Recruiting, employing and retaining people with convictions: Guide for organisations

00 00 00 Zoe Raymond It looks like we’ve got everything going. Hello everyone and welcome to the latest in our inclusive workplaces webinar series. Great to see so many of you popping in. We’ve got my lovely colleague Ali is here looking after the chat. So, it would be great if you could all just pop in the chat who you are, where you’re calling from, tell us what the weather’s like. We’ve got sun here in South London, very briefly. We’ll see if that lasts. So, my name is Zoe and I’m the Programme Design Manager here at the CIPD Trust. So, the CIPD Trust is all about inspiring and enabling HR professionals to improve access to work and this webinar is designed to help you look at your hiring process and make sure that, when you’re hiring, you’re kind of doing absolutely everything you can to make sure that it’s fair for someone who has a criminal conviction. Inclusion isn’t always about kind of these big long-term projects. Although those have their place. It can also just be about making small, just tiny little tweaks and changes and so that’s what this series of webinars is all about, really. It’s about, easy, practical tips that you can put into place immediately and hopefully, by the end of this session, you should leave with at least one thing that you can change or tweak by the end of the day. That’s always what we’re aiming to do. I’ve got two fantastic speakers here with me today, Richard and Matt. Richard, do you want to just very quickly introduce yourself? Richard Rowley Yeah, so I’m Richard, I’m the Deputy Chief Executive at Working Chance. We’re the UK’s only employment charity solely for women with convictions. 00 01 56 Zoe Raymond Perfect. And I can see everyone is popping up in the chat with not brilliant weather going on. Someone has said it’s England as usual, which I think probably sums it up. Matt, let’s hear from you. Let’s have you introduce yourself. Matt Ponsford Yeah, so my name is Matt Ponsford. I’m the Head of Workforce Strategy, Reward and Compliance for a charity called Fitzroy, which works in the social care sector with adults with learning disabilities, autism, and mental health. Zoe Raymond Brilliant. So, we’ll hear from Richard and Matt most of this session but I thought I would start off with just going through a few things about hiring people with convictions. This, in my mind, I’ve termed as the important but maybe not that exciting stuff. I’m just going to run through this and then we’ll hear from Richard and Matt about some of the more interesting kinds of practicalities about how you might put the stuff into practice and why it’s important. So, I should start by saying that in order to produce these couple of slides, if you are a CIPD member, you have access to something called CIPD Buddy which is, it’s an AI chatbot that’s been trained on CIPD materials. And so I just plugged in a couple of questions and it gave me a load of stuff to include here. I did double check it, as you always should but definitely worth looking at if you’re a CIPD member. It is like super useful and produces like just really concise answers that are really helpful. So, how to decide if you should ask about convictions when hiring. Just a few kind of key points here. So, the first thing is you should always be familiar with the legal obligations and restrictions related to spent and unspent convictions. We’ll talk about that on the next slide. You should check if the role you’re hiring for is exempt from the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act. First thing you should do is initially assess all applicants based on their ability to do the job and if you have questions around criminal convictions, they should be asked at a later stage. So, you’re kind of making that initial assessment based on someone’s abilities. 00 04 08 Zoe Raymond I think we’ll talk a bit, probably later, about how you can do that and how you can have that question around convictions and flagging it up early in the process, even if you’re not using it to make a decision at that point. Employers can only ask individuals to provide details of convictions and cautions they are legally entitled to know about and you should make sure that all of your kind of application forms, online portals, don’t inadvertently discriminate against individuals with convictions. So, just to talk a bit more about the different kinds of convictions, or the different some of the terminology you might come across. So, there are kind of two types of convictions when we’re talking about this stuff, spent convictions which are considered rehabilitated and unspent convictions which are not considered rehabilitated. Most convictions will become spent at one point or another, and there’s usually a length of time that they will take. Some convictions become spent, kind of as soon as a penalty is paid. 00 05 08 Zoe Raymond So, if you’re kind of fined for something then that can be spent immediately. The reason why this is important is that unspent convictions must be disclosed to an employer if the employer asks for them. And spent convictions do not need to be disclosed in general, but should be disclosed for some roles and these roles are generally described as being exempt from the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act. So, there are some roles where you can ask about convictions even though they’re kind of considered spent and rehabilitated. And as well as doing that, like just asking someone to voluntarily sort of tell you what convictions they have. You can also conduct criminal records checks and those can be one of three levels. So that’s basic, which will just give you any unspent convictions. Standard which is spent and unspent convictions and enhanced which includes all of those and anything that the police might have that they think is relevant. So you can do these checks but you can only do those checks if you’re entitled to receive that information. So if you’re hiring a role which is not exempt from the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, you can’t then do a standard or an enhanced DBS check, for example. One of my colleagues, my colleague Ali, will share a link to these slides and there is actually a lot more information, there’s a lot more detail in the later slides that I’m not going to go through but I just wanted to make sure that we had those kind of big headlines covered. And now I’m going to stop sharing this if I can figure out how to do that. And then we are going to hear a bit from Richard about why this stuff is important, why should people be factoring in criminal convictions? Richard, do you want to just tell us a bit more about why we need to think about these things? Richard Rowley Yeah, I’ve got a bit of a presentation, Zoe, nothing major. Zoe Raymond Brilliant. 00 07 02 Richard Rowley Just might, might help. Let me just, if I can get it working, just bear with me. Zoe Raymond Oh lovely. Richard Rowley Right. Is that up on screen? Zoe Raymond Perfect, yeah. And you’re in present mode, even better. Richard Rowley Excellent. Excellent. So, right so, yeah, I mean, as the title suggests, the Hiring with Conviction shouldn’t take it from the guide which I’ll come on to in a minute. Really focusing on building confidence, clarity, and consistency in recruitment. Building on just some of the stuff that you’ve already mentioned, Zoe, anyway. Right, let me just see if I can move it on. There we go. So, as I said at the start, we’re the UK’s only employment charity just for women with convictions and I think, probably, one of the biggest things that we do for women coming through is helping them to build that confidence and self-belief in particular. Because I think, whilst the conviction, yes, does present a barrier, the confidence stuff actually is the biggest problem right at the start of that because that’s, that’s the bit that’s stopping a lot of the women that we support even bothering looking for a job or going to a particular employer. So, everything we do, the confidence, the self-belief is a theme running through all of that. So, and the bit about long-term partnerships with employers is, you know, we work with just short of 140 employers and the reason we onboard them and work with them and there’s no cost to that, we just genuinely want to know. What is their processes? Some of the stuff that Zoe mentioned actually about when are you going to ask about convictions? How are you going to do that? What’s the disclosure process? When you do a risk assessment, what are you going to do at the end of that? Are you going to have another conversation with the candidate? So, I’ll come on to some of that stuff, but that’s the kind of relationships that we have with employers. Big stat on the side, as I’m sure some people in the room will probably know, but 12.6 million people with a conviction. One in four. People of working age has a conviction or criminal record. So, as it says there, we all know the stats or a lot of people know the stats. We certainly haven’t fixed the problem, that is for sure. And I think it’s, you know, people are held back still because of the convictions. And what Zoe said there about seeing somebody’s skills first, doing the interview, understanding are they the right person for the job? 00 09 37 Richard Rowley Before this even becomes relevant to that point. And, you know, unemployment is out of reach for a lot of people because of these situations and we see this a lot even with women that have got very historic convictions. If they’re still going for a role that requires an enhanced DBS, it’s still going to come up. It’s still a conversation that they’ve got to have and, you know, and as it says at the bottom, this is part of the hiring reality because if you’re an employer that doesn’t entertain applications from people with convictions, that’s 12 and a half million people straight away that you’re not even entertaining. So, it’s a lot of people that have got skills and experience and talent that you’re potentially missing out on. So, when we start talking about risk, I think what we tend to see a lot of is you know, people excluded through blanket policies. So, that’s things like particular convictions where employers will say, no we can’t talk about those convictions or we can’t employ those. And actually, in some cases, being fair to those employers, some of those are really valid. You know, if you think about Timpson’s which is a great example, obviously, but James three exclusions are sex offences, terrorism, and arson and the reason behind that is because generally they’re working in those shops alone. You know, there’s lone working involved. There’s no way of putting any mitigations in place to manage some of those risks and to be honest, James, when he started doing this, used to get quite a bit of grief around that. Around the fact that he wasn’t just employing anybody which is quite interesting. So, and that bit around the context and around giving people the chance to explain the context, that’s why the blanket policies are really damaging because I think, when you start to think about particular offences and the nature of those offences. Just on a DBS, it’ll only say that very simply in black and white and I’ll give you a better example of that later on but and I think one of the things that we definitely see is that inconsistency across organisations and sometimes within organisations as well, where you might have a group of hiring managers that are doing things really, really well or in a particular way and other hiring managers doing it in a different way from a candidate experience. You want to have that confidence that no matter which hiring manager they’re going to see, they’re going to get the same experience and the same outcome. 