In May of this year, Dr Joe Garrihy, Assistant Professor, and Dr Ciara Bracken-Roche, Assistant Professor, with the School of Law and Criminology published the Employers’ Toolkit for Inclusive Hiring of People with Convictions with the Open Doors Initiative providing practical guidance for employers.
The Open Doors Initiative provides opportunities to some of the marginalised members of our society by creating pathways to work through training, education, employment and entrepreneurship. This project has received funding from the Irish Human Rights and Equality Grants Scheme.
Building on the authors’ recent research with the Irish Penal Reform Trust on employers’ attitudes to hiring people with convictions and PWC experiences in the labour market, the toolkit offered a practical evidence-based support for employers across multiple sectors.
The toolkit is designed to help Irish employers successfully navigate fair chance hiring, that is to give employers the tools they need to help fairly assess candidates who have a criminal conviction.
The Toolkit addresses key challenges and provides practical evidence-based information on:
- How to achieve best practice legal compliance for employers hiring people with convictions
- How to minimise and mitigate risk for employers, employees, and candidates/employees with convictions histories
- Best practices for onboarding and training
- Templates for different policies to help employers with fair chance hiring
- Keeping track of your fair chance hiring efforts with a ‘Hiring PWCs Checklist’
Read the report in full here
The research forms part of the wider Unlocking Potential Project that seeks to address barriers to higher education and employment for people with convictions. See more information at www.unlockpotential.ie