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Written By Digital Content Editor Thomas Ahearn
Most employees are comfortable working alongside coworkers with a criminal background as a full 92 percent of workers said they would be comfortable working alongside a coworker who had a nonviolent criminal record with a single, isolated incident, according to a survey commissioned by the job posting website Indeed.com.
The survey of 1,000 American workers released in September 2022 found that even if a coworker had multiple nonviolent incidents on their record, 67 percent of workers said they would be comfortable working with that person. But the recentness of the criminal offense played a role in exactly how comfortable they felt.
If a coworker had a nonviolent criminal record dating back 20 years, 50 percent of workers said they would be very comfortable and 5 percent said they would be very uncomfortable. But if the criminal record is just 5 years old, only 28 percent said they would be very comfortable and 8 percent said they would be very uncomfortable.
As for violent incidents of coworkers, the survey found that 66 percent of workers agreed that they would be comfortable working alongside a coworker with a single, isolated violent incident on their record while 54 percent said they would still feel comfortable around a co-worker with multiple violent incidents in their past.
The survey found that workers overwhelmingly disagreed that people with a criminal record should be excluded from getting jobs, as 72 percent said that companies that do not offer fair-chance hiring are not truly diverse and inclusive and 91 percent said that providing fair-chance opportunities was “essential to society.”
While 96 percent of workers surveyed said they preferred to work for a company that incorporates fair-chance hiring, the share of job postings on Indeed that included explicit language about the company’s commitment to hiring job seekers with a criminal record was only 2.3 percent in July 2022, down from 2.5 percent in May 2022.
Employment Screening Resources (ESR) is a service offering of ClearStar, a leading Human Resources technology company specializing in background checks, drug testing, and occupational health screening. ClearStar offers background checks for employers that follow fair-chance hiring guidelines. To learn more, contact ClearStar.
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