Second Chance Hiring with Fifth Third Bank’s Chief Economist, Jeff Korzenik

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Jeff Korzenik:

Estimates are that when you get to someone with some kind of interaction with the justice system, it's north of 70 million. We also know it's not the burden of this, so having a criminal record from your past and even having done your time is not spread evenly overall communities. So the research, for instance, that looked at felony conviction count came to ... drew from the data that, for example, one in three Black men in America has a felony conviction, and you think about the way that burdens whole communities because it tends to create multi-generational lack of employment, multi-generational poverty.

And I think it's a message too to the corporate community and to the DEI community, unless we're offering an on-ramp to success for people with criminal records, our workforce can't reflect the diversity of our population.

Speaker 2:

The Will to Change is hosted by Jennifer Brown. Jennifer is an award-winning entrepreneur, dynamic speaker, bestselling author and leadership expert on how organizations must evolve their cultures towards a new, more inclusive workplace reality. She's a passionate inclusion and equity advocate, committed to helping leaders foster healthier and therefore more productive workplaces, ultimately driving innovation and business results, informed by nearly two decades of consulting to Fortune 500 companies. She and her team advise top companies on building cultures of belonging in times of great upheaval and uncertainty.

And now, onto the episode. Hello and welcome back to The Will to Change. This episode features a conversation with Fifth Third Bank's chief economist and discusses the overlooked talent pool of people who have interacted with the justice system. You'll hear about the enormous scale of this community with over 70 million Americans having some involvement with the legal system and the compelling business case for hiring this untapped talent in light of today's tight labor market, all this and more and now, on to the conversation.

Jennifer Brown:

Jeff, welcome to The Will to Change.

Jeff Korzenik:

Thank you. Delighted to be here.

Jennifer Brown:

I am delighted as well. So the fabulous Sue Mason introduced us and Sue introduced me and I'm sure you've learned a lot from her.

Jeff Korzenik:

Absolutely.

Jennifer Brown:

You can tell us about that in a bit. Sue introduced me to the whole talent pool that is those with conviction histories, those with criminal backgrounds and the millions and millions of talented people that heretofore are subject to institutionalized biases in terms of employment. And some of you might know and listen to those episodes that I've done on the Will to Change with Sue Mason and the ways that I've been learning about that community. I'm thinking about again, the lens through which I look at it is the DEI lens, which is processes that we have always thought were the right ones.

And yet the world has changed. It is very competitive, tight talent market. Jobs are changing and there is an influx, an enormous influx, Jeff, which I know you'll tell us all the numbers around of talent that's available, but that we cannot seem to adjust our systems and our processes to welcome into the workforce. So I am really excited to meet you, Jeff. Learn from you. You're an economist, you've many other things, but please let the Will to Change audience, know who you are, where you're currently engaged in the work that you do, and if you'd like to segue into where we always start on the Will to Change, which is that everyone has a diversity story, even those that you don't expect, we would love to hear something about that as well.

Jeff Korzenik:

Well, thank you. I guess I'll start with where I am. I'm chief economist for one of the country's largest commercial banks, but our topic today is technically an outside business agreement with the bank. So I don't speak that much about the bank that we've followed this path and done some great work there. I'm also, as a result of my work as an economist, I started down this road of trying to figure out why so many people were missing from the workforce and came to the conclusion that social ills this century, played a role unlike any role we've seen in previous years and decades and was really an economic problem.

And along this journey, I started focusing on the specific issue of people with criminal records and sharing the business case for hiring them and the best practices. I think the ground was softened for me with my exposure to diversity. I guess at one level, I should mention on my father's side, the grandson of immigrants who came penniless to this country and then, my mother is actually a war refugee from Nazi Germany. So there's a little bit of a start there, but my dad in particular was raised, he was first in family to go to college. He enlisted in World War II at age 17. He had to get his parents' permission to do that and that enabled him to get the GI bill, which he used.

It covered four years, so he doubled up on law school and undergrad what was supposed to be a seven-year program. He did in four years getting undergrad and law school degrees from Harvard and then worked a graveyard factory shift to get an LLM from Yale Law School. So very accomplished, amazing person. He passed away in 2003, but just an incredible person. And he exemplified the best of America in the terms of we can be a land of opportunity. He also was very active in civil rights. He wanted that opportunity that he had been afforded to be extended to everyone. And he also never lost touch with his roots.

