Fair Chance Hiring Report Methodology

Our approach

Economic Architecture has an iterative research process that is grounded in over a decade of experience mapping complex systems and surfacing structural innovations. Our partner, NLADA Mutual brings deep expertise and networks of professionals working in the criminal justice system, complementing Economic Architecture’s research approach. 

Over a nine-month period, we leveraged the strengths of both partners to identify structural innovations that could advance fair chance hiring, focusing on models with potential for broad adoption.

We reviewed over 300 organizations, analyzing models, tools, and policies that support workforce participation for individuals impacted by the criminal legal system. We also conducted 35 in-depth interviews with employers, reentry professionals, and workforce intermediaries across multiple states, capturing diverse perspectives on challenges, successes, and emerging innovations.

Economic Architecture’s framework for structural innovation

Building on over a decade of prior work at Economic Architecture, we have developed a framework for identifying and evaluating structural innovations across diverse issue areas.

Structural innovations are defined by their ability to change patterns in society at the aggregate level. They achieve this level of change by increasing the likelihood of certain behaviors across contexts, independent of the characteristics of specific people involved, often through mechanisms that reinforce those behaviors over time. They do so by changing incentives for different stakeholders so that effective and equitable options are more appealing and feasible. We assess, in part, the capacity of innovations to achieve this level of structural impact.

These key outcomes are universal indicators of strong structural design, providing a framework to identify innovations with potential structural impact, regardless of the specific issue or context. In this study, we applied that framework to fair chance hiring, using these outcomes to guide the identification, evaluation, and validation of promising models.

Mapping the landscape

We began with a wide search to identify organizations doing innovative work and to surface promising approaches. In this process, we deliberately connected with established voices in the space and those at the leading edge of innovation—from academics and long-standing service providers to innovators and organizations experimenting with new approaches.

By overlaying these perspectives, we gained a nuanced understanding of the landscape: the barriers that persist, where progress has been made, the challenges still ahead, and the most promising avenues for innovation. This broad scan generated the initial pool of barriers, opportunities, and potential innovations, informing both thematic exploration and structural innovation validation.

Two complementary, iterative lines of work

1: Identifying patterns: biggest barriers, greatest opportunities

To build a comprehensive understanding of fair chance hiring, we explored the field broadly, engaging diverse actors to uncover persistent barriers, emerging opportunities, and recurring patterns. This exploratory work laid the groundwork for systematic analysis, ensuring that the insights we captured could be organized, compared, and synthesized rigorously.

Interviews were designed to go beyond existing literature and received wisdom in the space, capturing perspectives that might not be publicly documented. By integrating views from established experts, academics, innovators, and service providers, we developed a nuanced understanding of where progress has been made, where challenges remain, and where the most promising avenues for innovation lie.

2: Validating structural innovations

Building on the Economic Architecture framework and methodology, we developed a multi-stage pipeline to identify and evaluate structural innovations in fair chance hiring. This approach allowed us to move from a broad landscape of potential models to a focused set of innovations with evidence of structural impact.

As part of this process, we developed a set of guiding questions to translate the persistent barriers identified in our thematic analysis into concrete considerations for evaluating innovations. These questions addressed key design challenges—including navigating system complexity, maintaining robustness, managing costs of complexity and uncertainty, and ensuring long-term viability—and guided our assessment of how well each model confronted structural challenges in the fair chance hiring space.

By assessing how well each model addressed these challenges, we could evaluate its potential to overcome structural barriers and achieve the key outcomes defined in the Economic Architecture framework: aggregate impact, behavioral influence, shifts in stakeholder incentives. The detail of these guiding questions and how they informed our evaluation is described in the next section of the report on emerging models.

Preliminary assessment—surfacing potential innovations

We conducted an initial review of models from our broad scan to identify promising candidates for deeper evaluation, rather than to make definitive judgments about structural impact. For prioritized models, we gathered additional information to understand design, context, and implementation.

Interviews and validation

We conducted interviews with organizational leaders, innovators, and other stakeholders to capture perspectives on challenges, opportunities, and practical considerations in implementing fair chance hiring. Interviews were largely open-ended to surface insights not publicly documented, with structured elements included only when necessary to address central study priorities, such as employer risk management and insurance.

The interviews served a dual purpose: confirming and refining our understanding of barriers and opportunities and gaining a detailed view of how potential innovations operate today and how innovators envision them functioning in the future. This dual approach positioned the interviews as a bridge between our broader thematic exploration—mapping recurring patterns, barriers, and opportunities—and the focused structural innovation validation. By linking insights across these two complementary lines of work, we ensured emerging models were evaluated with a nuanced understanding of both context and design.

Analysis and synthesis

All interviews were transcribed, coded, and analyzed to support systematic organization, cross-interview comparisons, and iterative reflection. Subsequent evaluation rounds and synthesis meetings refined our understanding of each model’s design and structural potential, ensuring that recurring patterns, barriers, and opportunities were accurately captured and ready to inform subsequent analyses.

Emerging structural innovations

Building on our approach, we identified several complementary models that illustrate how innovations with potential for structural change can produce measurable improvements in employment outcomes.

Well-designed models achieve structural impact at the aggregate level of society by:

To evaluate these models’ potential to achieve such impact, we developed a set of guiding questions that translate observed barriers in fair chance hiring into concrete considerations for structural validation:

A successful innovation with potential for structural change must provide constructive answers to each of these questions. Different models address these considerations in different ways, and understanding these design choices was central to our evaluation.