00 12 01 Richard Rowley Which I think is important because I think you know you want to make sure that you’re removing any bias or any opportunity for bias. So and, as it says at the bottom, we talk to a lot of employers that want to do this but generally, they’re just not sure how to do it or what’s the best way to do it. Or what are the problems? You know, what are the pitfalls? And, you know, that’s the reason that we did the hiring with Conviction Guide, actually. So, that’s a fair question right at the beginning. You know, is it even do you even need to know this? What role is it that you’re you know that you’re recruiting for? Is it relevant to the role? Because if it’s not relevant to the role, why do you need to ask the question at all? And I think, the bit about it being a fair decision and about it being proportionate, again, depends on what information you’re asking for. So, if you’re only asking for particular bits of information, there’s stuff over here you’re not asking, then you’re not getting the full picture. So I think, if you deem that it is necessary to ask, and in a lot of cases it probably will be, it’s still around the detail that you’re going to capture from that to be able to make a really informed and a fair decision because I think you know that proportionate decision making is the key bit to this. If you’re making a decision based on a snippet of information, then invariably it’s going to be the wrong decision for whatever reason. You might bring somebody in actually that you shouldn’t be because if you do a proper risk assessment, you might find out that there’s a risk there that you just can’t mitigate. So again, it’s about doing things fairly for everybody that’s coming through the door. And a better way to assess risk, you know these are only a fraction of some of the questions that you might want to consider when you’re doing risk assessments. And you know, if you’ve got somebody coming in that’s got a conviction, again, what’s the risk to that particular role? Is it relevant? How long ago was it? Is there a pattern? You know, is this a repeat of a pattern of offending behaviour? But I think the bottom bit is the bit that tends to get missed a lot, is that what’s changed since then? What’s all the great stuff that that person might have done since then? And I think, within recruitment processes it’s about giving somebody the opportunity to be able to articulate that because there isn’t a box there to put that information in. An event we did a couple of weeks ago, this came out actually from a senior person from Circo that said exactly that. Where’s the box on the application form or within that recruitment process that that gives you an opportunity to tell that employer, this is how I’ve moved away from this. 00 14 34 Richard Rowley Yes, that might come as part of the disclosure at some point but that’ll be a little bit further down the line. It’s something that we do a lot with the women that we support to make sure that employers are aware of you know, this offence might have been six months ago, it might have been six years ago. But importantly, how is that individual trying to move away from that? What have they done? What, you know, what opportunities have they taken? What are the positive steps that they’ve taken as well? This bit, just kind of comes back to what I was saying earlier about the context. So, let me give you a bit of an example of this one. If, and we’ve seen both of these examples, so these are real, these are absolutely live examples, where, when we see employers that will have arson as a blanket ban on their policies. So, because they usually cite insurance reasons and as a blanket policy which technically is not quite correct because the what companies want also what insurers want to know is what the what the convictions of the directors of the company, not every individual employee, unless there is something specific that’s included in that policy but just to give a really practical example of why this really matters. We worked with two candidates, both had an arson conviction. On their DBS, it just said arson in black and white, that was it. So, side by side, you couldn’t differentiate between them. You couldn’t differentiate the risk either because it was just very clear arson. So two candidates the first one, deliberately set fire to a block of flats and with the intention of hurting themselves and potentially not even considering the fact that it would hurt other people as well. So, and when you start to think about the context behind that and start to understand that context, you start to look at the sentence that was handed down, quite a long sentence, custodial sentence and you look at all the information that’s surrounded by that but still remembering the only thing on the DBS, it just says arson. The second person, somebody that fell asleep in their living room with a lit cigarette in the hand and set fire to the living room. Not deliberate in any way. Yes, obviously, still at fault because they did what they did. But when you look at the sentence that they received, a suspended sentence, didn’t go to prison, wasn’t deemed serious enough by the court. You know, that’s their determination, not ours. 00 16 56 Richard Rowley But on a DBS, that person looks exactly the same as the other person. So I think, just the point I’m getting across, obviously, is to have those conversations because you need to understand the context. And there’s nothing wrong with an employer asking questions, you know, and asking for those clarification points because, at the end of the day, you’re the only ones that can assess the risk to your business. So, but what I would say is make sure you’ve got the full facts to make sure that you are assessing that risk properly. And you know, one thing just to point out as well is just ignore what’s out there in the media because it’s factually incorrect half the time. You’re not hearing the context out there and actually, if that conviction is spent, for instance, that information out there is irrelevant. If you’re recruiting for a role that doesn’t require an enhanced DBS, that information shouldn’t even be coming to the table. So, the Hiring with Conviction guide, we developed this three years ago and we just released the new version two weeks ago, which I’ll put that in the chat in a bit. But we did it because employers keep coming to us and saying, how do we do this? What do we need to do? We know the legal stuff. We know all of that. What’s the doing bits? What do we do? How do we avoid getting it wrong? What are the practicalities? What can we do? What can’t we do? What’s good practice look like? So, we developed it in a way that is, it’s absolutely a guide that you can pick up and you can run with it. There’s lots of stuff in there that you can go off, you can implement, and just get on with it. And I think what it does is for us, it’s a door opener to organisations, and I think you know, one of the things that we’ve been asked quite a lot is, why do we, why is it free, why do we not charge people for it? And the reason for that, really, very simple. We want employers to be doing this because more employers that are doing this and doing it well, it benefits the women that we’re supporting, but it benefits everybody with a conviction. And it opens it, starts to open that door and create that level playing field. So, it is designed specifically for HR professionals, hiring managers. I think you could probably say that it really benefits people in EDI roles, social impact, social value as well. And, you know, it is really based on what employers have been telling us over the last 16 years we’ve been doing this. So, I’ll share a link to it in a little while, but it’s a really practical guide and I think the good thing as well is that there are some good practice examples in there from lots of businesses that you’ll recognise. 00 19 20 Richard Rowley So people like KPMG, Virgin. Co-op, lots of different varieties of organisations, YMCA, so we’re hitting charities. We’re hitting the stuff in there from the public sector as well on the private sector. I think you know, I’m sure some of that will resonate within your organisation, you know depending on what kind of work that you do. So just, just to kind of nearly finish off, in terms of what we do, how we can help, you know, we work with employers day in, day out, and as I said earlier, to onboard employers to come and work with us. We don’t charge employers for that, that’s not what we’re here to do. But we are really strict around who we work with, to be honest because we want to understand those processes. We want to know that, if we send a woman over for an interview or she applies, we want to know for sure that she’s going to have a good experience. And I think, yes, some of that comes a little bit proof in the pudding when you go through that process and we’ve been bitten a few times with that, to be honest. But it’s how we then handle that and how we challenge those situations when it does happen. But we do a lot of work around supporting employers to understand convictions and the risk associated with that. So, we’ve done lots of work with employers around kind of auditing their recruitment process, I suppose. So, in other words, looking at it with a candidate lens on it, to say, right from start to finish. If you’re a candidate with a conviction. What’s that journey going to look like for you? How are you going to feel about that? So even things like, what language are you using in your job adverts? What’s in the recruitment policies? Are all hiring managers on the same page? How do they react when somebody discloses something really quite serious and quite difficult to hear? You know, because we’ve certainly seen it where hiring managers have burst into tears, which, you know, human reaction but you can’t be doing that. So it’s just thinking about, again, how we can help in those processes and you know, building confidence and inclusive hiring, a theme running through everything that we do. So again, we’re not coming into businesses saying you’re doing this wrong, you’re doing this wrong. What we’re saying is, look, how can we just make what you’re doing even better? 