When we wanted to bring the message of smart hiring into town, we went straight to the nationally known leaders: Johns Hopkins Medicine and Butterball Farms. After all, that’s who Bloomberg Radio interviews, that’s who The Guardian writes about, that’s who the US Department of Justice puts on the stage in a beltway ballroom, that’s who the Pew Center promotes, when they’re looking for the greatest heft of evaluated experience in the realm of putting people with criminal conviction histories on the job.
So it’s no wonder that our world was rocked by the message of Bonnie Mroczek from Butterball Farms and Joe Phelps of Johns Hopkins, delivered in a friendly conversational style – but backed up by serious stats – at Project Return’s recent Employer Roundtable.
Between the two companies, there’s about 50 years of experience in hiring motivated job applicants who have criminal records. And for most of those years, these two profitable, thriving companies – one mammoth, one mid- sized – have been tracking and analyzing the results, as well as packaging and presenting their successful methods for the rest of the world to know about.
Here, in a nutshell, is the news from Butterball’s Bonnie and Johns’s Joe: their employees who have conviction histories not only succeed but stay longer at the company than their employees who don’t. What’s more, those employees with conviction histories are more likely to advance at the company than the ones without.
This, at one level, just makes us happy. We’ll admit it – we’re pleased as punch with the narrative and the numbers.
But at another level, this is pragmatism made profitable. Sometimes, as we all know, necessity is the mother of really good business practices. These companies didn’t head down this path out of the goodness of their corporate hearts; they needed workforce, for goodness’ sake, and they had motivated applicants whose backgrounds were blemished by criminal justice involvement. Knowing full well the costs of no hire, wrong hire, and rehire, Butterball Farms and Johns Hopkins broke from business norms and brought people into their ranks who had made serious mistakes in their past. And the rest is history. Success upon success, by now numbered well into the thousands of employees who have, incrementally and collectively, spelled success for their employers.
Bonnie is HR through and through, at the pinnacle of a proud career, and Joe put in two decades as a detective on the streets of Baltimore before switching over to corporate life. Johns Hopkins is a massive and much-revered urban healthcare system; Butterball Farms is an award-winning food production company in the Upper Midwest. Their background and their brogue couldn’t be more different, but their message couldn’t be more identical: it is a winning move to hire people who have conviction histories!
For this Employer Roundtable, we were so pleased to have so many Middle Tennessee employers in the room, spanning health care and manufacturing and hospitality and construction, to hear this message of success. For those who weren’t able to attend, we ask: What if you could hire people who would work better and stay at the job for more years, and even advance better at the company, than those you’re already hiring? Would you do it?