Second Chance Hiring Doesn’t Stop at the Warehouse Door
So here’s something that kind of bugs me, and I’ve been sitting with it for a while now.
Every time second chance hiring comes up in a conversation with a business leader, there’s this almost reflexive response. Like, a mental picture that loads automatically. And that picture is almost always the same one: a guy in a hard hat, a distribution center, maybe a production line. Something physical. Something hands-on. And I get it, because that’s honestly where a lot of the conversation has lived and that’s where a lot of the early momentum happened — companies like Dave’s Killer Bread and Nehemiah Manufacturing did real work and deserve real credit for moving the needle and getting people talking.
But I think we’ve accidentally built a box around this idea, and it’s doing a lot of damage to a population of people who don’t belong in that box.
Because here’s the thing. The justice-impacted population in this country is enormous. We’re talking roughly 70 million Americans with some kind of arrest or conviction record. Around 600,000 people come home from state and federal prisons every single year. And the assumption that all of them are best suited for a forklift or a fryer is not just wrong, it’s kind of insulting, and at a practical level it’s leaving a massive amount of talent on the table.
I run Corporate Development for Persevere, which is a nonprofit that trains justice-impacted people in full-stack development, data operations, AI skills, and a whole range of tech-adjacent disciplines. And I say that not to pitch you anything, but because I’ve got a pretty close-up view of what this population actually looks like when someone takes the time to invest in them. And what I see does not look like a warehouse workforce. It looks like engineers and data analysts and project managers and cybersecurity professionals and sales operations people and AI support specialists and everything else you’d find inside a modern enterprise technology footprint.
And so the conversation I keep wanting to have with corporate America is a different one than the one that usually gets had. Not “will you give someone a second chance in a packing role” but “have you considered that your next IT hire, your next help desk lead, your next data analyst, your next technical project manager — might be sitting in a population you’ve been overlooking?”
Let me say something about the talent piece first, because I think this is where the practical argument really lands.
The IT and cybersecurity talent shortage is not a small problem. ISC2 put the global cybersecurity workforce gap at somewhere around 4.8 million unfilled roles — and that was 2024 data, and the number keeps growing. Here in the U.S. you’ve got estimates ranging from 225,000 to 700,000 unfilled cybersecurity positions depending on who’s counting and how. IDC is projecting that IT talent shortages will cost organizations worldwide over five trillion dollars by 2026. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics was projecting 1.4 million unfilled computing jobs in the U.S. by 2027 before those projections were even made.
I mean, those numbers are staggering. And the pipeline coming out of traditional universities and bootcamps is not remotely keeping up. And so companies are sitting here with these gaping holes in their technical teams and their operations teams and they’re spending more and more on recruiting to chase the same shrinking pool of candidates with clean backgrounds, when there’s a whole other pipeline that most of them haven’t even looked at yet.
NASCIO actually put out a report in 2024 specifically suggesting that state governments should start looking at prison-based cybersecurity training as a way to fill critical public-sector cyber roles. That’s a state government IT association saying explicitly: the talent problem is bad enough that we need to seriously think about this population. And honestly, good. Because it’s about time.
Now here’s what I want to correct about the mental picture most people have.
The idea that incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people are universally low-skilled or undereducated is not accurate. It’s a broad-brush assumption that doesn’t hold up when you look at the data. About a quarter of incarcerated adults have some postsecondary education. Federal prison data shows something like 24% with college coursework. There’s a whole subpopulation of white-collar offenders who, by definition, were working in professional roles before they were incarcerated — finance, tech, healthcare administration, marketing, legal — and who still have those skills, even if their record creates friction in a hiring process.
And the certification and training pipeline that exists right now for justice-impacted people heading into tech and professional roles is genuinely impressive. It just doesn’t get talked about the way the blue-collar pipeline does.
Slack built a program called Next Chapter in partnership with The Last Mile specifically to place formerly incarcerated people into software engineering roles. Not IT support, not data entry — software engineering. They started with a small cohort and all of them became full-time engineers. Now they’ve expanded to 14 hiring partners including Dropbox, Zoom, Square, Affirm, and PayPal, all of whom are bringing these folks on in technical roles.