00 21 23 Richard Rowley And just come at it with a different lens, because I think the good thing that we’re really good at is being objective. We can take a bit of a step back, we can ask those awkward questions and we always make sure there’s a real opportunity for employers to throw out what their fears are as well and say, look, this is why we’re worried about it. You know and we get it. You know, we see that all the time and I think, you know, the bottom point about moving from intention to action, I think that’s the really key bit for us. We do see a lot of employers that want to do it, but there’s a lot of nervousness and particularly, around things like, the you know the adverse effects in the media, the front page of the Daily Mail which is the, you know the bit that everybody wants to avoid but you know most of what’s on the front page is just not accurate anyway. That’s it, really, Zoe. I don’t know if we could do questions at the end or now, but I think, you know, either way. Zoe Raymond Let’s do questions at the end. Yeah, we’ll see what pops up which I guess is a good point for me to say, if you’ve got any questions, put them in the chat. That was really great thank you Richard. I love what you were saying about that moving from intention to action. I think it’s really important. Yeah, just so many interesting things and of course, that whole question around context and making sure that you, you know you think about getting that context but also that you’re kind of you’ve prepared your line managers to receive that because it’s you know, it’s one thing to go, yeah, you should just ask a question and see what someone says but you’ve got to be prepared that what someone might be saying might be quite difficult. Great. Thank you. Right. Well, now we’re going to go to Matt and hear a little bit about what it’s like from the kind of HR perspective. So Matt, do you want to just tell us a bit about your experience of kind of doing DBS checks, receiving criminal conviction disclosures when you’ve been hiring? I know that this is something that you’ve come across quite a lot. Matt Ponsford Yeah. So, I mean, I work for a social charity and the basis of our work, the majority of our workforce work with vulnerable adults. So, it’s really important that we have a really robust and clear message I suppose for any candidates who are applying for us or for staff already working for us to be honest with you. 00 23 40 Matt Ponsford So, as we work with vulnerable adults, we are highly regulated, so there are certain things that are expected from our local authorities, from the Care Quality Commission CQC that we have to have in place. The first thing being that we need to get enhanced DBS checks for the majority of our staff because they will be working with vulnerable adults potentially one-on-one and protect potentially in specific environments that could lend themselves to being problematic potentially. So, from our perspective, I think as an organisation, we want to be really, really clear and upfront about what we will be asking our candidates for. So, the fact that we’re asking for an enhanced DBS check is an industry standard, so that is almost by the by that’s expected. However, what we also like to do is to ensure that any candidates that are applying for us are aware of what is going to happen during that interview process. So, we have a specific rehabilitation of offenders policy, that is open for all to see, it’s a one-page document, it’s nothing crazy, nothing arduous to write but it touches on what Richard was saying there around actually, let’s set out what we’re going to be doing in that interview. When are we going to be asking you these questions? What is the timeline like? And I think the main thing around that is the fact that we encourage people to give us the details on their terms and then we will explore that. So, it’s not like anyone’s going to be blindsided. Any communications we have with any applicants that we’re moving forward with will have some reference to the sort of questions we’re going to be asking. So, it’s not lining someone up to be shocked, I suppose. Alongside that, we’ve also we do quite often quite a lot of training with our managers, particularly new managers, to talk through, what does this look like? You will be interviewing people. And what questions should you be asking? We put a few scenarios to them and we talk about actually if something is on somebody’s DBS check or when someone does disclose that to you, what you should do next and whether that might be well actually, I’ll need to go and speak to the HR team because there’s something that I’m not sure of myself but just really keeping that conversation open. We will always go back to somebody if there is something that we’re concerned around to have a conversation so it’s not like, you haven’t got the job, see you later. 00 26 03 Matt Ponsford The other element, I suppose, is that what we want to ensure that anyone who’s applying with this, we want to ensure that they’re aware if they disclose something to us, it’s not an automatic, you can’t work for us, by any stretch. So the policy itself is really, really clear that we will assess any disclosures to us which is around the seriousness of the offence. The relevance to the safety of not just the people we support but also our other employees, our clients, our property and that’s where maybe the arson bit comes into it as well. The length of time since maybe something has been disclosed. So, was it something that happened when they were a lot younger? Was it a one-off event? And is there any other relevant information? And again, going back to Richard’s point about that arson situation, we would definitely want to explore that a little bit more. What we do tend to find is that, if people are happy with the process and happy to talk about it, quite a lot of the time these are things in the distant past. That just so happened that it appears on the DBS because, maybe, it hasn’t been spent yet or whatever it might be. The way we would approach that is that’s one element of quite a lot of different things that we’d be looking for. So, yes, DBS checks are important. Yes, looking at somebody’s convictions is important but alongside that we’d like to look at their references to make sure if they have been working previously that they have been a good, upstanding employee in previous roles. It might be that we look at the amount of jobs, have they job hopped quite a lot. How many references can we get for that person? So, what we’re trying to do is build a bit of a picture of this person’s character in the background, and that might include convictions or not. But also what we really look at is their knowledge, skills and behaviours first and foremost. So, if we’re inviting somebody in for an interview, that’s the area that we’re really interested in. Can you do the job? Can you display the right behaviours? We’re a very values-led organisation. So, what are your values when it comes to care of a vulnerable individual for example. Can you give me examples of when you might have done X or Y? The other element is we have quite a lot of people that want to move into social care because of personal experience. And that might be their own personal experience of maybe mental health difficulties. It might be experience they’ve had with members of their family or friends, and so all of that is relevant from a values-based perspective. 00 28 31 Matt Ponsford Now some people might have been in mental health crisis and committed a crime. That seems quite harsh to say because you’ve committed a crime, maybe when under some sort of stressor. We won’t move you forward so that’s all part of the sort of moving parts to think about there. What we need to do is to satisfy CQC, the Care Quality Commission, that we are employing good and proper people, basically. And if somebody has a conviction, that doesn’t prevent them from being a good and proper person. What it means is we need to look at that from a risk assessment perspective and think about actually what are all of those moving parts. Can we mitigate any of that? So, it might be for example, we could offer somebody a role, but potentially it might not loan work for a period of time. It might be that actually you want to get another couple of references, potentially. We might want to potentially, if it was a recent caution or a recent conviction that appears somewhere, we might want to see if we can speak to maybe a probation officer potentially to see what other elements are there to consider. I’ve been looking when I learned about this. This webinar, social care across the board and convictions versus DBS, there’s not a lot of data out there because it is all obviously GDPR information is quite a lot there but from speaking to colleagues, for speaking to people outside of Fitzroy itself, I would suggest it’s probably between 5%-10% of our workforce have something on a DBS check and that could be for numerous different reasons. And after speaking to people across the industry, it would seem very much that risk assessments are what people are using. Early consideration and training of managers and training of the right questions to ask are the key things within our sector, absolutely. Zoe Raymond Brilliant, great. So good to hear someone in a regulated industry talk about what they do. Part of my job is going to conferences, CIPD conferences, and talking to people about, you know, have you thought about hiring people with convictions? A response I get a lot is, oh, no, no, no, we’re regulated. We won’t touch it. And so it’s good to hear the other side and I know that social care in particular is one of the industries that is kind of more open because it’s harder to recruit but I guess you’re looking for that breadth of the talent pool, which is really great. 00 31 00 Zoe Raymond So, so good to hear that like really practical approach you take. Would you have any advice for someone who was thinking about you know, do we need to start asking about criminal convictions when I’m hiring, like, what, what are there any kind of tips you would give? Matt Ponsford Yeah, I mean, I think from my perspective, to start with really it’s, does the job require a DBS check or not? Quite frankly, that’s a real basic star with. We may well employ people that are based at our central support offices who aren’t going to come into contact with the people we support. And if they do, they’re likely to be with the service manager, so they won’t ever be left alone. Do they require a DBS check or not? Let’s think about that early doors and then think about whether that’s required or not. Something for me, and it might come with the compliance element of my job really but the process needs to be consistent and fair. So, we need to really make sure that our managers, our hiring managers across the organisation, understand what is expected of them and where to get advice if they’re not sure. So, from an HR perspective, our HR team write the policies, they’re very aware of what we need to be doing but also we have an adjoined but slightly separate recruitment team and they are having conversations very early doors with people that apply for jobs, it is at that pre-screen time when we start talking about the fact we’re regulated, it’s on our adverts, it is in everywhere that you look, there is a real expectation of what it’s going to happen next. So, that consistent, fair process is there. And we have to remind people quite often, let’s not assume. Just because there’s something on there, let’s have the conversation. We want evidence. We want to be able to talk through things rather than just assuming that someone maybe wouldn’t be able to work for us. Finally, I suppose it’s looking at from an equality perspective, I suppose. What are our obligations? So, are we doing everything by the book from an HR perspective? Because somebody has a conviction, is it right just to completely write them off? And we return to this all the time when we’re reviewing our policies and actually, that’s key for us. We need to keep on reviewing this. Things change within the sector, things change within the delivery of our services. And it might well be that what works somewhere might not work somewhere else. So, that dialogue and that constant review is really important. 