He was raised in pretty dire poverty, and as a kid, I would go with him on technically errands, but he never seemed to get anything done, just visited people in his old neighborhood. And I now know that's getting a lot done. And on one of those visits, I was probably about 10 years old, he introduced me to a friend of his. They'd had a long conversation and as we walked away, my dad mentioned casually, "My friend was in prison," and I asked for what? And he said, for murder, a crime of passion. And then my dad said something that has stuck with me for 50 years. He said he's done his time.

And I think that's a value of openness that has lasted with me and has probably shaped my work.

Jennifer Brown:

That's beautiful. There's so much in that statement, those four words. Goodness. So as an economist and from a heart perspective, what really interested you in becoming deep into this conversation? I guess we could start with that, the business case if you will, the way that you saw the opportunity and the problem and the solution, but that these two things are not meeting for a variety of reasons that I think you and I need to unpack in this conversation, but how did you first get struck with the enormity of potential here on the part of talent and on the part of employers?

Jeff Korzenik:

As an economist, I can't let my heart guide me. It has to be the numbers aspect of this and the numbers for me start with the demographic profile of the United States. We stopped having enough babies to replace our population decades ago. So I always believed there was a labor shortage coming, and as an economist and as a banker, I believe this would be a real challenge for the companies we bank and that wouldn't it be great if I understood pathways for those businesses to succeed and to overcome the built-in labor shortage of the United States around 2013, there was a big question.

Even though the labor shortage hadn't really taken its bite, it was evident that we were missing a lot of people from the labor shortage. Economists used this measure called the labor force participation rate, and we are missing millions and millions and millions of workers compared to where we should have been say or had been even a decade before, and economists by and large just accepted that, okay, that's the new number we plug into our models, but it bothered me. And part of how I've approached this role as economist is when I go to different cities and I do 140, 150 flights a year, I will often meet with business leaders and we have the CEO round tables.

The New York Times actually sent a reporter to one of them in Toledo, Ohio and accompanied us because it's a really interesting learning experience. And I started hearing so much about problems with people being unable to pass a drug test. And when you're in manufacturing, for instance, or transportation or construction, this is a workplace safety issue. This is not being narrow-minded or inflexible. This is workplace safety. And that got me asking questions. In one memorable breakfast in Lexington, Kentucky, I heard that again and I said, "So what is it pot?" And everyone looked at me like I was crazy and said, "Pills."

And that was the first I had heard of the opioid epidemic. At that time, it hadn't really been as widely understood. It was obviously well understood in Eastern Ohio and in West Virginia and in Kentucky, but it was less known in the rest of the country and it wasn't viewed as a economic problem, a workforce problem. I started digging in and started to come to the conclusion. And then there was some wonderful academic work that supported this conclusion that this was more than this social tragedy, but it was also a macroeconomic issue. HHS, Health and Human Services estimates something like 10 or 11 million Americans are using opioids for non-medicinal purposes.

And then, economic work was done out of the Brookings Institution and Princeton suggested that more than a million people were missing because of taking pain pills. And then, there was other work done that suggested that long-term unemployment, particularly the gutting of the manufacturing sector in the Midwest, was bleeding people from the workforce. When you're out of the workforce a long time, you tend not to come in. And it was actually more of a direct line here. You had the despair from long-term unemployment led to self-medication, and that's a pretty quick path with opioids to criminal justice interaction.

And that was the big one where so many millions, tens of millions of Americans have a criminal record of some kind or another. It is a huge barrier to employment. To my thinking, I identified the problem, but I didn't yet see a solution. And then, very fortunately, I mean this was serendipity on the recommendation of my wife's niece said, "When you're in Charlotte, go to dinner at the King's Kitchen." And the King's Kitchen is a nonprofit restaurant owned by the top or started by the top restaurateur of the Charlotte area, Jim Noble. They take people in need of a second chance, homeless, recovered addicts and people with criminal records.

And help them get on a path of self-sustainability and employment in the food service industry. That caught my attention and I started asking about trying to locate other businesses. And then over the course of a few years, I collected the stories of businesses that had done this. The King's Kitchen was not alone. I very early on met a company called Nehemiah Manufacturing in Cincinnati. Harvard Business School has actually written the case study of Nehemiah, and it's required reading for all their MBA candidates and the CEO and founder and I have become very good friends and I have dinner with him now and again in Cincinnati, incredible pioneers.

