Applicant with felony

AACCCUA

If an applicant committed a felony two years ago and is on probation, what should I know legally about hiring or not hiring him as a custodial worker? (His felony was stealing money.)

Don D

If there is any possibility of him having unsupervised access to valuables of any description above 50 cents at the workplace, I would not offer a custodial job to an individual with a felony for theft of money.

LeeR

I worked for a large custodial company in Birmingham. We cleaned after hours when the regular staff were gone. You would be suprised the to see how much money, cell phones, lap tops, cameras etc are left out on desks. If you can't keep an eye on this ee I wouldn't hire them either.

marc

One of the things about the custodial staff is the unfettered access they have to all of your offices. After all, what do you control that does not need cleaning? Once you give them the keys and turn them loose, you have exposed the entire organization to their whimsy. Of course you can mitigate this by having them work in teams, security cameras and the like, but if you are not doing that sort of thing already, the cost benefit ratio would be out of balance.

I am all for giving people another chance, but this might not the job to do it with.

Rockie

I agree. I would not hire a custodian who has free access to the building. We have had a lot of thefts in our practice that are traced to after hours. We have actually caught a couple of them rifling through employees desk drawers, etc.

Shadowfax

If you will check a recent thread I posted on this issue, you will find a lot of other info - and all of our colleagues were helpful. Bur, to answer your question, what you need to know..and to consider, is that the EEOC views the basing of a hiring decision on the existence of a felony to be a potential disparate impact issue because it will probbly aggect more minorities. So, what you need to do is is assess the relationship between the job you have to b e done and the nature of the felony (others have done that for you here). Then youneed to look at the time elapsed since the offense; how he was punished - was there any counseling or other social engineering applied to direct the criminal app on the eror of his ways; rehab efforts; and his subsequent employmenht record, THEN REFUSE TO HIRE HIM. He may have paid his debt to society (my recent terms lament) but you needn't give him a new line of credit. Cold? Maybe. Realistic? Absolutely!