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Former inmates can reveal about the complexities of the job market

Companies have open positions and Texas unemployment remains high. The demand to hire former inmates reveals problems connecting jobseekers with companies

TYLER, Texas — The unemployment rate remains high in East Texas and across the state. At the same time, companies have lots of open positions and many business owners claim they cannot find anyone to fill them.

How can both be true?

To understand today’s job market, one might first want to look a metaphorical world away: in prison.

That is where you would have, until last year, found Carlos Rosales. “I was released from federal prison probably about October,” he said. “And that's kind of when the Coronavirus was pretty strong. So, we're on lockdown and looking for jobs.”

Searching for a job with a criminal record is a difficult task. Many companies will not employ felons, and others will offer them a limited number of positions depending on the crime for which they were charged. (A person convicted of multiple DWI charges, for instances, is not likely to get a job in which driving is a significant component.)

Cheri Garcia understands the challenge a former inmate faces when attempting to reenter the work force. She founded a staffing company called Cornbread Hustle that specifically works with second-chance employees, as she calls them.

“Before the pandemic, it felt like a real uphill battle,” she explained. “I was, as far as I know, the first ever for-profit staffing agency that had the idea of banking on the success of people coming out of prison. And a lot of people at first told me like, wow, you were really crazy, to really put your neck out on a line like this. And I was like, ‘You know what, I am crazy. But that's okay.’ I'm an entrepreneur, and I believe in social entrepreneurship. So even though I really believed in what I was doing, I had a lot of hopeless moments and times. It was real struggle to get this business off the ground.”

Rosales worked for a telemarketing company when he finished his sentence, but Cornbread Hustle was able to get him a better-paying position at a Henry Company facility in Dallas, where he mixes paints and chemicals.

“When the pandemic happened, we were scared,” Garcia said. “We thought we were going to lose all of our jobs. But the opposite happened.”

While hundreds of thousands of Texans lost their jobs, Rosales and other former inmates were in high demand.

Garcia said the enhanced unemployment insurance benefit meant that lots of laid-off Texans had no incentive to get back to work. “We found out that people were coming to us looking for people who had just got out of prison, because those people are not eligible for unemployment, because they have no work history,” she explained. “So it was actually a blessing in disguise that cornbread hustle got an opportunity to show employers that second chance hiring really does work.”

She said companies are valuing reliability to the extent that some companies offer an hourly bonus for employees who show up consistently on time.

Rosales said his managers are more concerned with what he can do as opposed to what he did. “You know, they're looking at what your work value’s like,” he stated. “So if you come in on time, and you bust your butt, you're more valuable to them than somebody who's come off the street.”

Garcia said another unintended consequence of pandemic unemployment contributes to the challenge businesses face when hiring. The Texas Workforce Commission has a work search requirement for anyone collecting unemployment insurance benefits, and one of the ways for a person to meet that requirement is to apply for jobs. Garcia said many of those applicants would rather remain on unemployment than accept the jobs they apply for. She claimed that, when recruiters call applicants for a job, only five percent are actually interested in it.

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“We have a slew of recruiters who are constantly on the phones all day, and a lot of our money and a lot of our payroll goes towards just picking up the phone and dialing people who have applied that may not even really be interested in working,” she stated. “So, it is a major pain point for the industry as a whole. It hurts the employees that really want to work. It hurts the employers who are spending time and resources, posting job ads, and making the phone calls. And it obviously hurts production and the economy because it's just a bunch of people chasing their tail.”

Rosales said he has already recruited three other former inmates to work with him. He and Garcia agree: if someone is looking for a job and cannot seem to find one, showing how much they want it could be the key to a new career.

“You might not have made your way through the fluff,” Garcia explained. She said a cover letter that explains why the candidate wants that specific job carries a lot of weight with recruiters. “So, maybe having a more creative approach to how you get the attention of the hiring manager can really help you in your search.”

Rosales mentioned that working hard guides him because he knows that will keep him on the right path. He believes persistence will pay off for anyone searching in this job market. “Don't be that guy,” he advised, “that says, ‘You know, I can't find one. So I'm not going to work.’ You know, you can have anything you want. Just gotta want it bad enough.”

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