What these businesses didn't know was that there were other businesses doing the same thing who had come up with the same system. To an economist that says that's a model, knowing a labor shortage was coming because of the demographic profile, there was a problem and here was a solution. So I started talking about it, writing about it and ultimately, led to writing a book about it and still very active in continuing my research and speaking and trying to seek new models and more effective models and help guide customers, businesses why they have to do this and how they should do it.

Jennifer Brown:

Right, and we are talking about some serious numbers. By 2030 and the process from prison to the world and the demographics of that influx of talent. Can you share with us just the magnitude of the transition that is underway now and backing up from that, actually, before you address that, so you talked about 2013. Tell us about what happened in the pandemic and how the last couple of years impacted this. I think you and I in our prep call, you were startling me with some ... it's just interesting data about what has actually accelerated and shifted as a result of that.

Jeff Korzenik:

This labor shortage as the result of the baby boomers exiting the workforce was supposed to play out gradually and was first apparent in 2018. We were losing about 10,000 baby boomers a day, we're retiring. The pandemic ... so anything that's demographic tends to play out very slowly. The pandemic was an accelerator and in addition to the 10,000 baby boomers a day that were retiring, you had another about two and a half million retire earlier than expected. So suddenly what should have been a gradual labor shortage became an acute labor shortage. I think you also have to lay that against the backdrop of the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent focus on our justice system.

And I think for the first time business leaders became aware that all is not right with our justice system, and that has led businesses to be a lot more cognizant about A, diversity needs and the labor shortage, but also a better understanding of some of the barriers. People who have been excluded from our system of success, for lack of a better phrase, understand some of those barriers better. There are some ... there's a genuine interest in the business community on addressing these wrongs. So that's been a potent combination. It's gone down some blind alleys to be sure, but I think ultimately I'm an optimist.

The business community has never had to care about some of these structural problems in US society. Now, they care because they understand that in the example of people who've had interaction with the justice system, that's their workforce, either their current workforce or their future workforce because you can't afford to overlook anyone.

Jennifer Brown:

That's right. Okay, so what are the numbers and by what year?

Jeff Korzenik:

Sure. The number I focus on, different people in the field use different numbers. There's a real problem with data collection compounding all this, but there are currently at least 19 million Americans with a felony conviction. That's the big hard number. It is well-documented. There's a number of scholars led by a scholar at the University of Georgia, put this to the test, came to that conclusion. Felony convictions are the largest barrier because often companies have absolutely no one with a felony without even knowing what a felony is. And a felony could be actually a fairly minor infraction the way we overcharge or have historically overcharged in the justice system.

On top of that 19 million, you have tens of millions more with a misdemeanor conviction. By the way, no one actually knows how many because we've never done good data collection. Estimates are that when you get to someone with some kind of interaction with the justice system, it's north of 70 million and that's the number you hear most. That does include things like tax liens or arrests without convictions drawn from state databases, that might also include some relatively minor traffic offenses. So we don't really know, but we know that 19 million, we know tens of millions more with misdemeanors.

That's bad enough to make it worse. We also know it's not the burden of this, so having a criminal record from your past and even having done your time is not spread evenly over all communities. So the research, for instance, that looked at that felony conviction count drew from the data that, for example, one in three black men in America has a felony conviction. And you think about the way that burdens whole communities because it tends to create multi-generational lack of employment, multi-generational poverty. And I think it's a message too to the corporate community and to the DEI community, unless we're offering an on-ramp to success for people with criminal records, our workforce can't reflect the diversity of our population.

So it's a very sobering number, yet I'm an optimist and I see progress being made.

Jennifer Brown:

So the business community is waking up to this enormous opportunity and yet can't help itself from being biased in everywhere you turn. So there is so many barriers. I mean, what do you think the top two or three resistance points are to even having the conversation and doing what needs to be done to accommodate, to invite, to ensure that people aren't knocked out right away banning the box work. What are some of the things that happen on the front end that could be changed and what is the appetite to make those changes, I guess? I'm curious to know also success stories of, "Hey, we've done this and we've had success and this guy didn't fall and we've been able to solve our problem."

"We've been able to be a good actor in the world and also by the way attract a lot of diverse talent of all identities and diversities to our workforce, which is also something that's where I live."

