Launch HN: 70MillionJobs (YC S17) – Job board for people with criminal records
Again, on behalf of all the folks with records trying to get on with their lives, and myself personally, thanks again for your incredible support. Richard
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Hi HN,
My name is Richard Bronson and I'm the founder/CEO of 70MillionJobs (https://www.70millionjobs.com). Our website is the Internet's first job board for 70 million Americans—1 in 3 adults—with criminal records.
I'm something of a domain expert in this area because I myself have a criminal record. In the early 1990s, I worked on Wall Street and some of what I did was illegal. For a time I was a partner at the infamous Wolf of Wall Street firm, Stratton Oakmont (Scorcese film). I ended up with a 2 year Federal prison sentence. I was guilty.
I experienced first hand how difficult it was to get on with life after going through the "system." I served as Director at Defy Ventures, a great non-profit in the reentry space, but was interested in a scalable solution to ex-offender unemployment and resultant recidivism. I felt a new, for-profit, tech-based approach was necessary, so I launched 70MillionJobs. We're seeking "double bottom-line" returns: make money and do social good.
Like most job boards, our business model is based upon employers paying to advertise their jobs. We expect additional revenue to come from municipalities, who spend tens of billions of dollars annually, when someone is rearrested.
You might not be surprised to learn that most formerly incarcerated men and women are petrified to discuss their background with prospective employers. So we created a "safe haven" where all parties knew the score, and applicants could relax knowing that jobs being offered were with companies that accepted their pasts.
Since many of our applicants don't have a laptop or easy access to the Internet, we send out text alerts they can easily respond to. Because most of these folks have limited work experience and limited formal education, we plan on building a video resume platform to accompany their resumes. In person, many of these folks are respectful, bright and personable, so this will show them at their best.
540 comments
[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] threadWith lower entry barriers for tech startups, one would expect to see more startups that fight for a better world, instead of startups who fight for selling your data faster, or detecting your face better to overlay a duckface on top of it.
This is why seeing a startup like yours makes me hopeful.
Wish you best of luck!
Do you need a remote full-stack programmer?
I agree, it's disgusting, but that's the status quo.
Is this a list of curated companies? Or is there something that you're parsing out that denotes this acceptability?
I would love to hear from company founders about what factors they use to discover this information in their external job listings that are not on jurisdictions like this.
Source: http://www.millerlawgroup.com/publications/alerts/San-Franci...
Proceed to bullshit.
You mean his crimes? No need to abstract reality.
I was a homemaker for a lot of years. I also happened to be too sick to hold down a job during that time, but homemaker sounds so much better on a resume.
Find a preferably true and accurate description that is palatable to employers. Then realize it is tough all over at the moment. LOTS of people are having trouble getting hired at all.
Also: I did not suggest a man call himself a homemaker. So, I am not sure what the point of your comment is.
Uh, I'm not sure where this hostility is coming from. Just because someone responds to your comment doesn't mean they're disagreeing with you. I was just adding the context for anyone who sees your comment and interprets it narrowly as thinking that putting 'homemaker' on their resume gap is a useful way to explain it away without understanding the pitfall for 50% of the workforce.
I am quite open about my gender. Lots of people recognize that I am female. Those that don't can easily determine my gender by clicking into my profile. I have zero reason to believe people will interpret my remark to mean that men should call themselves homemakers.
Claiming that "I don't see the point of your comment" isn't hostile is just disingenuous.
> You could have made the point you made here without implying I was suggesting that some man should go with that framing.
> I have zero reason to believe people will interpret my remark to mean that men should call themselves homemakers.
No such implication was made. I liked your comment and was adding context that I thought was relevant. I also didn't claim that you were hiding your gender? I don't check everyone's profile on the off chance that it has the relevant information about them that I'm about to ask them. If you're not mature enough to handle someone _agreeing with_ and trying to expand on your comment without imagining yourself under attack by implications you pulled out of thin air, this conversation is a waste of both of our time.
At least in my neck of the woods (Western Europe) it's (relatively) easy to find programming work as a contractor/freelancer, and as far as I can tell employment history doesn't matter, at least not in the 'web' space of programming.
