Kate Bachman
Contributing Editor

Expanding the Hiring Sight Line

The workforce shortage in manufacturing has been a constant for more than a decade. Manufacturers have gone to great lengths to attract staff.

But most company hiring leaders, in screening their prospective employees, have one box that, if checked, nearly always results in a “no hire” decision: a criminal conviction. 

Not so for Awake Window & Door Co., a fast-growing Gilbert, AZ, manufacturer creating a niche in the luxury housing market making high-end windows and doors with expansive glass openings and very minimal frames to broaden sight lines. The $30-million-annual-revenue startup set a goal at founding to hire at least 40% formerly incarcerated people, in addition to other aspirational, engineering goals such as reducing window frames to ¾ in. wide. Today, 56% of its more than 100 employees are “second-chancers.”   

Something Bigger

When CEO Scott Gates and other founders left their jobs with a large commercial window and door manufacturer and launched their own company, they wanted to make it about something bigger than the products they would manufacture.  

“We all said, ‘Hey, if we’re going to start what we know will be an incredibly trying endeavor and pour our lives into making this business happen, what if we could do it for a reason that’s bigger than ourselves?’” Gates recalls. “We all were on a bit of a learning journey about our justice system. And, you start to understand some of the challenges … the reality that we lock up more people in America than most other countries. It’s harrowing to me that we have 4% of the world’s population, but 25% of the prison population. It’s crazy. What hit me—what really hit all of us—is that when people get out of prison, 40% end up going back, primarily because they have a hard time finding gainful employment.

“We said, ‘Let’s turn this on its head,” he continues. “That’s why we started our company. This, and designing great windows, is our mission. We’re doing this so that we can hire people who really need jobs and help them turn their lives around.”

Gates and Dustin Wright, VP of engineering and design, maintain that their operations are not impeded by the criminal history of the people they hire. In many cases, productivity and creativity are enhanced because employees are very motivated to prove themselves. I asked them to cite examples.

Wright described one team member who had struggled to find gainful employment as an infinitely smart, capable, diligent guy. “He basically had been swept to the curb because of ticking that box on applications,” Wright says. “He joined the organization in an entry-level position and is now a skilled machinist, running CNC machines and programming CAD software. He has his first permanent housing and is thriving on all levels, and is even mentoring new people because he’s that capable.”