Jeff Korzenik:

Yeah, I think the big overarching problem is that there are broad assumptions made about this cohort within our country that we would never tolerate making broad statements about someone because of their race or their religion, but we tolerate it because of criminal record. And there's this implicit assumption that a criminal record from the past tells you something about the person today or their future. And that's frankly the flaw, where the rubber meets the road. Where the problem tends to arise is companies for no other reason, than an EOC requirement have to at least give some kind of consideration, to hiring people or to considering an applicant with a record.

The reality is there's a review process and first of all, does an application that has checked the box where there is a box present, even get any consideration whatsoever. If they do get consideration, and particularly large companies have, for lack of a better word, red light, yellow light, green light system of what's the offense and who's actually making the decision, and there's a very strong career bias from the person making that decision to say no every time. It's a heads eye, wind tails, you lose scenario. If I approve someone who has a record and everything goes as expected, I brought a talented person in.

Well, that was your job, just processing these applicants and getting them hired. If on the other hand, something goes wrong, whether it's related to the record or not, and there's, "Who hired this person who said, okay." So there's a strong career disincentive for typically HR or legal or talent acquisition professionals to be unbiased. And I don't blame them whatsoever. This is why executive leadership and executive accountability is so critical in order to make this work. So companies have addressed this A, by starting point is getting the executive leadership to say, not only we're going to do this, but I want to have results and I'm going to measure results.

My favorite example is Jeff Brown, who is a fourth generation grocer in Philadelphia, who has chains of grocery stores, including stores in what would otherwise be food deserts. He's very successful bringing quality grocery stores. He was a guest at the State of the Union from First Lady Michelle Obama one ... it happened in a year. Just in recognition of the incredible work he does for his community, but Jeff got feedback. They're opening stores in these neighborhoods that hadn't had traditional stores. And part of the feedback and meeting with the people who live there was don't just take our money, hire our people.

And that meant, some of these communities hiring people with records. So Jeff challenged his management team to hire six people with records who'd be good employees. As he put it, "If in the city of Philadelphia you can't find six qualified people who happen to have records, the problem is not with the people of Philadelphia, it's with my management team." They currently have 500 of their 2,500 employees are second chance hires. So phenomenally successful, very successful chain of grocery stores and incredible contribution to the communities that his business serves.

I've seen other models in terms of how do you do your review process getting people who are in the line of business involved, who are feeling the pain of the labor shortage are more apt to balance out concerns, having a committee approach, making someone's role to advocate for why you should hire this individual. All of those are ways you get to fair outcomes. Not everyone should be hired. Not everyone is ready to return to work. Not everyone is rehabilitated, but you need to bring balance to that process.

Jennifer Brown:

Right, those are some great ideas. I know you co-authored an article for HBR with somebody who's the foremost expert on background checks. What were the key takeaways from your work there and how does that get-

Jeff Korzenik:

Shout out to Sean Bushway, who's a distinguished scholar in the field. He's with SUNY Albany and also the RAND Corporation, the think tank and probably knows this better than anyone and was really privileged to work with Sean. So one of the ... I think the single most important takeaways, first of all, most people who have a criminal record just committed one crime and it was a mistake of youth and they move on. You don't necessarily see that in some of the recidivism statistics. Those are based on people who, for one, they're based on people who actually go to prison. Even in the case of felonies, the majority of people don't serve a prison term.

The most are minor, relatively minor perhaps in overcharged and just never go on to commit another offense. So clearly, they were not to the degree anyone's ... a career criminal, they were not career criminals, just people who made a mistake, wrong place, wrong time, errors of youth. So that's takeaway number one. Another takeaway is the best indication that someone is truly rehabilitated is the amount of time that's passed since either exiting incarceration or if there's no incarceration since the crime. So we shouldn't get hung up on what the actual crime was in most cases.

I mean, there's certain cases you do need to take that into consideration, but we should focus on the true evidence of rehabilitation, which revolves on time.

Jennifer Brown:

Those are such important distinctions. Go back to the CEO executive support. So the grocer had that fearless leadership was very committed, said, "Just make it happen. I expect you to make it happen, and it's been great," but back to the fear that people have of being responsible and accountable, and I know that a senior leader has the power in many respects to push something through, right? I would argue that is their job. That is something only they can do. So is it necessary to have someone like that? And what does it take to awaken that commitment in someone?

Often, when we think of DEI, you got to see it to be it, and the people that have made it from a certain community that's underrepresented then become the champion, right? And they are a different kind of leader. They show the way they are the light to follow and they tend to build different kinds of organizations because they have their own experience in mind and they know the community. They're acutely aware of who's missing. They were missing. They just happened to sort of get through the knot hole and get to the top of the house kind of witnessing, I'm thinking LGBTQ community, right? Tim Cook, sitting at Apple and not being really out for most of his professional career until the last, I don't know, what it was, five, eight years.