I just read this story and thought it might be interesting for you: http://www.sgi.org/people-and-perspectives/changing-lives-in...
https://ceoworks.org/
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/rates.html
>Percent of sentenced prisoners under the jurisdiction of state or federal correctional authorities, by age, sex, race, and Hispanic origin, December 31, 2015
446,700 white male prisoners 501,300 black male prisoners 301,500 hispanic male prisoners 122,400 other male prisoners
Which means male adults of color (925,200) make up more than double the male white adult (446,700) state/federal prison population.
[0]https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p15.pdf
The more disturbing statistic being that 1,745/100,000 black adults are incarcerated, compared to 317/100,000 white adults.
Female incarceration rates do not follow this same trend identically according to the data, and they make up only ~7% of the total correctional population.
As others have mentioned, our prisons are not predominately filled with people of color (although, I'm sure many people would believe that to be). A bit more diversity would definitely be nice ;)
The companies hiring are at somewhat of an advantage (they can hire anyone, the employees have more limited options). How do you ensure they get a fair offer, and not, like migrant labor, receive a below market offer? Would the marketplace effect here help prevent that? (edit - looking at the website, duh, it looks like you've solved this - awesome - and found good companies.)
Your revenue model is based on companies laying to get access to these prospective employees - how do you get past the stigma (without breaching q1 above)?
I like the municipality revenue model - it would be awesome to see them as "reverse recruiters" we're they pay every time someone gets a job.
This will be legal employment, so hopefully the abuses resulting from migrant employment won't happen, but the salary they are getting will be below the "normal" market price, at least for a long time - and this is a good thing, since they would otherwise not be hired at all.
As an employer, I want to hire the best people so my company can be successful. Why would I hire anyone from your site when there are plenty of other candidates elsewhere?
Do you think people will try to use your site to disqualify potential hires (i.e. use it as a do-not-hire list so those registered with the site can specifically be avoided)? How will you prevent this from occurring?
Why would a company that doesn't care about criminal records advertise with you? Wouldn't it make more sense for them to advertise on a generic job board, take the best resumes, and sort out criminal history issues as they arise?
Does your site allow employers to see what a job seeker's crime was, or any other info related to that that other job boards wouldn't provide?
Hell, Hans Reiser wrote a great filesystem and he murdered his wife. John Draper and Kevin Mitnick would probably both be good hires for certain roles. Steve Jobs could've been easily arrested for drug use.
Not associated with that company but one reason to hire a convict is that you get a pretty decent tax break[0] out of it
[0]https://www.doleta.gov/business/incentives/opptax/
Someone with criminal record has something to prove, so will be grateful for the job and work hard.
That said, local newspaper stuff is a horrible source of information. "Mr. Doe was charged with the entire book" routinely turns into a plea deal for the smallest charge on the list.
Not to be obtuse, but what incentive would an employer have to hire someone with criminal records?
In purely economic terms, I'm willing to bet some people with criminal records are willing to work for less than someone with the same qualifications and a clean record.
That's interesting; would be curious to hear if there's another side of the story as well.
Whether/how the math works there I dunno, it just occurred to me as another possible factor.
1. is there any extra liability for the employer if they knowingly hire someone formerly incarcerated and they commit a crime while working for them.
2. aren't some kind of tax credits for hiring formerly incarcerated incarcerated people.
3. is it only w2 or do you allow 1099 opportunities.
- It's a myth that these folks will be criminals on the job.
I wasn't trying to imply they were, I was more thinking of a company getting dragged into a witch hunt. Regardless of the population there's always a bad apple just like there's a diamond.
So many people deserve a chance to redeem themselves from being 'branded', yet are denied the exact opportunities that would allow them to do so. This problem goes back a long, long ways.[1]
Anything you can do to help is great. Best of luck!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branded_Man
Let's face it, America sucks in a ton of ways and the biggest crooks are bankers and people in finance--they stole billions and got away with it over and over again. So nothing else quite compares except maybe whatever goes on with the CIA and drugs.
This is from G.K.Chesterton, around 1907, "The Perpetuation of Punishment":
https://books.google.it/books?id=QtWvMclbR9YC&pg=PA504H7CQ#v...
It's been 20 years, she's married to a good guy and has a baby... yet that black mark still comes up on her record.
We are looking into gubernatorial pardon (Arizona has a decent process) but not holding my breath.
The first step to improving any of this is changing deeply held beliefs by our society, and many days it feels like an impossible task.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/they-have-to-be-monsters/
One thing I wonder about is if folks in our industry would be more willing to have an felon of some variety working with them than somebody who's been tarred with the racist/sexist/conservative label?
