The Fortune Society’s Successful Transition course helps prepare ex-convicts for the job market
Acing a job interview is no easy feat. It’s even more challenging if you’re fresh out of prison. Incarceration may teach a person certain skills, but poise probably isn’t foremost among them.
However, a program at the Fortune Society, which since 1967 has been helping people re-enter the community after they’re released from prison and jail, seeks to remedy that situation.
The society’s two-week Successful Transition course, which started in 2014, teaches formerly incarcerated men and women the fundamentals of making a good first impression—from the way they enter an interviewer’s office, shake hands and establish eye contact to how to address the 800-pound gorilla in the room: explaining their crimes and how they are now worthy of trust and responsibility.
“I didn’t know how to present myself, how to dress, how to answer the tough question that comes with a conviction,” said Knowledge Nevels, a participant who told me he was recently released from federal prison in West Virginia after doing 11 years for possession of a controlled substance.
Those lessons can go a long way.
“People come here and say I don’t want to go back to jail,” explainedStanley Richards, the Fortune Society’s senior vice president of programs. “But that vision of hope gets dashed so quickly because of the collateral consequences of conviction. They get rejected, and dealing with that rejection leads to hopelessness. They believe nothing is going to change.”
‘People come here and say I don’t want to go back to jail. But that vision of hope gets dashed so quickly because of the collateral consequences of conviction.’
Mr. Richards said that of 700 people who took the program last year, 450 were placed in jobs, among them in building maintenance, construction and the food industry. “We have hundreds of employers willing to interview people.”
Volunteers conduct the training, lending their know-how about the ways of the business world. They are mostly retired female professionals—including financial industry executives, lawyers and college professors 50 and older. Many are members of a national women’s nonprofit called the Transition Network.
I started the afternoon by auditing Karen Merson’s “Trait Tree” class, where students list three personality traits that make them uniquely themselves. It’s an exercise designed to boost self-esteem.
Roxroy Taylor, one of the participants, volunteered to go first. “I’m compassionate,” he said. “I’m driven. I’m honest. ”
Ms. Merson, an organizational consultant who taught at the New School, paid particular attention to his last descriptor. “What’s the biggest fear people have?”
“Not trustworthy,” somebody said.
“Every time you walk into an interview,” projecting a sense of integrity “should be first and foremost on your mind,” Ms. Merson said. “If we don’t give that impression, what’s the employer going to think?”
From there it was on to the classroom of Betty Rauch, a marketing-and-communications consultant who helped create the Successful Transition program and is chairwoman of the Fortune Society board. There, she critiqued students as they knocked and entered the room, as if on an actual job interview.
“Good afternoon,” one of the students said. “I’m here for the maintenance position.”
“Why were you looking at the ground?” Ms. Rauch demanded.
“It’s still the butterflies,” the man confessed.
“When you’re standing outside, take a deep breath,” Ms. Rauch instructed him. “It’s been known to work. It relaxes the muscles in your chest. It makes you voice more resonant.”
In the third part of the program, Fortune clients sat for one-on-one interviews with executives who examined their résumés and grilled them about their job experiences.
Susan Nieder Acunto, a real-estate company owner, examined the résumé of a man who had been sentenced to 12 years for a burglary conviction.
“What skills did you learn in prison?” she asked.
“Dry wall.”
“What else can you do for me? What if I have a broken window?”
At the next table Kathy Krall, a former Prudential Financial vice president who is president of a staffing firm, was coaching a Fortune Society client with a DUI conviction about how to answer the hardest question of all.
“You need to address the DUI, but I need you to go very quickly into the background you have” in plumbing, she instructed him. “I’m going to write this down. I want it to come right off your tongue.”
As she watched the interviews, Ms. Rauch said of the volunteers, “There were people who felt they were not prepared to schlep on the subway to Queens and—let’s be real—work with convicted felons.”
But those feelings quickly changed, she added. “There’s a beautiful feeling here.”
She identified it as hope. “These volunteers are saying you matter. Not a word is spoken. But it’s expressed from their behavior doing this.”