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When Eugene* started his job search midway through 2023, he didn’t expect it to be easy. The prospect of looking for work can be daunting at the best of times, and this is not the best of times. Unemployment in Canada is hovering around 6.4 percent, a problem that’s compounded by factors like biased AI resumé vetting that is ableist or magnifies other human prejudices, and a strong downward trend for youth, whose unemployment rate hit 13.5 percent in June. But the situation is even more challenging for the nearly 4 million Canadians who have criminal convictions.
“When you’re freshly out of the justice system, you’ll take anything you can get because it’s less about the skills that you have and more along the lines of: What’s even available?” says Eugene, who was in precisely that position.
The GTA resident applied for nearly 100 jobs in the space of four months and landed just four interviews, none of which resulted in an offer. Eugene (who requested a pseudonym to protect his privacy) knew he had the experience hiring managers were looking for. But he also suspected that the five-year gap on his CV was setting off red flags and that a criminal background check, which doesn’t have to be declared to an applicant, would confirm that he had a record.
“Someone in my sort of circumstance will have very difficult questions to answer regarding the past,” he explains. “It is disheartening and frustrating but it’s understandable. In order to succeed in this kind of scenario, you have to be resilient.”
As he kept searching, Eugene was eventually connected with an Ontario pilot program called Second Chances that was created to help people like him find jobs. A week after he was enrolled and ready to go, he had his first shift as a server at a catering company.
Second Chances was the brainchild of Darren Perlman and Daniel Copeland, two Toronto entrepreneurs behind the staffing platform Spotwork, which launched in 2020. Their app connects employers and job seekers, then supports onboarding, scheduling, management and direct payments. Employees are vetted, their credentials are uploaded, and it’s not unusual for them to receive a phone call from Spotwork to make sure they know which door to use at their new gig.
While accessibility and inclusion were tenets of the operation from the get-go, after meeting with Ontario’s then Minister of Labour Monte McNaughton, in 2022, Perlman and Copeland realized their company was in a position to support a uniquely underserved segment of the population: the province’s one million justice-involved individuals.
“Studies have shown that people with criminal records are about 50 percent less likely to get a job and this is even worse if you’re racialized, particularly for black folks and indigenous folks,” says Safiyah Husein, director of policy at the John Howard Society of Ontario, which assists individuals and communities affected by the criminal justice system.
“We did some analysis and saw that 25 percent of our jobs at the time didn’t require criminal background checks,” says Spotwork CEO Perlman. They quickly realized that opportunities already existed on their platform and “people with a criminal background could start working tomorrow.”
The program launched in spring 2023 and after its one-year run, they had 24 companies and 260 job-seeking participants. Of those candidates, 163, or nearly two-thirds, found opportunities through the app. Eugene was one of them. “It was actually my first shift with Spotwork that was a pathway towards gainful employment,” he says. Eugene has held a full-time administration job since April, and he knows he can always use Spotwork or his other new connections if he needs supplementary work.
While the Second Chances program concluded in March of this year, its spirit lives on at Spotwork. Currently, 33 percent of their job postings do not require a criminal background check and, working with the 500 companies currently using the platform, Perlman hopes to raise that number to 50 per cent in the next two years. Spotwork also remains committed to broadening the marketplace for all job-seekers. As Perlman notes, in a survey from last year, “more than 95 per cent of respondents self-identified as being marginalized and facing a barrier to employment.”
Ling Huang has been thinking about how to support another underserved segment of the population since 2004, when his four-year-old son Brian was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In 2014, shortly after Brian hit his teens, Huang began focusing on the challenges faced by people on the spectrum who are trying to find jobs that suit their needs. According to research, only 20 percent of Canadians with ASD and intellectual disabilities are employed — and most of them are working in positions that pay less than minimum wage.
As an entrepreneur, Huang landed on the inevitable solution: if people on the spectrum needed jobs, he’d create them himself. The outcome of his efforts is Technology North Digital Services, launched in 2019, which currently employs 20 people with ASD (including Brian) to convert paper files to digital. The work is detailed, repetitive and requires a high level of precision.
“Instead of training people on the spectrum to look like us, to fit in our roles, we don’t try to change them,” said Huang, the company’s CEO. “We try to create an environment where their strengths and their talent can really shine.”
Since it launched in December 2019, TNDS has earned over $1 million in revenue. From May 2023 to April 2024, the team scanned 3.6 million pages of documents; the company recently expanded its offerings to include data management such as digitizing handwritten information captured in surveys, petitions and tickets for parking and moving violations.
Fostering sensitivity and finding solutions to lower the barriers to Canadians with disabilities is the name of the game at Magnify Access. While the Ontario school systems, from kindergarten through university, are well-equipped to accommodate students of varying abilities, support structures are often inadequate or non-existent in workplaces.
While some people with disabilities have greater independence navigating their work lives, others face big, inscrutable questions. How does a job applicant disclose a disability? Should they disclose a disability or will it bias an employer against them? When is the right time to ask an employer for a piece of equipment? And what’s the right approach if you’re struggling but don’t really know what with?
These and other hurdles are to blame for the 7.6 percent unemployment rate for the eight million Canadians with disabilities, compared to 4.6 percent for Canadians without disabilities. Seeing an opportunity to make things better for both job seekers with disabilities and employers who would benefit from their skills, Toronto-based Magnify Access launched a webinar series to provide thoughtful, tailored sessions to improve accessibility and equity in the workplace.
“We’re really trying to change people’s minds around supporting people with disabilities, dispelling myths that might exist, promoting the benefits of hiring a diverse talent pool,” says Magnify Access’s co-CEO Keri Banka. She notes that the company is part of the federal government’s 50 – 30 Challenge, which aims to achieve gender parity (50 percent) and increase representation of equity-deserving groups (30 percent).
Magnify Access is looking to roll out several new services later this year, including the Workplace Accommodation System, a secure platform that allows employees to identify needs and request accommodations (such as a wrist guard or a high-visibility keyboard) through a process that includes a follow-up to confirm effectiveness. The company is also working on a digital service for document remediation that will take a regular Word file or PDF and make it fully accessible.
A little accommodation can go a long way to providing more opportunities for qualified job seekers. Some supports (such as closed captioning for the hearing impaired) can be incorporated at zero cost. As well, there’s a need to raise awareness and establish best-practice guidelines for employers. “We need some standardization in terms of how and when record checks are done and guidance on when it’s appropriate,” says Husein, who adds that a criminal background is not an indicator of potential misconduct on the job. In fact, research in the U.S. suggests that people with past justice involvement exhibit lower turnover and that their job performance, on average, is equivalent to or better than that of their non-justice-involved counterparts.
For his part, Eugene would like to see a shift towards hiring practices that de-emphasize a candidate’s past and put a premium on who they are and what they can do.
“If you’re going to discount people with a criminal background or who have interacted even slightly with the justice system,” he says, employers are missing out on individuals “who are very thankful for a job, are motivated and may have the skill sets that you need.”
*Not his real name.
Image source: Adobe Stock
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