So it's the rare person that gets there that's had that lived experience, but there's tons of allyship, I think percolating at that level on a whole host of levels and identities. So I know that you probably know a bunch of folks that may or may not be public about it. Maybe they've transitioned their roles and they no longer can lead from that platform and really make something happen. So tell me more about leaders. How do we grow more that have a ... we want to say empathy, but a true strategy around this?

Jeff Korzenik:

I wish this was taught in business schools. I'm starting to see inklings. There's a professor at MIT who assigned some of my writings as readings and things like this.

Jennifer Brown:

That's so exciting. I love that.

Jeff Korzenik:

And you're starting to see in business schools, Columbia had a second chance symposium. MIT is going to have one. There's some talk of other schools and that's a start, is kind of legitimizing this and planting the seed early in the minds of leaders that this is a legitimate talent strategy. I think that's very helpful. There is ... and you've pointed this out or alluded to this, so many CEOs of companies today just are so divorced from the communities that feel the pain of this and they just don't know people who have a criminal record. So it's outside their zone of empathy.

I'm sure that's not a real phrase, but a way to think of it. I had a friend of mine who leads a foundation, he's on executive team of not public trade, but a large decent sized corporation who's leading the charge on this, and he said, what's the CEO strategy? And I said, to go back to their gated communities, go to their golf club and not think about it. And that's the reality. So it usually ... I'm not sure you can change this easily among existing leaders, but you can start growing it earlier.

There are a fair number of existing leaders who started out from very humble origins and are much more sensitive to this. When you listen to say Rodney McMullen, the CEO of Kroger, they're going to have ... after this acquisition they're working on, it goes through not 700,000 employees. I mean amazing, and he doesn't think of them as employees. He thinks of them as associates and he means it. He started ... I'm not sure what the term is today, but he started working there as a stock boy, the person who put things on the shelves. And here, he's leading this enormous corporation. He's someone who clearly has personal passion.

They started the New Beginnings program at Kroger, a pilot program. It started in Cincinnati, Ohio, and it is spread elsewhere and they hope to ramp it up nationwide. That's someone who leads from the heart and clearly felt strongly about this because of his own background. So there's two taxes. One making sure people who are open to that, get educated on it. I mean, people generally have no idea. I'm working on, for instance a ... there's such a thing as reentry simulations. They're usually about hour and a half to two and a half hours long where you go through the life in the first couple of weeks or couple months of someone exiting prison.

Very similar to poverty simulations, which many of your viewers, listeners may be familiar with. The problem with a reentry simulation is that you can't get a CEO to attend anything that lasts two hours long. So I'm working on a 25-minute one that will go into the executive boardroom and say, "Play along with me. Let's see what's happens," and once executives understand that mountain of obstacles someone has to overcome just to be a job applicant, you need access to a computer. You may not be trained in a computer, you could get a computer at a library, but you need a library card, you need an ID for a library card, all these things that back up and you realize that that applicant is actually someone of extraordinary determination because of all the obstacles they overcame.

And I can do that in 25 minutes, and that's the kind of thing where I think you can start to make a dent.

Jennifer Brown:

I agree. That's fabulous. I think that I've been a party to a couple of those scenarios with the headset on and just on the gender front, cisgender gender front, a little bit old school, because I think we're updating a lot of those, but there's still such a clear issue.

Jeff Korzenik:

Yeah.

Jennifer Brown:

Clear issues, but the experience of being female and the things you see, the things you hear, the way you're interacted with or not, in meetings, the scripts can be written in such a way that it just hit to me, as a teacher of this, it just hits on every single point that we teach and yet, the visceral reaction is unforgettable as a learner. It just takes it to a whole different realm to put people in that position. It's so uncomfortable sometimes that ... I remember speaking to one who developed these scenarios and she said that occasionally a male leader will rip the headset off, and I'm just so uncomfortable this has to stop right now.

Because it is so foreign and so horrifying, which it should be, but you hope that that gets into the deep recesses of our brains and our behaviors and our stored memories and really shakes us up because it's almost like you need that aha moment to really see it and then, to really have the will to change speaking of the title of this podcast, to have that fire ignited in you and then it becomes something that you promote as a leader and you do it tirelessly, and that commitment-

Jeff Korzenik:

It gets easier over time, and this is ... I mean, I think the LGBT community followed a similar path, right?