There’s a company called Televerde that has been doing this in sales and marketing technology since 1995 and they’re kind of the proof point that nobody’s paying enough attention to. About 70% of their workforce is justice-impacted, their clients include SAP, Adobe, Microsoft, and Dell, and they’ve generated over 14 billion dollars in revenue for those clients. Their employees are Salesforce-certified, Marketo-certified, and working in demand generation and B2B sales roles. That is a professional workforce doing professional work, and the recidivism rate for Televerde program graduates is 91% lower than the national average for women released from state prisons.
Checkr, which ironically is a background check company, has about 5% of its workforce as formerly incarcerated, including people in customer success and product-adjacent roles. JPMorgan Chase had roughly 9% of its U.S. hires in 2023 come from the second-chance population, and those are bank operations and technology roles, not factory floor positions.
Columbia University runs a program called Justice Through Code with three tracks — foundational digital skills, data analytics and UI/UX and project management, and a full software engineering track. More than 80% of the first cohort who wanted post-program jobs or internships landed relevant roles within six months. Relevant roles. Not any-job-will-do. Software and data and product roles.
And at Persevere, our graduates are coming out of a 12 to 18 month accredited program with full-stack development skills, AI literacy, and the ability to step into roles across the enterprise technology footprint — not just software engineering, but technical support, data operations, digital ops, QA, scrum master roles, UI/UX, technical PM, business systems and everything else where technology meets the business. Our graduate recidivism rate sits under 3%. The national average is 68%. I don’t know a more dramatic number in this space than that one.
And here’s where I want to say something that I think gets missed in most of the second chance hiring conversation.
It’s not just that these people can do the work. It’s that giving someone a job that actually means something is what drives the outcome that everyone says they care about. The research on this is pretty clear. RAND published work showing that people who participate in correctional education programs are 43% less likely to return to prison and 13 percentage points more likely to be employed after release. But there’s a more nuanced finding underneath that, which is that low-quality employment — minimum wage, short-term, survival jobs — doesn’t actually move the recidivism needle much. What moves it is quality employment. Career-track work. Work that pays enough to build a life around, that gives someone a reason to stay and grow, that carries a sense of dignity and professional identity.
And so when we’re talking about whether second chance hiring “works,” the answer is kind of: it depends on what kind of second chance you’re giving. A warehouse job is better than unemployment. A career in technology or sales or operations or IT is better than a warehouse job, because the stakes are higher on both sides and the motivation to succeed follows accordingly.
The SHRM data is pretty telling on the employer side. 85% of HR professionals and 81% of business leaders say workers with criminal records perform the same or better than workers without them in job performance, dependability, retention, and quality of hire. Those aren’t numbers from an advocacy organization trying to make a case. That’s SHRM, surveying thousands of HR professionals about their actual experience. And what they found was that the gap between willingness to hire and active recruitment is enormous — most of the employers who say they’d hire someone with a record are not actually going looking for them. The practice hasn’t caught up to the openness.
Here’s what I’d ask any business leader reading this to actually sit with for a second.
If your company is in technology, financial services, healthcare, logistics, professional services, or really any sector where knowledge work is a core function — you have roles where a justice-impacted candidate trained for professional work could step in and add value. Help desk. Data analyst. Technical support. Sales operations. Digital marketing. AI support roles. QA. Project coordination. Business systems. The full footprint.
And if your company is part of the Second Chance Business Coalition, or you’ve signed a fair chance pledge, or you’ve made a public commitment to this space — I’d just gently ask: are those commitments showing up in your technology organization and your operations teams and your sales teams, or are they mostly showing up in your physical locations?
Because there’s a whole population of people who are AI-literate, highly trained, technically capable, and already looking for exactly the kind of opportunities that most hiring teams aren’t even thinking about offering them. And the employers who figure this out early are going to have a competitive advantage that’s going to be hard to replicate, because this pipeline is deep and the barriers keeping people out of it are mostly just assumptions that don’t hold up to scrutiny.
At the end of the day, second chance hiring done right isn’t charity. It’s talent strategy. It’s workforce strategy. It’s community strategy. And it should be happening across the full enterprise, not just at the loading dock.
Chris “Spin” Spintzyk heads up Corporate Development for Persevere (perseverenow.org), a national nonprofit that trains justice-impacted individuals in technology and tech-adjacent skills and connects them to employer partners at zero cost.
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