These guys spent 5 years grinding it out at whatever shit job would hire them just to spend 2 more in school + working with the hope of getting a simple rack & stack job, all because of some mistake they made in their late teens/early twenties. It was the exact same story 3 times, and all involving drug offenses.
It really gave me a different perspective on the situation. I don't think these 3 people should've been sidelined for 7 years. They could've been productive members of society well before that. Keeping them out of the skilled/professional workforce is painful.
This could be a huge untapped pool of candidates, as long as companies are willing to take the risk. I hope it takes off.
Right now the demographic make up of companies don't match the population, that's true, but these companies do tend to match the demographics of trained programmers. The difference in demographics is from people choosing not to enter tech. If you want to fix the problem, work on training pipelines into tech.
The best way to summarize our different viewpoints is probably "Wanting Equality of Opportunity vs. wanting Equality of Outcome". And-- you assume that if the outcome of tech-demographics is different than the population, then it must be due to racism/sexism. There are other cultural and socio-economic factors that influence the demographics of tech.
What does that even mean? Isn't all sexism bad?
Another example of positive-racism-- being a white dude visiting China, I got into night clubs without paying. :-/ But cab drivers also consistently added 50-100% onto the fare.
Implying that it's "positive" doesn't do any social justice but incites the us vs them, 0 sum game train of thought.
Is there evidence I'm missing? Besides my willingness to ask for evidence? :]
Maybe I'm just in test-writing mode, but, if there's a bug, we ought to be able to write a test for it. If there is bias in tech, we ought to be able to see it in data. Maybe we need to look at 1st-job hiring rates? Maybe we need to look at people who drop out of tech after their first year and don't return? But I haven't seen it. I'm not asking you to do this data analysis, I just figured that... there are a lot of people examining this, and it should have been uncovered by now.
How have you experienced racism, sexism or ageism in tech?
I don't see how that follows from the parent comment. What do you mean by this?
Here's a relevant piece from the Los Angeles Times.
'One example: Google's own data showed women were promoted less often than men because workers need to nominate themselves. Women who did so got pushback. Based on her studies, [Joan C.] Williams [law professor, UC Hastings College of the Law] found that women are rewarded for modesty and penalized for what men might see as "aggressive" behavior. Google began including female leaders at workshops to coach everyone — men and women — on how to promote themselves effectively. The gender difference among nominees disappeared, Williams said.'
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-women-tech-20150222-st...
These smart, awesome people never get to be "trained programmers" because attitudes like this allow casual, often unintentional behaviors to ruin their days.
Claiming this is a funnel problem is short sighted. We definitely need people in the funnel, but we also need to ensure they have an amazing time as they integrate into tech culture.
The population benchmark for "tech hiring" probably should look more like "college graduates" than "people with CS degrees."
If you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; otherwise please don't comment until you do.
No. Your attitude here is the crappy one. Without being called out, a community will never grow. It's entirely appropriate to call out a community for the issues it has. And yes, the HN community has a HUGE problem with not recognizing sexism and racism in the industry. Far too many are willing to take the, "I don't see it, so it doesn't exist" point of view, which not only means that things won't improve, but means that they will likely get worse, as those who are doing the bad things are noticing that they can get away with it.
If you don't want people to take snipes at your community, maybe you should look at why people are taking snipes at it, and work to be better.
And to the person who mentioned that my tone might be aggressive or somehow unpleasant: people have been saying that to the marginalized when they yelp in pain for centuries. Of course, no one wants to hear about how and whom they are actually hurting. They would rather those people play nice and exhibit a welcoming tone. I don't recall anyone worrying about their tone with respect to marginalized groups in tech. They rudely shoot them down, for the most part. That is why women leave tech in droves. And it ain't enough for us to shake our tiny fists by "not buying products" or whatever from these companies. (although, feel free to so) I'd rather the community know that there are actual people within their ranks who call bullshit. I'm sure there are the formerly incarcerated (remember Aaron Swartz would have been among these, as would Snowden, and Assange- so let's not forget about those people being considered "criminals" as well- just a reality check) women, people of color, veterans, and people over 35 in tech who read these threads and don't feel comfortable jumping in. I write here for them, hoping that one day, they will feel supported and comfortable speaking out.
Nope. This is hyperbole (although not completely unfounded).
