Justice Champion Spotlight: Joe DeLoss and Hot Chicken Takeover
Why did you decide to set up Hot Chicken Takeover?
I’ve been launching businesses, or at least making attempts, for most of my life. But in my adult life, just over 15 years ago, I started getting very interested in how businesses could generate more sustainable impact in our communities. After a few failed attempts, I found my chance in fried chicken of all things.
Can you tell us a bit more about HCT’s mission? What do you see as its role in the community?
Our mission is pretty simple, we’re trying to create extraordinary experiences for extraordinary people. Of course, we’re concerned about creating extraordinary experiences for our guests and investors, but our primary stakeholder is our extraordinary team. We believe this team-first attitude dramatically improves our business.
What led you to make providing fair chances such an integral part of the company?
I had my share of false starts before HCT, but all of these attempts leveraged fair chance employment as a critical ingredient. When I began all this work, I was fueled by a ton of ego – really self-righteously believing I had a responsibility to rid the world of adversity or some nonsense. The reality is I got a chance to grow up as an entrepreneur (and human, for that matter) because of the rich relationships I had in fair chance work environments, particularly with people that had very different experiences than my own. I can’t imagine another way to do business.
How does HCT break down barriers to employment for formerly incarcerated people?
From the outside looking in, most people get stuck on the novelty of who we hire, not how. We’ve built HCT to be an employer of choice for those that have experienced some significant adversity along the way – for many, that means incarceration, but additionally, could mean addiction, homelessness, trafficking, or even domestic violence. We hire those with bright visions for their future as they navigate the fallout of their pasts. We try to meet our team members where they’re at and couple accountability with countless earned benefits for growth. Our benefits range from matched savings programs and legal support to more conventional benefits like healthcare and professional development.
What has your experience been working with justice-involved individuals? How has it benefited your business? What are some of the key challenges?
We know our business is strong because our people are strong. HCT retains its team three times better than our industry, creating a lot more continuity for our business and guests. Aside from low turnover, we get to be alongside people as they’re achieving huge goals in their life – it just makes for a much happier and healthier work environment and community.
Being deeply invested in your team isn’t without challenges, HCT works hard to tow a line between personal investment and accountability with our team but we don’t always end up on the right side. As we scale, we’re really focused on how to equip our leaders with more tools to support their teams while achieving critical growth metrics as a restaurant.
What advice would you give to an employer who was considering adopting fair hiring practices? What first steps should they take?
We’re always eager to share our experience with employers but have found many look at our strategies and think hiring fair chance candidates is some silver bullet to improving their employee retention (or any other number of metrics). If you approach this work without a deep desire to understand your team and what they might be up against, you’re bound to fail. The reality is, that same attitude is why these employers are probably having labor issues to begin with. Our number one piece of advice is pretty simple, get started by not being an a--hole employer.
Why do you think some hirers are hesitant to employ people with criminal records? How would you respond to those reservations?
There’s a great list of reasons we’ve heard, with the most frequent being around theft and conflict in the workplace. I heard this years ago from an international distribution company; simultaneously, they were not hiring fair chance but admitted to having substantial enough ‘shrinkage’ to account for it on public financial statements. Here they were actively hiring folks good enough at stealing to have never been caught while egregiously discriminating against those who had so much to gain from meaningful employment because of a past mistake.
Though I don’t always have the patience for it anymore, I try to help these employers understand the impact adversity and poverty can have on their candidate pools. A little bit of empathy can go a long way into creating stronger work environments.
What’s next for Hot Chicken Takeover?
With the craziest year of our history nearly behind us, we’re diving deeply into a round of HR innovations while seeking partners to grow and scale our concept further. We’ve come a long way since opening a chicken window in the side of a building 7 years ago but we know we’ve got a lot further to go.
