Fair Chance Hiring

What fair chance hiring involves

Fair chance hiring is a policy choice that goes beyond the minimum in most laws. A typical program has five parts:

1. No blanket bans. No "no felonies" rule in job ads or screening.
2. Timing. Criminal history is considered only after a conditional offer, so candidates are judged on qualifications first. In many places this is already required by ban the box laws.
3. Job-related review. Each record is assessed against the specific job's duties.
4. Candidate input. The candidate can explain the circumstances, rehabilitation and what has changed since.
5. Support after hire. Mentoring, clear expectations and sometimes partnerships with re-entry organizations.

A large share of US adults has some kind of criminal record, including arrests that never led to conviction. For employers who hire hourly workers at scale, excluding all of them shrinks the candidate pool considerably.

How to assess a record fairly

The EEOC's 2012 enforcement guidance on arrest and conviction records describes three factors that make a criminal history screen more likely to be job-related and consistent with business necessity:

• The nature and gravity of the offense.
• The time that has passed since the offense or completion of the sentence.
• The nature of the job: duties, setting, level of supervision and access to people, money or property.

The guidance also recommends an individualized assessment: telling the candidate they may be excluded, giving them a chance to respond, and considering facts such as age at the time, evidence of rehabilitation, employment history since, and references. Arrests without convictions generally should not be used on their own to deny employment.

In practice, a 2015 shoplifting conviction says little about a 2026 applicant for a warehouse picking role. A recent fraud conviction may well be relevant to a role handling customer payment data. Write down the reasoning either way.

The legal framework

Several layers apply:

• Title VII: criminal history screens that exclude people of some races or national origins at higher rates can create disparate impact liability unless they are job-related and consistent with business necessity.
• FCRA: if a screening company provides the report, you need written authorization before the check and the pre-adverse and adverse action notice process before rejecting someone based on it.
• State and local fair chance laws: many restrict timing, require individualized assessments, mandate specific notices and waiting periods, and limit what records you can consider (for example, sealed or expunged records, or convictions older than a set number of years).
• Industry rules: some roles, such as certain healthcare, childcare, financial and transportation jobs, have mandatory disqualifications set by statute or regulation. Fair chance hiring works within those.

Rules vary by state and city, so map them for every location where you hire.

Why employers adopt it

• Bigger candidate pool in tight labor markets, especially for hourly roles.
• Retention: many employers with fair chance programs report that these hires stay as long or longer than average, though results vary and you should track your own.
• Tax credit: the federal Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC) includes people hired within a year of a felony conviction or release from prison, among other target groups. Employers must file the certification paperwork on time.
• Federal Bonding Program: free fidelity bonds, typically covering the first six months of employment, are available through state workforce agencies for at-risk job seekers, including people with records.
• Reduced legal risk from blanket exclusion policies.

Running fair chance hiring at volume

For an employer making thousands of hourly hires a year, case-by-case review needs structure or it becomes inconsistent:

• Write a matrix by job family that defines which offense types and time frames are relevant, and which records go to individualized review.
• Route only flagged results to a small trained team, not to every hiring manager.
• Use templated notices and a tracked waiting period so FCRA and local timelines are met.
• Track how many candidates are flagged, reviewed, cleared and rejected, by site and by reason.
• Keep the background check turnaround fast; long delays after a conditional offer lose candidates regardless of the outcome.

The point is consistency: two candidates with similar records for the same role should get the same decision, wherever they apply.