My department hired a junior female of color coder of color after she completed a coding bootcamp. She wasn't a diversity hire, she was simply the best person for the job at the time. We legitimately needed to fill the position and luckily the company was willing to take a risk on a junior dev. In her previous short career, she was a public school teacher. She's not a "rockstar", a "ninja", or a 100x programmer (neither am I), but she's reasonably good at programming and is curious and driven enough to teach herself whatever she doesn't know.
BTW, we are an early-stage, funded cybersecurity company with a fantastic product in San Jose, CA.
For starters what you can personally do is not purchase or use services from companies you feel are unethical. Explain to your network why for example you won't use Uber or Reddit or whatever other company you're fed up. If you can get enough other consumers to see from your view you'll force these companies to change. This just recently happened with health food junkies, now we have McDonald's at least paying lip service to healthy eating and serving things like kale.
One thing that won't work if you're a tech outsider is shaming people who work in the industry. It's hard to collaborate with people if they feel your tone is hostile.
Don't get me wrong...I think what you're doing is great, but I think "ban the box" laws that allow criminal histories to be hidden from prospective employers are the thing that's really going to make a difference. Because hiring managers can always find fault with a candidate, either consciously or subconsciously, and playing it safe with hiring decisions is often in their personal interests, even if it's not the right thing to do.
Why should I give an opportunity to someone who has gone out of their way to hurt other people over a similarly qualified person who doesn't view other human beings as objects to take advantage of for their own personal gain?
Not sure I have all the answers but your concept of "the right thing to do" seems fairly unexamined.
Are you sure you've deeply examined that concept?
I'm not advocating for preferred treatment, just a lack of discrimination against ex-cons. The person who never went to prison should still have the advantage of work experience gained during the period that the felon was in prison. Anything beyond that is, in my view, unfair. I personally believe that the current system is designed, largely by lobbying on behalf of the for-profit prison system, to make it difficult for ex-cons to re-integrate into society and encourages recidivism. Society should want these people to be successful, if only so that they are no longer a financial burden.
I also believe that once people have finished serving their time, their right to vote should be restored. If you're expected to pay taxes and follow the laws of society, you should have your say in how public policy is made.
I recognize that my views are predicated on the idea that our justice and prison systems should aim for reform over punishment. Others will have a more vindictive goal for those institutions. I think the "changing attitudes" that I mentioned are people who are being converted from the vindictive camp to what I see as a pragmatic camp that believes a more compassionate approach will reduce crime and reduce the amount of money the state spends imprisoning people.
(It's crystal clear that we don't want these people voting, not ever!, because it might shift power centers and it might allocate funds to the needy, etc.)
But we prefer the poor to always feel that they are non-people with a "debt" to society; and automatic debt they pay from the day they are born. The thing is, it starts out that way, and we know it to be true. So, we will always see these incarceration measures as punitive; this validates the current power structure and those who benefit from it. And of course that doesn't "work" (if by work we mean "rehabilitate folks), and of course people end up right back in jail -- our society has figured out a great system to keep these people marginalized forever. Other countries who approach incarceration like rehab (Norway?) see actual positive results from its incarcerated populations---but we clearly aren't aiming for positive results for the poor. We are definitely not interested in this data or we would be doing something about it. Heck, it's cheaper for taxpayers! But we don't want it to be cheaper for taxpayers; we (when I say we, I mean those who voices are heard loudly- the wealthy) want profit to those in power while at the same time, ensureing their power endures because they really don't want to deal with the bees escaping from that jar they have shaken for centuries. "We" hate the downtrodden in this country, "we" certainly don't want them to have a first chance, let alone a second chance. When "we" realize this, those of us who care about this and who definitely don't want to be a part of this kind of a "we" will need to speak out and unify. But too many are unable to see the machinery at work making this kind of awareness more difficult, too many buy into a meritocracy that awards them accolades when it does. I would think engineers and scientists, many of them would have an urge to be skeptical of the criminalization of poverty.
Besides, I've met enough terrible people who were smart or lucky enough not to get convicted. Being a felon or not is (almost) no indication as to someone's character, just how adept they are at dodging the law.
It might also make a difference if the crime was committed when they were very young, and they now clearly recognize that it was wrong and something they would not do again. I've never committed a crime or seriously harmed anyone, but there are things I did in my teens/early 20s that it find mortifying at 40.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/consequ...
Only exception government jobs....
OP: Thanks for starting this, good luck, I've been thinking about doing something similar for a while now!