00 33 30 Matt Ponsford I’d suggest, if you work in a regulated industry, it’s probably even more important that you have got a clear process in place and you understand how to risk assess because for me, all of those things are evidence of us, number one, being well led, which is something that a CQC would look for in an inspection, but also that we’re employing fit and proper people. And by having that risk assessment in place, having those references on file, having potentially, if someone has lived abroad for a prolonged period, we state, 12 months in the last 10 years that we have a local police check or a certificate of good character from the, from either the Home Office or their country of origin or where they’ve been living. Or alternatively, if they needed to get a visa or whatever that might be, we’ve got evidence of that being checked but we are incredibly highly regulated. We speak about those sorts of things at very early doors as well. There was an expectation for that police check to happen. There was an expectation for those references to come in. They are as important to us as a good DBS check in reality. So, there is always risk around all of those things. When we risk assess, I would suggest probably 40% of our applicants or our staff for numerous reasons. It could be because of references, it could be because maybe they haven’t worked before, and so how do we mitigate that? If you can put a risk assessment into your hiring process as a, I probably need to risk assess this, then it doesn’t become arduous, it doesn’t become extra, I suppose. Zoe Raymond I guess if you’re doing it, you know, for 40%, I mean, that’s two out of five, isn’t it? That just becomes really routine, doesn’t it? And something that you don’t, you’re not, doesn’t become like a big blocker. Richard, I can see you nodding away. Do you have anything from the kind of candidate perspective about, you know, what can people do first off? Richard Rowley Yes, I mean, I think I was just going to type something in the chat, actually, but exactly what Matt’s just said. That transparency around the process, yes, is beneficial for the organisation but from a candidate perspective, it’s crucial because you know, we see this a lot where if it’s not clear what the process is, lots of the candidates or the women we support will just simply not bother applying because they’re not sure what’s going to happen. You know they’re not sure if they’re going to be blindsided at some point, so that transparency I think is really, really key and and not difficult to do. 00 36 01 Richard Rowley You’re not sharing confidential information, you’re just been really transparent about how you’re going to treat people when they come in. So, I think what Matt said about how they do that and the level of transparency that they give, particularly, again, in a regulated industry. I think it’s great, I think it’s just a really good, it’s a really, a good example, a good practice of somebody actually thinking about the candidate and wanting to entice applications from such a wide demographic. I think it’s great. Zoe Raymond Brilliant. I agree. Fab, can we talk a little bit about risk assessments? I feel like we’ve said that I’ve heard the word risk assessment a lot today. Matt, do you maybe just want to talk us through some of the things you would maybe consider in that risk assessment? Obviously, you’re kind of doing them all the time. How do you start that and how do you, I presume, that’s almost a bit of a two-way process with the candidate, is it? You’re trying to get information, obviously, that is relevant to the risk. Can you just talk us through some of the detail there? Matt Ponsford Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s really easy to have a generic risk assessment that you do and you fill in, and it’s a couple of lines or it becomes war and peace. I think it’s important to do something in between, really. It doesn’t need to be just a quick one line. The questions that we generally get asked if we’re being inspected, for example, is, how have you mitigated this? You’ve identified a risk, which might be something has appeared on a DBS check. So, what we would like to include in that risk assessment is the nature of the offence, how long ago it happened. How relevant is that offence to the role itself and the level of contact maybe with the people we support. So, a good example would be In some of our services, for example, the support workers will have access to maybe the bank card of the person that we support. If somebody has a previous conviction for theft or for fraud or for something along those lines which is directly linked to access to cash or monetary side of things, then there is a direct link there. So, it would be very much a case of, what have we done to mitigate that? And it could well be that we have decided, actually, because of that conviction, it’s probably not best to give that person access to the person’s bank account or cash or whatever it might be immediately. So, there might be a six-month period to start with where we talk through that and we do more training, for example. 00 38 28 Matt Ponsford It might be that, for a let’s say an offence of assault, which happens occasionally. We would like more context around that, it could have been when they were much younger. It was a drunken scuffling outside a pub on a Friday night, that might be very different to what they’ll be doing day-to-day. It’s very unlikely that they will be in a position where number one alcohol would have been consumed that they might not be with general population who are arguing for example. So, there are definitely things that you can put in place but I think for me, a risk assessment is very much a two-way street. It is an agreement that we’ve identified a risk. What are we going to do as an organisation and you as an individual to actually mitigate that risk? I suppose. And the more detail I would say the better but actually, the more important thing is, are we updating that risk assessment further down the line, it’s not a one-off job, it’s not a ‘we’ve done it now, get on board, and we can move forward. It may well be we review that at three months, at six months moving forward. And then, ideally, it would be reviewed annually because things do change. Convictions do drop off, and DBS checks may go from being unspent to spent all the time. So, it’s very much a case of, if we’re reviewing staff files, which we should be for lots of other reasons but why not do the risk assessment at the same time if you have a robust one to start with, it’s just updating that as we go along. Yes, it does add a little bit of extra work at the start at early doors but what we have found is we risk assess a lot in our industry anyway. So, an extra one here and there isn’t massively going to take up loads and loads of time and it also allows our managers to use their skills for other risk assessments. So, thinking about maybe if somebody has disclosed a medical condition, then they’re used to doing risk assessments around certain things and it’s upskilled our managers in that respect as well. Zoe Raymond Great. So good to hear risk assessments being used to drive action. I feel like I’ve had a conversation with someone the other week about how risk assessments are often more about writing it down and going, well, we’ve written it down now. Tick that box. So and I think you know, I mean that’s obviously one thing but really great to hear that kind of, you know, doing it in order to put in mitigations and think about you know, think about things really clearly. Richard, have you had to support candidates on the other side of this kind of being risk assessed? 00 41 03 Richard Rowley Yeah, quite a lot. And generally, when it goes wrong, to be fair, when the organisations don’t tend to do what they say on the tin. But I think it’s, I think our responsibility really is getting candidates to understand why organisations have to do risk assessments, you know, because it’s important. And I think, you know one of the things we say to a lot of organisations is, if you’re going to do a risk assessment, as you should be doing but you should be using it as a way of trying to identify the risk and everything you can to mitigate them to get that person into the business rather than where we’ve seen sometimes organisations using the risk assessment as a way of filtering people out as a process to tick a box, to say, actually, this is the reason we can’t bring you in. And I think one of the things I would definitely say to any employer, though is, when you’ve done the risk assessments and if you’re identifying risks and you’re struggling to decide how, you know, if you can mitigate it or you’re not sure if you can mitigate it. I think, I would be bringing the candidate in at that point to have that conversation because it might be that you just need a bit more clarification on stuff. It might be that you just need a bit more information. Or, as Matt said, actually, a really good one around you might need a conversation with a probation officer or a social worker, or whatever it might be, to bring in that full context. Again, to make an informed decision rather than quite a narrow view on just might what, you know, on the little bit of information that you might have conducted or carried out. So, I think just broadening it out and making sure that the candidates have got the chance to come back in after the risk assessment because we see this quite a lot where an employer will do a risk assessment and the rejection email follows. No conversation with the candidate. So, from a candidate’s perspective, A, they don’t know why they’ve been rejected because they don’t know the risk that’s been identified. And then from a further perspective, when applying for further jobs, they don’t know what to apply for because they don’t know what risk they’re posing. So, I would say to organisations, well, if you are going to reject somebody at the risk assessment stage, and that’s fine. Be transparent about why you’re doing it because that helps the candidate in terms of what other jobs they’re going to go for, particularly as Matt said, if it’s a regulated industry and the risk means they’re not going to get into that industry, they really need to know that. 00 43 10 Zoe Raymond Yes, so true. I mean, I think we support a lot of people looking for work and one thing that I would say to all employers is, if you can give feedback on why you’re not hiring someone whether that’s risk-related whether that’s competency-related, it really does make such a big difference. And it is one of the kinds of biggest gaps in hiring at the moment, is that it’s so hard for people to know. Right, I can’t believe that we are pretty much out of time. That has gone incredibly quickly. I am just going to ask you, Richard and Matt to just come up with some final reflections for our audience. What’s the thing you kind of want people to take away from today? Matt Ponsford Shall I go first? Zoe Raymond I’m sorry, I should have specified that. Matt Ponsford I mean, from my perspective and it’s interesting because this isn’t always on my radar. It’s made me reflect and think actually, we’re doing quite a good job in Fitzroy which is great to hear but I think, for me, it’s definitely there is a whole swathe of the population in the UK that potentially are an untapped resource. And a lot of them are incredibly highly educated, have the right behaviours, have the right skills, have the right knowledge to be able to do a lot of the roles probably that you’re all advertising day-to-day. For me, the fact that we’ve got a rehabilitation of offenders policy and we are doing everything at the front end means that I think we’re probably ahead of the game compared to a lot of our competitors and we’ve seen that impact through our lower turnover rate, our attrition rate, our length of service rate all being better than the industry average. So for me, I would suggest if you haven’t thought about it and you’ve got those problems maybe within your industry or within your organisations then this could well be a good first step. Or a shift of mind, I suppose, to get into it. A new exciting area of recruitment. Zoe Raymond Perfect. Richard, let’s hear from you. Richard Rowley I mean, yeah, absolutely agree with everything there. I think, for me, I think, you know, see the person before you start looking at the past. I think you know, if you interview somebody and they’re not the right person for the job because somebody else has performed better, you don’t need to ask any of those questions. It’s not relevant. 00 45 37 Richard Rowley So, you know, do the interviews, find out if that’s the right person because when you get to the end of that, if you’ve got somebody that you know is going to do a really great job. When you then do the risk assessment, you’re going to be looking to try and mitigate stuff and, you know, there still might be occasions where you simply can’t do that and I get that. But it does really change that, that shift that mindset a little bit. I think you know, the final thing I would say is you know, download the Hiring with Conviction guide. It’s free. Just take it, run with it, share it within your HR teams, within your EDI, leads, social impact because actually, there might just be a couple of things in there that are really going to help start shifting the narrative. And I think, you know, and if we can help in any of those conversations, you know, we talk to employers every single day. So, very happy to throw that out. You’ve got my email address in there anyway. So, if we can help, just give us a shout. Zoe Raymond Brilliant. Great. Well, I’ve shared our feedback survey in the chat. So please do click through, I think it’s two questions. So, very, very easy. Just let us know what you thought and all that remains for me to say is huge thank you to both Richard and Matt for just really walking us through all of that. I feel like we’ve got a load of kind of really practical things we can put into place. So, yeah, thank you so much and I hope you all have a lovely day. Richard Rowley Brilliant. Thank you.

