Our Role in Criminal Justice Reform as Tech Employers by Jessica McKellar
Your company is committed to building a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace, right? Great. Let’s talk about how hiring formerly incarcerated engineers fits into that picture.
Jessica will talk brass tacks on both the inclusive recruiting infrastructure needed to give formerly incarcerated applicants a fair chance, and a strategy that actually works for sourcing high-caliber engineers from this overlooked and undervalued talent pool.
This is good for business, but ending employment discrimination for people with records is also a crucial step in decarcerating the United States.
Jessica McKellar
Jessica McKellar is a founder and the CTO of Pilot, a bookkeeping firm powered by software. She is also a former Director for the Python Software Foundation and PyCon North America's Diversity Outreach Chair. Open source meets criminal justice reform in Jessica’s work with The Last Mile, a job training and re-entry program that has implemented the first computer programming curriculum inside US prisons. She teaches Python at San Quentin State Prison in California, hires formerly incarcerated software engineers, and uses that bridge between the tech industry and prisons to get people activated and acting for decarceration.
