write this book.
Did you know a lot about hiring these groups before you started to research this book?
No. But I knew from my wife in the case of the formerly incarcerated that it was hard. When you’re talking about second chance hiring, you have to look at the range of potential employees as a spectrum. Say 10% or 15% of the folks coming out of prison had a career before going in. They have resources. They may have a family. And they probably have access to education. They just need a break.
The second group needs a little more support but they really want to be good employees and just need a little more coaching. They may need support organizations to help them transition back to work. Say that’s 25%.
The third group is people who need a lot of help. They need more counseling and may need help with job search and health counseling, transportation and housing. That might be 35%.
The last group is 10% to 25% who just are not ready to work, not ready to become viable employees. They likely lack basic skills and possibly stable housing or other essential resources.
Employers can’t generalize about people coming out of prison. They need to be viewed as a range. And group one and two are the two that employers should be focusing on.
What do you expect to accomplish with Hidden Talent?
My goal is to give busy managers and executives the info and confidence they need to explore second chance job candidates, as well as the other two groups I cover. A lot of companies just don’t know how to get started. They don’t understand how to do it or the benefits — or the obstacles they’ll have to deal with.
This is not charity. We’re not doing this to be nice. We’re doing this because it’s smart business.
What are the biggest challenges that you see companies are facing with second chance hiring?
One of the biggest challenges is overcoming the natural bias employees and managers may have of working next to a person with a criminal record. There are unwarranted fears about working with second chance candidates. The chances of reoffending are pretty low once they’ve found a job. After seven years the chances of them recommitting a crime are very low.
Another challenge is overcoming the fear of being legally liable for what’s going to happen if something goes wrong. And a third is getting buy-in from senior management, middle managers and the people working with the second chance employees.
How did your perception of second chance hiring change as you got to know these companies and the people who work there? Or did it?
I learned about the systemic obstacles people coming out of prison face. They lack basic resources. And their probation requirements may demand that they take courses and do things that are very time consuming. Employers usually don’t have any idea of this and try to treat second chance employees like everyone else. But they can’t do this because they’re dealing with people who are trying to work through so many things. We’re going to have to find ways to support returning citizens if they’re going to be successful. We can’t just assume all their other needs outside of work have been taken care of.
Why should a company engage in second chance hiring?
This is a business decision to address chronic labor shortages, particularly in places with high level turnover, especially in manufacturing, call centers and distribution. The cost of turnover is tremendous. This talent pool is way too big to overlook or dismiss.
What’s the No 1 characteristic of a company that successfully implements second chance hiring?
Sponsorship. You’ve got to have an executive leader or operational leader who champions it. That person could be a general manager. It could be a plant manager. It could be a CEO. If you look at the three businesses I profiled, all three of them have that.
What are the most important things that a company considering second chance hiring can do?
Identify jobs where these candidates might be successful. And you have to be realistic. For example, an entry level manufacturing job. Or a tech job where they’ve had training. Also identify the specific jobs that are hard to fill.
Find a good partner organization – one that works with people coming out of prison. And really ask hard questions about how they prepare these people.
Sell the idea inside the company. You can’t do this overnight. You start educating your colleagues about the talent pool you’re tapping and why. And what’s the process to do so.
Learn from other companies. Reach out to other companies to learn from them. Find other employers in your region who have done second chance hiring and talk to them. Ask for their advice.
How can the business community get more companies involved in this movement toward hiring those from marginalized groups, particularly the formerly incarcerated?
Try to get early adopters in your region or industry to talk about their experiences. The best thing you can do is to bring together those who have done it to share their experiences. Collect lessons learned, and identify great partner sources. Reach out to organizations in your region and have them come speak to your group.
What’s the most important thing that you learned from researching and writing this book?
There are a lot of people out there in this era of chronic workforce shortages who can be fantastic employees if given a chance. But they need extra support. And employers need to understand what that support is and how to do it. It’s a journey. This isn’t something you do in a month. Or a quarter. Or even a year. It’s going to be a process. We’re going to be facing chronic labor shortages for the next two decades. Finding effective ways to tap these marginalized employees is going to be essential – a matter of survival.
From what you learned from the companies you researched, is there any way they could be doing things better?
Everybody can do it better. You learn over time. Your needs as a business change, so you’re going to need different types of employees. Think of it as continuous improvement in the hiring process. You’re going to continue to learn about what works and what doesn’t.
Editor’s note: We encourage you to read David DeLong’s book—a valuable resource filled with practical steps and best practices. To complement its insights, we also invite you to download our to download our Second Chance Hiring Toolkit, which includes additional examples from employers actively hiring from the reentry community, along with other helpful information. We hope these resources support you—whether you’re just starting a second chance hiring initiative or looking to strengthen an existing one.