Zoe Raymond Hi, hello everyone and welcome to the first of our inclusive workplaces webinars. My name is Zoe. I am the programme and design manager here at the CIPD Trust, and at the CIPD Trust, we’re a part of the CIPD and our big mission is around supporting the HR profession to give people who are having troubles getting into work or succeeding in work an extra helping hand. So, some of that is through supporting HR professionals to work with individuals, to help them through the recruitment process and beyond and some of it is about looking at our own workplaces and how we can remove some of those barriers that exist for people who are struggling to find work. And so today we’re talking exactly about that. We’re talking about what happens when an employee or someone you’re in the process of hiring discloses that they have a conviction and nearly around a quarter of the working-age population in the UK has a criminal conviction. So, this is something that happens in workplaces and unfortunately, sometimes when it happens, the response is oh no, no, no, we’ve not really dealt with that before, or we’re feeling a bit anxious. We’ll just say no, it’s easier to say no. And so, what we’re hoping to do today is just to talk through some of the options that you might have when that happens, some of the practicalities, and just give you a bit of confidence, a bit of advice, and also a little bit of signposting so that if that does happen, you don’t go oh no, no, no, I’m panicking. You think, right, let’s make a clear-eyed, sensible decision about this, because really, it’s about feeling confident in your decisions and being able to make your workplace more inclusive, but also feeling like you are making those decisions in the right way. So, luckily, you won’t be hearing from me much today. You will be hearing from our two fantastic speakers. So, we have got Jacob, who is the director at a fabulous organisation called Off Ploy, which supports people with convictions into work and it also supports employers to make their workplaces more inclusive for people with convictions. Jacob, do you want to just say a couple of sentences about who you are and where you’re from? Jacob Hill You summed us up so well there, Zoe. Thank you very much. So I’m an ex-prisoner as well. And I advise large organisations to employ people like me. We’ve unlocked over 60,000 roles to date. And hopefully there’s some gems of advice in today’s topic. So, thank you, Zoe. Zoe Raymond Great. And we’ve also got with us Amy Solanki, who is a chartered CIPD member and an HR business partner at the Learning and Work Institute. Amy, let’s hear from you. Amy Solanki Hi Zoe, thank you. My name is Amy Solanki. I am a mental health first aid and HR business partner. So, I work across both manufacturing, retail, and charity sectors. Previous role, I was responsible for DBS checks and carrying out individual risk assessments, so that included supporting recruitment of people with previous convictions. And today I’ll be sharing some practical insights from the experience particularly how we balanced risk, fairness, opportunities within a workplace setting. Zoe Raymond Perfect. Yeah, it’s that balance, isn’t it? It’s not so much about, oh, just open your doors to anyone, but it’s about how you think about those things and how they operate within your business. Amy Solanki Absolutely. Zoe Raymond Fantastic, yeah. So, I’ve got a couple of housekeeping things to begin with. We are recording this session, but cameras and microphones have been disabled for attendees. So, you won’t appear on the recording. Please do use the chat to make comments, ask questions, tell us what the weather is like where you are. Always a bit of a winner, and we will hear from Amy and Jacob and then we will take questions from the chat. So, do please put any questions that you have in there and we will be sharing the recording afterwards. I know that always gets asked. So yes, we will be sending it out and it will be available on our website. So, without further ado, Jacob, I’m going to hand over to you to just give us a bit more of the kind of landscape around this. Jacob Hill Amazing, thank you so much and thank you to everyone for being here today over your lunch, it’s massively appreciated. There’s 87 of you on today’s call. So, in the chat, please pop in where you are tuning in from today in the UK today or any experiences you’ve got in employing people with convictions. Good, bad, somewhere in the middle, what have you found when employing people with convictions? It really helps to bring everyone in the chat kind of an idea of where we’re at. It also helps us speakers up here who are just talking to our own screens and images. So, we’ve already got Hemel Hempstead from Emma, no experience. Vicky from Oxfordshire, no experience. This is perfect. We’re talking to people who are first here to employ people with convictions. Maybe the first-time round we’ve got Susan, oh, Zara, amazing. Look at this. The chat is now popping and alive. Now, I need that same enthusiasm in this chat for questions that you’re going to have throughout today. You might have questions on protected characteristics, safeguarding, appropriate levels of DBS checks, right through to how to even get started as an organisation. So, pop them in the chat. I’ve just made Corrine’s job incredibly hard because she’s now going to have to read all these bits in there. Jacob Hill And super excited that I’ve even seen my colleague Heather in today’s call as well. So, when we think about a person with a conviction, let’s get some context here, let’s bring it all together. I’ve already said I’m an ex-prisoner but when we think of an ex-offender, what image comes to mind to you all in the UK? I was going to ask you to throw this in the chat, which, let’s see, what happens. But when a judge sentences people in the UK, out of 10, how many people get sentenced to prison? The other amount will get community-based sentences. But out of 10, when the judge sentences people, how many go to prison? Throw in the chat. Right, we’ve got Lindsay going in for 2 out of 10. Kelly 1, Rory 1, Nicky 1, Debbie 7. Wow, look at this, lovely to see. All this engagement today. Zoe, you’ve got a right engaged community, haven’t you? That’s lovely. We’re looking at 1 in 10 people. When the judge sentences people, one person goes to prison, nine get community-based sentences, that could be fines, restraining orders, cautions, whatever it might be. It could be 200 hours of community service. So, the first thing I really want to get across to you all today is that a person with a criminal record hasn’t always been to prison. In most cases, they’ve never seen the inside of a prison cell. So, as an organisation, do we do this? Do we not? Well, given that over 50% of convictions are for driving-related offences, it can really put into perspective, as an employer, should we do this? Well, of course we should, because they represent all walks of life here. How many millions of people in the UK has a criminal record? The answer ends with a 0.6. There’s 66 million people in the UK, so how many of us has a criminal record? Numbers in the chat. It ends with a 0.6. Come on, get them in there. 20.6. Gosh, Catherine, you’ve got a cynical view of the UK, haven’t you? 20.6 million people. Debbie’s straight in there, and I think it might be Debbie from my friends at Unlocked, I’d be absolutely right. Thank you, Debbie. Lovely to see. 12.6 million people in the UK have a criminal record and we’re looking at the UK’s eligible workforce, working age population. Out of one in how many people have a criminal record in the UK? So, one in how many of the working-age population has a criminal record? I wish we’d have done points for this quiz. Had to get one question right, well done Debbie. So one in how many people? One in four. There you go, straight away. Catherine’s in, coming in strong. So, one in four of our applicants, or one in four of our colleagues, Zoe actually said it right at the top of the call, so it shows how much listening people have been doing so far already. One in four people of working age has a criminal conviction. So, when we think about the people we already employ or the applicants already looking at our jobs, I tell you this, that if 25% of your revenue came from a single source, we would have dedicated web pages, trained colleagues on how to sell that revenue stream, we would have onboarding processes, we would have checklists, we would have everything in place to bring that revenue in. And yet, when mis hires and poor retention and agency fees cost us thousands. How can we not treat our recruitment and our talent pipelines the same? So, if 25% of your applicants are coming from a single source, what does your website, what do your processes, and what do your policies say about the approach to that applicant pool, particularly when it’s something as sensitive as people with criminal convictions? Jacob Hill And why are businesses doing this now? So why are businesses employing people with criminal convictions? There’s a huge movement in social impact and business development that you can demonstrate social value by employing people with convictions. It’s good for customers. It’s good for larger tenders and contracts. In fact, it’s worth about £25,000 to society for every person with a conviction that’s employed for 12 months in your business. So, there’s huge benefits there. But I guess, from today’s audience, the big focus is going to be recruitment and retention. We’re seeing Timpson, the high street retailer, they see that triple the level of retention from their justice cohort than they do their cohort without convictions. Retention in retail amongst their justice cohort is 75%. The retail industry sees it around 25% on the high street. So, really, just put it into perspective because people with convictions, one, they’re loyal, they’re so grateful for the opportunities, but two, their conviction is not going to be spent for a certain amount of time. And that means that, whilst it’s unspent, when they apply to other jobs, they’re going to have to disclose their conviction over and over and over again. If you take a chance on someone, if you say we recognise the character and the circumstances, not just the conviction. You’re looking at