Jennifer Brown:

Yeah.

Jeff Korzenik:

First year, the outlier and no one has ever knowingly worked with someone from that community before and it's okay. Then, it's hard on the pioneers. I know women who were early in their careers in Wall Street who put up with absolute abuse and they were the pioneers and they made it easier for succeeding generations. I'm not saying the work is done, but if you have a trusted colleague who happens to have had a criminal record and yet you like this person, respect this person, it changes the playing field and how you look at the rest of the world, it makes it easier for the next one. I mean, I always ... people in the community of people with records are very grateful for my work.

And I truly believe I'm the lucky one because I went from zero to 60 in terms of friends with criminal records. My friends with records are some of the most standup people in my life because they've been tested by fire. And at my age, you don't make that many new friends, and I've made these wonderful new friends who are incredibly talented people who overcome obstacles I could never overcome or I don't believe I could, and my life has been enriched by their friendships.

Jennifer Brown:

That's so beautiful. I was going to ask you about not being from the community and being such a visible advocate for it alongside it, et cetera. We've talked so much about the role of allies for any marginalized community and looking the way you do, I'm looking at you, and maybe for ... my listeners, maybe you're not looking at Jeff right now, but we make so many assumptions about what people know about, what they care about, what they're passionate about, what they're knowledgeable about, but you don't speak from lived experience, but you've really signed up to be an amplifier for this. And I wonder, I know you went from zero to 60, that's what ... I often call that being thrown into the deep end.

You threw yourself into the deep end on something you probably didn't know a whole lot about, and yet it felt so right and it felt like the right place for you, and it felt like the right venue and you could be helpful. So I'm sure that stirred so much of you and who you are and probably brought to mind so much of your family history that you described earlier. And it's funny, sometimes we know why we feel called to things and sometimes we don't. It just sort of permeates us. So I do wonder, it sounds like, and I'm not surprised, you're deeply appreciated because there are rooms you can get into, there are conversations you can have.

There are ways you can be heard. I talk a lot about the stages I can get on and the rooms I can get in, may not be the same ones as others who don't appear the way that I do or speak the way I do or identify the way I do. I see that as such ... like you said, just now, such a gift and it has transformed me, and the way I see my purpose, it feels very clear to me, and it also feels clear why I was born with so many of the privileges that I was born with. It didn't really make sense and it felt very random and sort of an overabundance was bestowed, but then when you sort of figure out at some point, as I hope most of us do, that there is so much you can give from the position you inhabit that's really unique.

And that would save others toiling for years to get a change done that you could literally lean on an executive in a meeting and create an aha moment that creates a change. To me, it's just efficient. I mean, it's just efficient. If we want change and we all have a role to play and each one of us is a different kind of messenger, don't we all want to work smarter, not harder. Don't we want to lock arms and do ... from wherever we sit, do a proportionately the same amount of work, but when we do that work, it's received in the right way versus some of us doing no work and some of us sort of giving our all and fatiguing ourselves and making ourselves sick because we can't tolerate the system.

And we're victims of that system that we can't tolerate. So I just see you and I think what an amazing model. Anyway, I don't know what the question is. I suppose it's-

Jeff Korzenik:

I'm going to disappoint you because I don't even think of myself as an ally. I think of myself-

Jennifer Brown:

What?

Jeff Korzenik:

I'm here serving, employers need talent. Our country works better when everyone is given a handshake. So it's a different mindset. Maybe that's an old screen-

Jennifer Brown:

Because you and I have not spent a lot of time together,

Jeff Korzenik:

So I kind of keep on that path.

Jennifer Brown:

Yeah.

Jeff Korzenik:

Let me share a frustration with you, because we kind of talked about some of the CEO mindset. I have the great privilege of attending University of Chicago has launched something called the Leadership in Society Initiative, just incredible out of the Graham School where they are taking people who are typically retired CEOs or business owners who are looking for a next step. It's a wonderful well-thought-out program. Harvard has something similar the ALI, the Advanced Leadership Institute. I was at essentially a preview, I did ... at one point, I had a chance to share some of my work with a smaller group on Second Chance hiring, but I was talking to actually a woman who was head of DEI at a major Chicago land company.

