BridgeWorks
Most employers who become fair-chance employers do not start with a public announcement. They start with a conversation — usually a quiet one, often between an HR leader and a sympathetic executive, sometimes triggered by a specific candidate or a specific community partner that has earned the organization's trust.
We have helped dozens of regional employers run that first conversation. The pattern is consistent enough that we want to share what works, what does not, and what to expect, because the difference between a fair-chance program that holds and one that quietly fades in eighteen months is almost always about how the conversation was framed at the start.
This is the playbook. It is not the only way. It is the one we have seen produce the most durable results.
Start with a real candidate, not a policy
The instinct, in HR, is often to design the policy first and then deploy it. For fair-chance hiring specifically, this works less well than you would think. A policy designed in the abstract attracts abstract concerns. "What if we hire someone with a violent offense?" "What does our insurance company say?" "How do we explain this to existing employees?" The abstract version of the conversation hits the abstract version of every objection.
The conversation goes very differently when it is anchored to a specific candidate. A real person, with a real resume, applying for a real role. Now the questions get concrete. The hiring manager can read the resume. HR can review the actual background check. Legal can look at the specific offense and the specific role and run the analysis the EEOC has been telling them to run for fifteen years.
When the conversation is anchored to a real candidate, the abstract objections shrink to their actual size. Most of them turn out to be smaller than they sounded.
Our employer relations team can help you find that first candidate. We have done it many times.
Decide who is in the room
The fair-chance conversation at most organizations involves more people than the typical hiring conversation. At minimum, it should include:
- A senior decision-maker (CEO, COO, or division head) who can make a clear call
- The HR lead responsible for the hiring decision
- The hiring manager for the specific role being considered
- Legal counsel (internal or external)
- Operations or risk, if the role has any meaningful safety or compliance dimension
The most common mistake is to leave out the hiring manager. The hiring manager is the person who will work alongside the new employee, and their buy-in determines almost everything about how the first 90 days go. If the hiring manager has not been part of the conversation, the placement is likely to struggle regardless of what HR and the executive team have decided.
The second most common mistake is to have legal in the room too early. Legal's job is to surface real risk. If the conversation starts with risk before it has been anchored to a candidate and a role, legal will surface every theoretical risk that could ever apply, and the meeting will end without a decision.
The order we recommend: anchor to candidate and role, sketch the operational picture, then bring legal in to do a targeted risk review. Not the reverse.
Run an honest read on the role
Some roles are easier to fair-chance hire into than others. The honest assessment is part of the playbook, and we would rather you do it openly than have it surface as quiet resistance later.
Roles that tend to work well: any role where job performance is observable and measurable in the first 30 days. Warehouse, light manufacturing, skilled trades, food service, certain operational roles. The candidate's track record builds quickly and visibly, and trust builds with it.
Roles that require more design: roles with significant financial responsibility, certain healthcare-adjacent roles, roles requiring specific licenses that may have restrictions, customer-facing roles in sensitive contexts. These can absolutely be fair-chance roles, but they require more attention to fit, more attention to wraparound support, and more attention to legal review.
Be honest about which kind of role you are starting with. The first hire is not the place to try the hardest version of the question.
Get specific about wraparound support
The single biggest predictor of whether a fair-chance hire holds at 12 months is not the candidate. It is the wraparound support around the first 90 days.
The best fair-chance employers we work with — and the public examples are out there; Triple Bottom Brewing's Philadelphia program is one widely recognized model — bake support directly into the role. Transit passes, where commutes are long or uncertain. Daily structure that supports the rhythm a new employee is still adjusting to. A clear point of contact for the first questions that come up. In some cases, a job coach. In some cases, paid time during work hours for legal or compliance appointments.
You do not have to start where Triple Bottom started. But you do have to think about the gap between "hired" and "thriving" and build a small bridge across it.
Our placement team builds this bridge with our graduates. Most of our employer partners build a complementary version on their side. Together, the two halves are what makes the placement work.
Communicate to your existing team
Existing employees are the often-overlooked piece. Some of them will be enthusiastic about the change. Some will be skeptical. Almost all of them will have questions, and most of those questions are reasonable.
The communication that works, in our experience, is direct, specific, and arrives before the new hire's first day. A short email or all-hands message from a senior leader. The framing is not advocacy ("this is the right thing to do") — it is operational ("we are hiring strong candidates from a sourcing channel we have not used before, here is what to expect, here is how we are supporting them, here is who to go to with questions").
The advocacy framing puts existing employees on the spot. The operational framing invites them into the work.
What we will and won't do
A few things to know about how we work with employer partners on the first fair-chance hire.
We will: prepare the candidate thoroughly, do the matching work, give the employer a clean and accurate read on the candidate's background, support the candidate's first 90 days, and stay available to the hiring manager for questions.
We will not: ask an employer to take a candidate who is not a good operational match for the role, sugar-coat anyone's background, or guarantee outcomes we cannot deliver. The honesty is what makes the relationship workable.
The placement rates we publish — 75%+ placement, 80%+ 12-month retention — are real numbers. They are also the result of a specific way of working with employers, and the way of working starts with the conversation this post is describing.
A small invitation
If you are reading this and your organization has been quietly thinking about fair-chance hiring for a while, the first conversation with us takes about 45 minutes. We do not need a commitment to come out of it. Most employers leave that conversation with a much clearer sense of what their organization is and is not ready for, and the next move becomes obvious.
The good fair-chance programs in our region were all, at some point, an employer who decided to have one real conversation. We would be glad to be the other side of yours.