a highly retainable workforce there as well and this is why companies are really getting started in doing this. We genuinely believe there’s only seven principles to employing people with convictions and it’s everything from an inclusive culture and I’m so glad to say, because you’re all on this call, you are our inclusion champions. You are the ones that now know too much and you need to go back to your organisation and say, right, what are we going to do about this to ensure that we can actively employ people with convictions? Right through to how you generate and celebrate your impact in employing people with convictions. Now I run this as a weekly webinar. I think I’m allowed to do this. Who knows? I run this as a weekly webinar. So, if you want to go through all of those seven areas, which we don’t have time for today, join me on the upcoming webinar and I’ll talk through them. But today, we’re really going to talk about empathetic interviews, disclosure and vetting. Now, I don’t know if you’re looking at this from home or in the office. Employing people with convictions is just the tip of the iceberg, right? So, I had to work really hard to make the word iceberg fit this. So, we’ve got empathetic interviews, disclosure, and vetting and that’s the E of our iceberg. So, I hope it’s not been a wasted effort but let me just get to the empathetic interviews, disclosure, and vetting. The big thing I want to share with you is whether, and I’m not right now just talking about the applicants. I’m not just talking about the people you hire. I’m talking about the people you already employ as well because when you think about when you have to sign up to an electricity bill or a new phone bill, they’re asking for so much information from you, aren’t they? The phone provider or the electricity provider. They want to know everything about your life and your favourite colour and all these, you’ve got to figure it all out. And then you’ve got to sign a huge contract that you don’t really understand or it doesn’t make sense of. Jacob Hill Now imagine that instead of it being for an electricity bill, it’s for your income. It’s to get a job. And now imagine that instead of asking about all your life, they’re asking about the most shameful part of your life. This is what applicants, candidates, and your existing colleagues go through every day. They have no idea when and if they should tell you about their conviction. They don’t know why they’re being asked the information or how you’re going to make a decision based on it. They then don’t know what’s going to happen to that information once they’ve told you. So, as an organisation building a transparent and empathetic approach to people with disclosing convictions, no one really knows how to disclose their conviction. It’s not something that you are taught to do necessarily in a prison. So, it can be quite an awkward and uncomfortable experience, particularly if the hiring manager on the other side doesn’t feel adequate briefed as well. So, this is something I’d love to cover today and I think Amy might even allude to a few of these points and experiences that she’s experienced in all of that. So, as an employer, it’s well worth doing. There’s huge elements to retention. There’s huge elements to filling your vacancies but let’s look at how, as an organisation, we can ensure that disclosure isn’t a really uncomfortable process for both you and the applicant. They might just want to move on from their past as much as you want to employ that person. So, let’s find a way that that meets in the middle. Thank you for listening. Zoe, back to you. Zoe Raymond That’s great. Thank you, Jacob. So much information. I feel like the iceberg is such a great, no, not too much at all. I thought that was like such a great way of putting it, that you get all those foundations right and then you can just put that little bit on top of that kind of final bit of inclusion but actually, there’s lots of good things probably that you’re already doing that are forming that foundation. And I can see that you’ve answered someone’s questions about sharing the slides afterwards, that’s really helpful. Yes, we will be able to share the slides. Brilliant. Great. If I can just ask you to stop sharing your screen, Jacob. That’s all right. And I think we’ll turn to Amy now. Amy, I think it would be great just to hear a little bit about some of your experience of receiving disclosures of convictions. I know that you’ve experienced this in a few different ways and different routes of talking to people about their convictions. So, do you want to just tell us a little bit about that? Amy Solanki Absolutely. So, I’ve had quite a few different experiences with dealing with people with criminal convictions. And I think the first point of when I first started to have anything to do with this, I panicked. I was in absolute panic and I think I was worried about it, how making the wrong decision or doing something wrong and in HR that can be quite daunting. But I think the best piece of advice I can give is, if you’re hiring somebody with a conviction, it’s just to take a minute and just to understand what the conviction is and not to panic. I think that’s the biggest thing. I think as soon as somebody says or ticks a box to say that they’ve got a criminal conviction, I think the first thing you think is, oh, my God, I can’t do this and panic. But I think the first thing you do is just not panic. Easier said than done, I know. And then again, if you’ve got to do a DBS check on somebody with a criminal conviction, I think the biggest thing that people have got to realise is there’s no pass or fail with a DBS check. It is literally. Just a disclosure of information, and it’s up to you as that HR professional to decide how you’re going to use that information and, kind of, build in a centre check of, how can you support that person within this new role? So, I’ll give you a couple of examples of where I have you know used a DBS check in a role, and the role was for an accountant, for example. And the conviction was fraud so you know, it’s like, that doesn’t mean that I automatically ruled this candidate out. He was the best candidate out of the bunch and actually, I thought, right, let’s see how we can work with this person. So, I took it away and I didn’t react straight away because I think the impulse to react and think, oh God, I can’t employ this person. He’s got a fraud conviction. It’s just too strong.’ Amy Solanki So, you’ve got to take it away and think about it. And I did take away and I did think about it and I thought, OK, how can I mitigate risk in this situation? What can I put in place to support this person getting back into work? Being the best candidate that we’ve got, and actually, you know, supporting them in this role, and we put in risks once we did a risk assessment, we put in elements of there would be dual signing, there would be, you know, limited restrictions on what this person could authorise. But what ended up happening, they became one of the best accountants there and really helps support other people and used their experience to help guide some of the junior accountants that were in the actual organisation. So, it really goes to show you know, by putting your faith in somebody and actually being able to give them that chance, they are so appreciative of the fact that you’ve done that, because they’ve got a qualification in accountancy, but can’t use it or limited to how they can use it. So, it’s really, really good that we’ve been able to do that for this person. But also, there’s the other end of almost kind of hiring people with criminal convictions. So, we’ve had people in a factory-based setting, for example, where there is exposure to certain substances. If they’ve been convicted of a substance abuse, it’s about how do we mitigate that risk, and how do we stop them from you know, potentially misusing substances again. And this one example I had where this chap actually said to me, I actually want you to put it mandatory in my contract that I get drug tested every week because that’s the only way I know that I will stay clean. And he was very honest and very frank with me. At first, I thought that was quite daunting because I’ve never had anybody be so straight with me with how they want to be kind of dealt with and it was, you know. I did say to them that, that’s not necessarily necessary for you on this occasion. But he was like no, you know, we can build this element of trust. But he was like, no, this is the only way I’m going to stay clean, and I need, I need you to be able to do that for me. And I know. So, we’ve had a conversation of, of, you know, did that take time out of my day having to drug test somebody every week? Well, actually, not really. It was a five-minute test and if that meant that I could support that person getting back into work and actually, trying to improve themselves. It’s not much of an effort really when you think of it like that. Amy Solanki So yeah, so we’ve had quite a few different experiences. Zoe Raymond That’s great. Thank you so much. Yeah, just like, I think those two examples are just like really great kind of examples of different, different approaches to take, as well. That was really fantastic. I particularly like the, when you’re talking about the accountant and the risk of fraud, I think there’s just something really great there as well about thinking about risk generally, and, you know like, someone with a conviction has been caught, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that there aren’t people in your business who you need to consider about the risk of the positions that they hold and the amount of influence that they have. So, I think really great to have done some of that thinking around, do we need things double signed. What, you know, how can we kind of mitigate some of that, just generally. I think we’ve had a bit of a question from someone saying. No, go ahead. Go on, Amy. Amy Solanki I was just going to say, it is a challenge to try and get management on board with you because of the amount of risk they factor into this. And like we’ve said before, sometimes it’s not all kind of roses and sometimes people will come on board and it’s not a good fit and they do leave. But the thing is, is that risk is with anybody. So, that’s regardless of whether they’ve got a criminal conviction or not. So I think it’s about opening the eyes of the management team and actually explaining that that risk could be, that could happen with somebody without a conviction but sorry, yes, there’s a question. Sorry, what was the question? Zoe Raymond Well, actually, Jacob’s popped up. Did you have something to add? Jacob, I wondered if you. Jacob Hill For me, it’s all about having a board-ready business case. So I love my alliteration. The board-ready business case is how do we link this project? The employing of people with convictions, not specifically to, we should employ people with convictions because it’s good for individuals, for society. I believe that that will happen as a result of this. But how do you make it good for the business? So, how do we get, because the board is there to maximise profits and efficiency and all these fun things and that they’d love to see OK filled vacancies, reduced agency spend, increased retention more business one as a result of this all as being legal and compliant. And it sounds like Amy got the buy-in from the board eventually because of showing that it does work. Look at the successes here. I asked Amy this the other day, but Amy, do you think it was worth it, all these extra bits you did for those two people? Amy Solanki Oh, 100%, absolutely. At the end of this project that we did, we saw production rates in the factory