It’s no secret that a felony conviction negatively affects a person’s ability to land a job upon reentry.

After release, formerly incarcerated people must navigate a maze of government systems, workforce programs, and parole requirements. They are rarely prepared to do this, and as a result, nearly half (45%) report no earnings within the first year of their release, according to research from the Brookings Institution.

The Big Idea: Reducing those barriers has become an increasing focus for a number of philanthropies and colleges. It’s also a growing labor market imperative. The number of working-age adults in the workforce has been dropping for two decades, and the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement has pushed it even lower in recent months, particularly among men. 

Formerly incarcerated people represent a largely untapped population of workers, and John Pallasch, former assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Labor, says employers and policymakers are more willing to give them a look now. But even so, bureaucracy and uneven training opportunities make activating this labor force difficult. 

Workbay, a company originally designed to help frontline workers, has taken that challenge head-on in the past few years. 

Mary Hayes, CEO of Workbay, describes the platform as an octopus able to preside over disconnected systems and link them with its many tentacles. It’s a one-stop shop where incarcerated individuals can develop a workforce training plan, take necessary courses, keep a verified record of training and experience, and ultimately match with potential employers. 

“Our primary goal is for each person to walk out the gate with an invitation to an interview,” she says. 

The Details: Workbay partners with correctional facilities to deliver its services. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many correctional facilities gave incarcerated people tablets to handle legal requirements, opening the door to workforce development opportunities. Pallasch, chief strategy officer at Workbay, says it was also a chance to connect previously disconnected systems. 

Many community colleges offer courses to incarcerated people, but often don’t know whether those courses align with jobs available where the individual plans to live after release. Learners should know whether restaurant jobs are available in their hometown if they are taking culinary arts courses, Pallasch says. Workbay shows them that. 

“Now, as an individual, I’m actually working toward something,” he says. “I know what I’m doing when I leave.” 

Clearing Bureaucratic Hurdles 

The platform also addresses a deeper problem: the siloing of government programs. SNAP, Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, and vocational rehabilitation funding all serve overlapping populations, but historically, each program has guarded its turf. 

Rebecca Villarreal, senior director in the Center for Justice & Economic Advancement at Jobs for the Future (JFF), says the lack of communication between government programs and agencies causes friction in re-entry. However, these walls are slowly being broken down in some states, she says, such as Kentucky. 

“We’re starting to see pockets of that happening,” she says. 

Workbay’s platform is designed to cut through that fragmentation, providing a consolidated profile to the incarcerated person, their case manager, and potential employers. It also creates a unified Learning and Employment Record (LER) and a verified resume for each individual. 

Correctional facilities are among the largest education and training systems in the country, Hayes says, but documenting that activity has historically been a challenge. 

Lucretia Murphy, vice president of the Center for Justice & Economic Advancement, says that in most state corrections systems, records of courses taken, jobs worked, and skills earned exist in disparate folders, if at all. Job titles compound the problem, as someone’s job title of “clerk” may not immediately convey their breadth of experience coordinating schedules, managing volunteers, and liaising on behalf of department leaders.

Without the language to translate those experiences, the skills disappear on a resume. “There aren’t great data systems in place to track all of those experiences,” Villarreal says. 

Changing Workforce Sentiments 

Verifying training, experience, and competencies is only one step of the process, however. Getting employers on board remains one of the biggest hurdles.

Murphy says many individuals re-enter society with all the skills and experience to succeed, yet are still failing to land a job because employers worry about reputation, liability, and regulatory risk. She contends those fears are rarely borne out in practice. 

“There is a perception of risk,” Murphy says. “But those are on the margins.” 

Hayes pushes back on the premise that “formerly incarcerated” is even a useful category for employers to think about. “The problem comes in saying you won’t hire anyone with a felony,” she says. “That’s the same as saying you won’t hire someone who is Catholic.” 

Workbay is trying to end this stigma through clear records. The platform currently processes around 4M job listings a day, matching candidates to openings based on 92 factors. Employers who commit to “second chance” hiring set their own filters—like excluding those convicted of a sex offense—and the platform surfaces only the candidates who meet them. 

By highlighting a person’s abilities, rather than their criminal record, Hayes says employers are slowly starting to come on board. 

“With Workbay, when people leave, it’s not just a record of their transgression,” she says, “but a record of their competencies.”

There’s also an incentive for many states to help this population of potential workers land jobs. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, formerly incarcerated individuals who are unable to maintain employment experience a recidivism rate of 52% over three years, while those who are employed for one year post-release experienced a recidivism rate of just 16%. 

Despite this, the Department of Labor’s dedicated reentry program reaches only about 9K people a year, which is just a fraction of the more than 453K people released from state and federal prisons in 2023. 

Pallasch says that many of the incarcerated individuals he talks with understand their missteps and are eager to prove they can be effective workers. They know what’s at stake and want to improve their situation, but government programs often fall short. 

“Some of these folks have never had a first chance,” he says, “let alone a second one.”