And she said, wouldn't it be nice if CEOs understood they could do this while they're CEOs and didn't have to wait for retirement? And I have to say that, boy, she nailed it. Accomplishing societal good doesn't have to be a retirement project. You are actually able to do it much more effectively while serving your shareholders if you understand truly inclusive hiring and what it means in this regard,

Jennifer Brown:

Boy, and the risk. So what is the risk? I mean, when CEOs decide to do something, it gets done and people figure it out, and the risk is sort of metabolized into the system. It's baked in and yes, right, but we're doing it anyway, and there's risks to things that we do all the time in business.

Jeff Korzenik:

I think it's an issue of prioritization. I don't think any CEO says, "Oh, I can't take that risk," because they're large companies. Smaller companies, there's legitimate questions that need to be raised of what are the risks I'm taking? Because if you make a bad hire and get sued for a negligent hiring liability, for a small company, that's an existential threat because you don't have the resources. Now, the reality is it hardly ever happens, and if you're doing this the right way, you've done so much due diligence and have such a clearly defined process for selection that that's your protection from that, but you have to ask, as a small business owner, you have to ask a large corporate leader, you got your legal department.

You got outside counsel. You really don't have any kind of major risk, but what you do have is a set of priorities. And unfortunately or realistically, most CEOs today were raised, who came up in the business community during a period of incredible labor abundance. We had every year, year in, year out, you had more job seekers than job openings. So, you didn't really have to prioritize human capital the way you have to today. Today it started in 2018, 2019, disrupted by COVID but then came back with a vengeance. We have more job openings than job seekers, and that is the new reality of the American economy.

So businesses CEOs are ultimately pivoting to this and understanding that anything regarding human capital has to be prioritized, but they're not there yet. There's still many CEOs who just think of COVID, it'll go back to pre-COVID. It's not going back. It's baked into our demographics.

Jennifer Brown:

Yes. They also are fantasizing about return to office being successful.

Jeff Korzenik:

There's a lot of ... as someone of a certain age, it's hard to change.

Jennifer Brown:

Yeah. Jeff, I want to go back to ... I don't want to let it go exactly yet, but it was so interesting that I was experiencing your allyship and you're like, "I'm talking about a business case, and I loved that moment," because well, allies don't often see themselves in the way that we see them. So I remember when I had an ally to me as an LGBTQ person, and I knew and I know she constantly is tirelessly looking for equity and pursuing it, and I had to point it out to her and describe it to her and say, "This is how you're showing up. This is what you're doing. This is what you're impacting. This is the difference that you're making, and please keep doing it however much you can."

And she was just really genuinely surprised and didn't know the word and didn't know what it meant. She said, "Okay. Oh, well, that's good to know. I will keep going. Absolutely. Tell me precisely what made the difference." And when I teach these concepts, I think it's important to ... some of us just are so deeply committed, we don't see ourselves and we don't understand how maybe unusual we are. We don't understand the gravity of what we're pursuing, and we don't understand the power that we have or we do, but it's just like, "Well, this is just the price of being human." I mean, I get that feeling from you. This is my price for existence, and it's not a chore, it's a delight. It's a joy. It's a point of-

Jeff Korzenik:

Absolutely.

Jennifer Brown:

Right. I mean-

Jeff Korzenik:

So I did learn the term because very, very nicely at my employer, which has about 20,000 employees, our African-American Employee Resource Group recognized me as an ally. It's sort of an award, which I was deeply, deeply touched by, but I just kind of do what I do, because I think it's the right thing, and whether this is my mental facade I've set up, I have to view it as helping the customers who bank the businesses we bank, because that's how I can allocate my time and reason. Now, the reality is as this has grown, I've had to divorce this activity from my daytime, my day job, because in fairness to my employer, I can't talk about this all the time as an economist.

And it's not the only solution to labor shortage. It's simply the largest and best solution, but there's lots more. I've done some work with a Japanese economist, Daisuke Nakajima and we've looked at, how did Japan figure this out? Because our low fertility rate we have today, which is a record low in the US, they first had in 1978, so their population has actually been shrinking. They now have more women in the workforce. It's a percentage in a core demographic than the US or Europe. Amazing strides. They've figured out a workaround from their immigration log jam and cultural walls.

And they do a great job with older workers where that's one of the last bastions of bias is ageism and Japan, they've got a whole system. So I now talk about ... in my bank role, I talk about all a broader solution set, but it has to include giving second chances. And then I've got this ... I give up about half my vacation days to go and talk places, and I still write, and I have all these other things I do that are strictly focused on the Second Chance Initiative.

