Offploy and their partners Prestige Recruitment Specialists are now two of over 100 employers who have taken the step to remove the tick-box question ‘Do you have any unspent criminal convictions?’ from the application process.
As a specialist HR advice organisation formed to help businesses recruit people with criminal convictions, it makes absolute sense that Offploy would ban the box – in fact, we actively encourage people with lived experience of the criminal justice sector to apply for our roles. We can even boast that at the time of writing this over 60% of our team have been through the criminal justice system and are now keen to help others turn their back on crime.
Supporting Prestige Recruitment Specialists however, was a different kettle of fish. Not because the recruitment agency was unwilling or unable to remove the tick-box from their application form, but because of a whole litany of challenges around informing their 150+ clients, training their 30+ team of staff, editing and printing thousands of application forms and ensuring the right processes were in place to correctly collect, assess and store the information provided by candidates who did declare a conviction during the interview stage.
Offploy supported Prestige Recruitment Specialists, one of only two recruitment agencies to ban the box, through every step of the process.
In partnership with Dominic Headley and Associates, a firm specialising in socially excluded advice and support for organisations we began by hosting several planning and consultation meetings on all the different elements of GDPR, practical data gathering and how we would train the company’s team of over 30 people spanning multiple locations.
After this, we held a company-wide briefing day in Prestige Recruitment Specialists offices in Hull and supported all their recruitment colleagues through the process of no longer asking about spent criminal convictions on the initial application but instead offering the candidate a better chance to disclose their conviction at the interview stage.
Now, Prestige Recruitment Specialists have successfully implemented ‘Ban The Box’ across their company. They now have access to a wider talent pool and more relevant data when assessing a candidate and to date have not received any negativity or loss of business as a result of taking a more proactive approach to recruiting people with criminal convictions.
If your business is interested in ‘banning the box’, you can register on the Ban the Box website. Our team are on hand to answer any of your questions and would happily discuss taking your organisation through the accreditation.
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