Our Philosophy on Hiring Ex-Offenders

New York State has a law that makes it illegal for a company to maintain a blanket policy against hiring ex-offenders.

In support of that law, we’d first like to cite a famous philosopher and great man of God. In the Bible, Jesus faced a mob eager to execute a woman caught in adultery. He put a stop to it with a simple challenge: anyone who has no sin in his own life should step forward and throw the first stone. So pause for a moment and consider your company’s policy if, in one full sweep, it paints the people who have been caught and labeled by the state as somehow different from the rest of the folks in your company. Personally, we think that aside from being hypocritical, it is simply bad policy.

To be fair, we understand why employers are tempted to take the shortcut. Hiring is not what it used to be. Today, a company can post a job on Indeed or ZipRecruiter and be flooded with knucklehead resumes in minutes. Filtering out ex-cons can feel efficient.

But efficient is not always wise.

We understand the effort it takes to look for folks who are worth investing in. We’ve interviewed more than 65,000 job seekers—and what we know to be true is that there are a great many excellent people who happen to have criminal pasts. We take the time and resources to look beyond blanket assumptions. We do the harder work of separating the good from the bad. We believe in hiring work ethic before skill. We look for grit, and GAS (give a shit) attitudes.

Our position is not that criminal history should be ignored—but rather that it should be considered reasonably, lawfully, and with some moral seriousness. If there are certain offenses or circumstances that could legitimately undermine trust in your organization, then those standards should be defined thoughtfully and applied with care, not through a broad policy that treats every case the same.

If your company is wrestling with this issue, Construction Personnel Group would welcome the opportunity to help you build a hiring approach that is lawful, wise, and effective.