Ready for Reopening: How Fair Chance Hiring Practices Will Lead to Stronger Businesses

Whether you’re looking to hire 10 or 1 billion people, we can all make an impact. As we look to reopen the economy post-COVID, we have the unique opportunity to be better. We can be better individuals, better leaders, and build better businesses.

During our Expert Roundtable on May 13th, we were joined by Phenom to discuss our shared values and missions around getting people back to work using fair hiring practices and reducing barriers to employment.

If you missed the session, you can watch the recording here. Below is a summary of some of the learnings we felt stood out the most.

What was normal in February will no longer be normal in June, November, or even in 2021. The way we interact with each other will be more distant, the way that we buy goods and services will permanently change for some, and simple things will no longer be taken for granted. As businesses, operating procedures are forever altered, entirely new business models have been created, and we’re now on the flip side of the lowest unemployment rates in history.

As a result, hiring will look very different for the rest of 2020, and maybe even longer. Yes, the candidate experience is still critical and some foundational elements will remain intact but new questions have emerged. How do we hire virtually? How will industries such as retail, hospitality, and food service hire thousands of workers at once when they’re allowed to reopen stores, hotels, entertainment centers, and restaurants? What was our normal procedure before won’t necessarily work moving forward. Hiring practices will need to be fully digital and functional for both the candidates and internal hiring teams to do remotely. If we can accept the new normal and not keep looking back, we can set ourselves up for even greater success moving forward.

Every situation we’re now faced with presents a lesson to be learned. Whether it’s good or bad, there’s no way around it. If we immediately go back to the old ways, we’ll miss out on the benefits these lessons can provide. For some businesses, that means adapting to new business models to stay open in the current environment. For others, it means pausing and re-evaluating hiring practices to identify opportunities for operational efficiency. However, the biggest learning we shared during the session wasn’t around business impact—instead it was focused on being more compassionate humans. It requires businesses to re-evaluate how they serve the communities they operate in and drive impactful change using fairer hiring practices.

To close out the session, we really dug into how we can all make a difference. It always starts with one. One person making a change, one business making a difference, one community becoming better together. These ripple effects expand out and can create a noticeable change. At Checkr, we believe that everyone deserves a fair chance to work and proactively pursue this mission. Internally, we hire people with criminal backgrounds and encourage all of our customers to evaluate these practices for their own businesses. Meanwhile, Phenom is working to help one billion people get hired by reducing barriers in the hiring process. To learn more about how you can make a difference with fairer hiring practices at your company, check out the recording of the session here.