Over the last couple of years I’ve had my ear bent by so many local enterprises about the difficulty they are having in recruiting staff. It is a national problem: we have a million vacancies. With that in mind, I am now lending my support to Starting Fresh – a campaign being run by Sodexo, one of our principal recruitment specialists, which aims to encourage businesses to employ more people with criminal convictions. The campaign is designed to help remove the barriers associated with the employment of ex-offenders.
Apart from the benefit to businesses in finding employees in a tight labour market, getting ex-offenders into work is an important part of making sure that they successfully reintegrate into their local communities.
Too often misconceptions and prejudice prevent businesses from tapping into this underutilised resource. Concerns about hiring people with criminal convictions can often be attributed to a failure to appreciate the quality of education which now takes place in prison. Many of the 50,000, or so, offenders who leave prison every year do so with formal qualifications they didn’t have before they were sentenced.
Businesses can access the Starting Fresh online hub, where they can find advice about how to make use of this underutilised resource and provide support in the workplace.
Sodexo also runs prisons on behalf of the Ministry of Justice and is, in addition, using this campaign to let employers know they are welcome to visit their prisons if they are interested in offering job opportunities to prisoners when they are released. Organisations with multiple job opportunities can even run employer days in the prisons.
More information on the campaign can be had from https://uk.sodexo.com/startingfresh.hmtl