increase. So, there was evidence in the fact that, just by recruiting people with criminal convictions and going in. I mean, we went in, I did a drive in our local prison of trying to recruit and, just by doing that, it just showed the impact that it did have on our production line. Said that, the evidence was there which was fantastic, you know, so we could continue with that project. So, yeah, it’s all about getting that buy-in. But I think before you start to look at, like Jacob was saying, before you start to look at getting that buy-in, you know, do some research on it. There’s no harm in doing some research and seeing how you support people with criminal convictions, just to kind of give you that backing when you go to the board to be able to say, look, this is what I would like to do and this is how I’d like to approach it. Jacob Hill Zoe, that’s a huge position to plug the CIPD Mentor Trust mentoring programme right here probably, like get involved, volunteer mentor, and support socially excluded people. Zoe Raymond Yeah, absolutely, hold on. I have a link to share, which I carefully copied into my document. Yes. So, if you are interested in supporting people with convictions through the CIPD Trust, one thing you can do is volunteer to mentor people who are looking for work or who’ve just got into jobs to kind of support them to, yeah, kind of get ready and find that and yes, I’ve shared the link. So please do sign up, you’ll see on that page a kind of variety of volunteering options that we have. So please do, yeah, definitely sign up. Right, we had a question Amy that kind of following on from your what you were saying about that kind of management of risk, and I think perhaps you both will have views on this. Someone has asked, how would it work in a small business where there are many single seats so there’s less oversight. So, I guess you’re less able to do some of that sort of double signing and you know, checking over of things. How do you think that could work in terms of just managing some of those risks? Amy Solanki I think it’s, I think if you’re going to do something like this, like this type of project where you are openly recruiting people with criminal convictions. I think you’ve got to be honest about it and if you’re in a smaller organisation, you know, I would probably start with saying this is what we’re going to be doing and explaining the reasons why and the potential benefits of you know, doing this as well, potentially increasing in productivity for example but I would probably be very honest and transparent about it and address any concerns there because I feel like that would probably be the best time to discuss it before somebody actually started. Then I think that in that way, when somebody did start, you’d be able to support them a little bit better. I understand that people might know about this person’s criminal conviction but actually, it just kind of reassures the team, but also it makes sure that you can openly work with this person as well. I’d also just mention to the person that would be potentially starting the team that this was the situation because I wouldn’t want them to feel awkward that people knew about their conviction and ask them if that, you know, OK for that was to share that with them and not necessarily what the conviction was for, but to say, you know, is it OK for us to say to the team that we’re putting in these processes to support you within the role because of this criminal conviction and maybe something like that but I wouldn’t probably go into detail about what the criminal conviction was. I think that’s not necessary. Zoe Raymond Yeah, absolutely. And Jacob, I wonder if you, I know you mostly work with kind of bigger organisations, but have you kind of supported those smaller organisations on how they can sort of think about these things and how it works in that context? Jacob Hill Yeah, Off Ploy is a team of 30 people, 70% of our team have lived experience of the justice system. In fact, we get access to the best talent because we proactively employ from the cohort of people we support so we get them before any of you lot will ever get your hands on them as these amazing colleagues and employees. So, I’m very fortunate with that. Size doesn’t matter in this context. I think as an organisation, the smaller you are, the more opportunity you’ve got to bring the entire team on board to say, this is the general direction we’re going. We might not proactively recruit people with convictions, but we’re not going to discriminate against them or if we do, it’s because people’s role, the risk of the role is too high for this certain conviction or this risk category. That would give people a sense of comfort that there is a process and a system behind it. Every company that asks about a criminal conviction and every company that conducts a DBS check has to have a criminal records policy. Yet only 16% of companies have one. So, I would say to you from today’s call, like go and get a policy, just write it down. And that is just your approach to employing people with convictions. If you ask, when you ask, what you do with the data, what next. So, I’ve got a template for it, Zoe. Should I share it in the chat or should I send it later? I’m not sure. Zoe Raymond Yeah, please do. I was going to say, and Jacob, is there a template anywhere? Because I’m sure you have one. Jacob Hill Got my little link so I’m pressing away. We’ve got a policy template. That is how small teams do it because small teams at least just get it onto one document, get the team onboarded. I wouldn’t necessarily be disclosing people’s convictions to the team, nor would I say the next hire is someone with a conviction. But as an employer, I think once you’ve made a proactive decision to employ someone and once you’ve told the team that this is the general direction we’re going in. You might actually want to consider the other side of it, which is bullying and harassment that, if you make a decision to employ someone despite their criminal past, and they then get the newspaper articles stuck on their locker at work or something like that, what’s your stance going to be as an employer? Are you going to dismiss the individual, based on the conviction that you’ve hired, or are you going to say to the colleagues, this isn’t a behaviour that fits with our culture? Any size organisation can have those challenges, but I think, as long as you’ve got a central plan and you’re bringing people generally on board, that’s the way to do it. Zoe Raymond Yeah, that’s great. And I think you kind of touched on this question around, you know, how much do other people need to know? And obviously, there are some kind of data protection rules that you need to follow and things about what you share and when you share it. But I think there is also that risk. I mean, I know I do this, right? So, you get an email saying, this new person is starting the first thing you do is Google them and generally that would just pop up there, LinkedIn, but obviously in some instances that can reveal other information, like that they have had a criminal conviction. What are kind of ways that organisations can sort of handle that information? Because obviously it’s one thing for the organisation to be disclosing in kind of specific ways to specific people to manage risk or whatever it is, but sometimes those things get out anyway, don’t they? And yeah, how can organisations get ahead of that or what’s the best approach? Jacob Hill Amy, do you want to go first on that one, or? No? Brilliant, so that it actually ties to another question here about public perception of employing people with convictions. It might negatively impact our image or our brand. When considering every hire, when considering someone with a conviction, you first consider the risk of the role first. So, does this role work with vulnerable adults or children? Does this role work unsupervised with a big pile of cash? Does this role manage data? Is this role public facing? Is this role a prominent public figure for our organisation? It could even be something as like, for example, one of our clients, Transport for Wales, has station attendants and that’s people who stand on the station wave the train in. And so public perception matters at that point. If that person is, has a notorious crime that is publicly out there and that crime is not yet spent, you can actually say we’re not going to employ them based on this conviction this because a criminal conviction unspent is not a protected characteristic. So, as an employer, you have a legal right to discriminate against someone with an unspent conviction. And now I know that sounds mad that I’d be saying that as an organisation, but I want it to be sustainable for you as an employer. And I know people’s, what we’ve got to do is go from seeing this big group of people with convictions, these axe murderers and these headline newspapers, and start to recognise that it’s like, what about Jacob? Would you employ Jacob in this situation for this role? And I think that would change things. So, public perception is one thing to consider but as an employer, I think that will come up few and far between. I think ultimately you will find people who just want to get on with their job and keep their head down. If other colleagues are Googling them and finding stuff online, you’ve made your decision as an employer. It goes back to putting it on the locker. Where do you stand in that situation as a people professional? Zoe Raymond Yeah, I think that’s a great way of putting it. Amy, did you have any other thoughts to add on that? Amy Solanki Yeah, no, I agree with Jacob and one of the instances where we’ve had somebody who wanted to come on board as a delivery driver but we found out they were actually banned from driving. You know, in those circumstances, you know, you can’t move forward with that role because, unfortunately, they’re not able to drive. And we’ve had instances where people have applied for delivery drivers and they don’t even have a driver’s licence. You know, so it can be very much a case of you know, you do have the right to withdraw in that in that instance. But I think I think one of the most important things within this is, is you’ve just, in the best way in the world is just got to use your common sense in it as well, it comes down to common sense a lot of it. But like I was saying earlier is you know I think with a lot of, a lot of the policies and the way people work within an organisation We’ll say a lot as well. Amy Solanki So, you know, Jacob’s right. You do need to have these policies in place because without them, it doesn’t make it difficult but you know you can almost manage the situation a little bit better if you like Zoe Raymond Yeah, great. Thanks. I think such a big part of it, it’s not an open-door policy, is it? It’s about making kind of clear-eyed decisions and standing by those obviously the policies really help with that. And like, it’s just about having that backing and not just saying no as a knee-jerk reaction, I think. Amy, this question specifically was about what, would you say to an exec who thinks they that liking the hiring people with convictions will create bad publicity for the company. In terms of that, just as an HR person influencing, I guess this is influencing upwards, do you have any advice for how to sort of do that effectively or to have some of those conversations? Amy Solanki Funny enough, I did actually get challenged by one of our board members with regards to it damaging the representation of the actual organisation. I did fight back on it and say, OK, but you can get that with somebody without a criminal conviction So give me an example, and I kept pushing back and saying, OK, give me an example. You