Jennifer Brown:

Yeah, I love that. I mean, I think there's a message in that for how we embed the, I'm not going to say cause we care about, because honestly, it's a fact. Like you said, it's a demographic fact. It's here now. It's all around us. It's waiting to be figured out, and we will figure it out. You know that we will. I share your optimism. I do. I just think this is one of those things I would put as a frontier conversation in our field.

Jeff Korzenik:

That's right.

Jennifer Brown:

If I canvassed all the practitioners in my field, all my peers, and quizzed them, or you said, "Hey, what's your knowledge of Second Chance? What are you doing? What are the barriers? What's your executive buy-in?" I don't know if a lot of us would really be fluent in it, and we need to be. So that's why meeting you, this was so important to bring you on, to educate us and to ... I'm hoping for you to sign you up to be a resource for people who are in the kinds of industries that can really, really move fast with this. It sounds to me like it's frontline workers, retailers. What would you guide us on in terms of industries so people ascending to this can know?

Jeff Korzenik:

Manufacturing is great, because you overcome some of the objections. It's not typically a customer facing role. These are middle school jobs that don't necessarily require a college degree, but require some training, but because they're middle skilled, they're also living wage jobs and you're not handling money, and those are the big objections, and that's where you see it. Manufacturing and construction tend to have been historically "felony friendly" industries.

Jennifer Brown:

I see.

Jeff Korzenik:

So there's already a base ... not all of them, but there's already a base to build from. The other one that I think has to come a long way is healthcare. Again, I'm going to put on my economist hat. There's something called the openings report, which is looking at unfilled job openings as a percentage of overall industry employment. So it's not just how many openings you have, but how relevant is it to your industry? Healthcare is off the charts with a high openings rate. They have a bigger problem than any other industry. It's one whereas our population ages, there's huge demand.

There are some hospital systems like Johns Hopkins Hospital system that has been a leader in second chance, fair chance hiring, and there are others, which I won't name names, but prominent household names that won't let vendors paint the building with people with felony convictions. So it's all over the place, and surely a commitment to community health should have something to do with making sure that people who made a mistake have the chance to rebuild their lives and lead healthier lives. So I think the healthcare, I'm going to challenge any of your listeners who are in healthcare, because there's some great examples of where it works and others where they haven't taken the first step.

Jennifer Brown:

Thank you for those specifics. So I hope everybody's listening. We have a broad array of industries listening to us.

Jeff Korzenik:

Tech is interesting. They're doing all sorts of things, and there's partnerships. There's a nonprofit in California and elsewhere called The Last Mile. They teach people how to be software engineers within prison. I mean, incredible things that are going on. So when you start with 19 million people, you can find every talent and every educational level. Yeah, we can make broad aggregate observations, but I don't hire aggregates. I hire individuals.

Jennifer Brown:

That's such an inspirational note to end on. Thank you for this. Thank you for everything you're doing. Where can people get in touch with you?

Jeff Korzenik:

I have a website, jeffkorzenik.com, maybe not imaginatively named. I'm the only Jeff Korzenik on the planet, so if you can get close to spelling it, jeffkorzenik.com and you'll find articles I've written, some podcasts I've done. I can't wait to put this one up there, as well as links to my book, but you can buy the book. Untapped Talent is the name of the book. It just went into its second printing. It just sold out its first printing. So I'm thrilled. HarperCollins is my publisher and it's on Amazon and all the usual suspects, and you can even order it through one of the independent channels as well.

Jennifer Brown:

Excellent. We're happy to support. Jeff, thank you so much for joining me today.

Jeff Korzenik:

Thank you. Thanks to all your viewers and listeners as well.

Jennifer Brown:

Hi, this is Jennifer. Did you know that we offer a full transcript of every podcast episode on my website over at jenniferbrownspeaks.com? You can also subscribe so that you get notified every time a new episode goes live. Head over there now to read my latest thoughts on diversity, inclusion and the future of work and discover how we can all be champions of change by bringing our collective voices together and standing up for ourselves and each other.

Speaker 2:

You've been listening to The Will to Change, Uncovering True Stories of Diversity and Inclusion with Jennifer Brown. If you've enjoyed the episode, please subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. To learn more about Jennifer Brown, visit jenniferbrownspeaks.com. Thank you for listening, and we'll be back next time with a new episode.