Checkered past is no barrier to Checkr job
S.F. company’s policy is ‘fairness in hiring,’ CEO says
If a person’s resume tells a story about their life — where they’ve been and what they’ve done — Annette Crespo’s reads like a novel.
A young mother who dropped out of high school in the ’70s to make ends meet, Crespo got her first job at 15. She worked the register at a Shell gas station. Later, she was a model. She tended bar, did hair, makeup, salon work. She parked cars as a hotel valet, kept the books for a moving company.
In the 1980s, Crespo minded the office for the Church of Hakeem, a pyramid scheme masquerading as a church. On the day federal agents busted the door down, she handed them the keys to her boss’ office.
But to her, the most unbelievable job of them all is the one she has now: Crespo, now 60, is an intern for a San Francisco startup that runs rapid-fire background checks for other tech firms like Uber, Instacart and Zenefits.
At Checkr, the background check startup, no one seems to care about her past.
Instead of asking why she never graduated high school or was charged with drug crimes in 2000, Crespo’s colleagues ask her to give them life advice or watch their kids.
She has her own desk surrounded by the glossy trappings of the Financial District and a collage of photos of her 13 grandkids. There are always tea bags and snacks for the taking. The paycheck isn’t bad either.
And Crespo arrived at this surreal scene not in spite of her, well, checkered past. She was hired because of it.
Checkr has a corporate philosophy that might seem in conflict with the service it provides.
“Thousands and thousands of people are getting rejected from jobs for things they’ve done in the past, and we’ve realized it’s really not fair,” CEO Daniel Yanisse said. “People shouldn’t be banned (from working) for life even if their conviction was from a long time ago and has nothing to do with the job they’re applying for.”
More than 73 million people in the United States have criminal records, according to data by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That’s nearly 30 percent of the adult population.
The number of people in state and federal prisons, about 1.5 million, has quintupled since 1980, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. People of color; lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals; and people with mental illnesses are disproportionately more likely to be arrested.
More than two-thirds of workplaces run criminal background checks on all of their job candidates, according to the Society for Human Resource Management. Employers say it helps to reduce the legal liability they might face if they hire someone with a record and something goes awry.
Others say background checks help ensure a safe work environment by weeding out violent offenders.
“A lot of companies really buy into this fear messaging, like, there is a criminal applying to work at your company — or a criminal in your company — and you need to catch them,” Yanisse said. “It’s not black and white like that. You can have safety and at the same time make sure there’s fairness in the hiring process.”
Crespo, who started her three-month internship in mid-August, was one of the first interns the startup hired with the help of Code Tenderloin, a nonprofit that helps people find employment by teaching what the organization calls “job readiness,” or skills like interviewing, public speaking, dependability and resume building.
The organization has recently partnered with tech firms to provide interns and employees from a local pool of candidates with unconventional backgrounds. Some have been homeless. Others have been incarcerated.
For Checkr, that was part of the appeal.
“If we can make a little dent into the social justice system and help some fraction of people get back into the workforce, instead of back to crime and back to jail, we made a difference,” Yanisse said.
Crespo works on a team that answers calls from anxious job applicants, wondering if they were approved, asking about old blights on their records they fear will prevent them from finding work.
She understands what they’re feeling. She’s felt it, too.
In 2000, Crespo was was arrested on drug charges and taken to San Francisco County jail.
“I was there for hours,” Crespo said. “They handcuffed me to the wall. It was terrifying.”
She posted bail and got out before nightfall. Eventually, the charge would be wiped from her record. But first, she had to attend a yearlong drug rehabilitation course and countless court dates.
That was 17 years ago. Still, Crespo said, she thought it might ruin her chance at getting hired at a startup she knew peddled in background checks.
“I was surprised they even gave me an interview. This is a background check company, and look at me,” Crespo said. “I’m older than anyone here. I didn’t graduate. I thought, ‘No way are they going to offer me the job.’ ”
Now in the last month of her internship, Crespo shows up to work an hour before anyone else. She carries around a legal pad, where she takes notes and makes sure she remembers everything she’s asked to do.
She’s not a fast typer, her pointer hovering over keys she presses one at a time. But she’s been taking typing courses, trying to improve.
“Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, or maybe it’s this place,” she said. “There’s something about it. I just love it here. Sometimes on the weekends, I’m like wishing I could come into work. It’s crazy.”
This, Yanisse said, exemplifies the quality he believes background checks too often overlook: hard work, gratitude, loyalty.
It’s why he and other Checkr employees have also taken to supporting initiatives that require managers to delay asking about a candidate's criminal history until after an interview or just before a provisional job offer has been made. These initiatives are known as “ban the box” laws.
California passed such a law earlier this year, joining 29 other states and more than 150 cities and counties that have outlawed preliminary criminal inquiries. San Francisco adopted a similar provision that applies to both the public and private sector.
It may be too soon to say what the impact of these policies will be, but so far, the results have been mixed.
Advocates of criminal justice reform hail them as a means of making the hiring process more fair. But some research has shown that preventing employers from asking about criminal history at the front end of the hiring process may actually hurt some of the groups these policies were designed to help.
A recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that ban-the-box policies actually decreased the likelihood that young, low-skilled black and Hispanic men would be hired.
That’s because, researchers said, when employers don’t have proof of an applicant’s criminal history, they tended to discriminate based on stereotypes — and young black and Hispanic men are perceived to be more likely to have a criminal record.
If San Franciscans are experiencing this kind of backlash, Yanisse said, Checkr wants to know.
The company has started to routinely sponsor community meetings that invite locals to come and talk to them about barriers to employment — and what companies like Checkr and its customers can do to help.
“We can’t do much if we don’t really understand these people and their situation,” Yanisse said. “Some people have no idea what’s on their background checks. They don’t know they can have certain records expunged or how to do that. Now that’s part of our sales pitch and the company. It’s become a big part of what we do just to help make things a little more fair.”