know, he would say, oh, well, we hired a murderer or, we hired, you know, and I was like, OK, so OK, so, if we did hire somebody who’d murdered somebody, OK, then what? So, keep coming, keep, keep explaining to me what the situation would be. Would we disclose this to the public that, oh yes, our organisation has hired a murderer today and they’re going to be in our workforce? We wouldn’t disclose that to the public. But it was, it was almost challenging it back, and actually saying, OK but you know, you could have somebody that could work with you that could become a murderer, for example. You don’t know this and actually, so it was all about like, looking outside the box with this situation. And I don’t think that particular board member liked to be challenged back, but it’s about being realistic with your opinions and your views on something because anything can happen in any setting. And it’s just about how you manage those and what you put in place before you start to go down that route to be able to protect the actual organisation and the business as well. And like Jacob was saying, you know, it’s about getting those policies in place, it’s about getting measures in place that support not only the individual but the organisation, the representation, not the representation, sorry, the reputation of the actual organisation. So, it’s about getting all of that put in place, and if you’ve got all that put in place already, when you go to the board member at that stage, they can’t really push back on you when you’ve already got it in place. So yeah, I think it’s about how you handle the conversation and keep pushing back, that’s what I would say. Zoe Raymond Yeah. Great. Yeah, thank you. It is about that keeping on, I think, and having that arsenal of things in your back pocket to kind of go well, what would happen, and someone once described that to me as, yes if so, you’re kind of saying yes, if that happened, what then. Zoe Raymond So, just like really pushing those thoughts to their logical conclusions. We have a great comment from Emma, which I just wanted to share, which is, I’ve used risk assessments in the past with a view to mitigate if we can, so mitigating those risks. However, these are undertaken independently from the hiring manager so that we don’t have to share any information, which I think can be a really good approach. Obviously, there may be situations where you do have to share things with the hiring manager if that’s, you know, they, well, if they kind of end up having to work with someone and put some of those mitigations into place themselves. But, yeah, I think that’s a really great approach to take of just sort of almost taking out of their hands in terms of the decision-making. Great. I had, so I had a question on my little list of questions which I’d like to ask both of you, but I’m going to go to you first, Amy. Which is, what advice would you give to someone in HR who receives like an unexpected disclosure of a conviction? So, suddenly someone comes to you and says, oh, I’d have to tell you that, either I was convicted in the past or I have been convicted recently. How can people handle that in a kind of, as Jacob said, an empathetic way? Amy Solanki Yeah, absolutely. So, I have had a delivery driver who was banned from driving and obviously couldn’t continue within their role. And it was a long-standing member of staff. Excuse me, sorry, and we looked at accommodating them in a different setting, just because they, you know, had this driving ban doesn’t mean that necessarily we have to close their contract or end their contract. We looked at the settings for that person to be able to continue working in the same, in the organisation but in a different role and we just looked at, there was no risk necessarily. by putting them back into the factory. We just looked at how we could accommodate that person because they were a valued member of the organisation and just because they had a conviction, didn’t necessarily mean they were any less valued, it just meant that there was a different role. And we didn’t, we didn’t announce it to the rest of the organisation or anything like that. We just said this person is going to be doing this role now and that was it, that was that was the end of that, there was nothing else to discuss, really. So yeah, so I would say you know, you don’t have to instantly think oh I’m going to go to dismissal. You know, we’re going to have to make this person redundant or anything like that. You could potentially look to see if there’s a place where they could fit somewhere else within the organisation and see if you can accommodate in that situation. So, yeah, it’s always about kind of taking a moment and just thinking, where can we put this person because they can’t do this job any longer? So, yes, so that’s a kind of live example of what we’ve done before. Zoe Raymond Yeah, that’s great. Thank you. Jacob, did you have anything to add? Jacob Hill Absolutely. Let’s now imagine that, given it is one in four adults of working age, it can happen to an existing employee, it can happen to an applicant. If you don’t define when an applicant should tell you and you don’t tell them up front and all that side of it, it could happen at any point. I saw a question here, on what happens if an applicant with an unspent conviction doesn’t disclose it. Jacob Hill Well, that’s one thing. What happens if someone with a spent conviction tells you about their conviction and you don’t need to know as an organisation? So first of all, what are your processes on where you expect people to disclose and when they should disclose? Where does your policy, which probably doesn’t exist, say that? As an employee do I tell you whilst I’m committing the crime? Probably not, I assure you, you do not want to know about that at that point. Do I tell you when I have been arrested, charged or sentenced? You only hear about it when your finance director’s been caught for embezzling funds and he’s in the newspapers because he was sentenced to prison. You’d probably find out about that beforehand but you don’t want to hear about it from the newspapers, essentially, you’ve just lost a colleague. You want as much notice as possible. That then comes down to the processes that you’ve made transparent in place and how you make people feel about disclosing that conviction. If you take Amy’s example, that will look for other roles within the organisation, especially if it wasn’t a crime against the organisation, but one maybe you were at a pub on a Saturday and something went wrong over there. I have no idea. I’m just saying we’ve got to take a few things into consideration. But before all that, the only advice I can really give you on this call today, in the office or at home, is, how are you going to react? Have you thought about this? Have you practiced this? Is it, oh, all right, well, I’ll be back in a minute, I’ve got to speak to my manager and then, and then you imagine that situation rather than listening to someone throughout. thanking them at the end of their disclosure for being upfront and honest, a word that they’ve used and then admit that you don’t know what’s going to happen next because maybe you don’t have the process in place. So right, I’ve taken this down, I might need to come back and ask more questions. I might need to speak to my line manager, my safeguarding lead, this, that, the other. You might already have processes in place and organisations say, right, you tell me about conviction. I need to ask you these questions, which yet again, there’s a template inside the toolkit, 37 of you have downloaded it so far. I think some are struggling to access it, but great to see that there is a set of questions that you can ask people in there. My biggest thing to you is how you respond in the emotional part to the person one-to-one. The systems and the processes can come back, can be dealt with later. But just giving people, thanking them for disclosing, letting them know that you need to go away and figure some things out, nothing immediate is going to happen, but you’ll speak to them by the end of the day, that might be the only way you can handle a disclosure conversation with your current setup. Zoe Raymond Great, yeah, thank you. I think that’s quite a comprehensive set of things to be thinking about. Amy, I know you’ve talked in the past about the sort of importance of admitting to people that something is new to you or that kind of supporting them is maybe something that you’re kind of trying out. Could you talk a bit more about kind of what that was like and working with people when you’re not sure? Amy Solanki Absolutely. And I think, like Jacob was saying, you know, making sure that you thank that person for disclosing because it can be very nerve-wracking for them And very uncomfortable for them as well. But in the instance when it happened with myself the first time, it is quite overwhelming because you’re not sure what to expect for that person and for yourself, but like Jacob was saying, it’s about how you react in that moment and actually, you know, thank them. Say to them, you know, this is new for me, this is new for me too. I’ve not had anybody disclose this type of information for me, with me, sorry, so I’m going to just need just need a minute just to kind of get my head around this piece of information, find out how I can move forward to support you, what we can do to kind of mitigate any risk. You know, so just being really honest about how you’re going to go forward and not run out of the room and say, oh, you know what? I’ll come back to you in two weeks’ time. It’s about being really honest and just saying to them, I’ve never had to deal with this situation before. I don’t want to do anything wrong so I want to make sure I can support you. And that has always been the best way for myself, particularly when I’ve dealt with these situations, is just being completely honest and I think people appreciate that. More rather than you being kind of almost fake and going, yeah, we can’t, we can’t deal with that and just shut it down, it’s probably better just to kind of pause, take a moment, and you know, say to them and be honest with them because they’re being honest with you, so that the least you can do is be honest back. Zoe Raymond So important, that kind of trust, isn’t it, in workplaces? We know that, you know, it’s hard for people to feel that trust with HR, unfortunately. So, yeah, the more that you can, kind of you know, without obviously misstepping, I think, yeah, really, really important. Right. We are pretty much out of time, so I’m going to ask. Well, firstly, I have shared a link to a feedback survey in the chat, please do give us some feedback. We’d love to know how you found the session. It’s a bit of a trial. So yeah, please do let us know. And also, I’m going to ask each of you, Jacob and Amy, just to share one thing that you would like people to take away from today’s session. Jacob, I’m going to start with you and put you on the spot. Jacob Hill Wonderful. Stop picturing 12.6 million one in four adults and start picturing the person in front of you with lived experience, considering the character and the circumstance and then the conviction. Thanks, Zoe. Thanks, Amy. Zoe Raymond Great thank you and Amy, what’s the one thing you would like people to take away? Amy Solanki Not to be worried about getting something wrong. We are all human and actually, just having the right kind of emotional intelligence and not rushing to make decisions is probably the best bit of advice I can give you. Zoe Raymond Brilliant. Thank you so much. So yeah, thank you both, Amy and Jacob, it’s been an absolute pleasure. And thank you to everyone for joining. Yeah, it’s been great. Thank you all so much.