Clarifying the Corporate Value of Fair Chance Hiring

A national non-profit advancing fair chance hiring struggled to clearly articulate its value to corporate decision-makers. Despite growing interest in inclusive hiring, awareness of its offerings was low and implementation barriers across internal roles were not well understood. The organization needed evidence-based clarity on employer perceptions, hesitation points, key decision-makers, and how to strengthen positioning, messaging, and pricing. It partnered with Provoke Insights on a multi-phase research initiative integrating internal alignment, qualitative depth, quantitative scale, and persona development.

1. Internal Stakeholder Interviews: Provoke Insights began with moderated stakeholder sessions to define success metrics, surface assumptions, identify challenges, and build alignment through a guiding SWOT analysis.

2. Competitive Analysis:Provoke Insights conducted secondary research to uncover key fair chance hiring trends and developed detailed competitor profiles covering positioning, messaging, and media strategies.

3. Quantitative Research: Provoke Insights fielded a survey of corporate decision-makers to measure awareness, attitudes, motivators, barriers, budget willingness, and partnership expectations around fair chance hiring.

4. Qualitative Deep Dives: Provoke Insights conducted in-depth interviews with corporate leaders to provide emotional context, clarify implementation concerns, and uncover role-specific needs.

5. Personas: Provoke Insights created decision-maker personas that capture responsibilities, pressures, perceived risks, decision criteria, and barriers to adopting fair chance hiring.

Through its multi-phase research approach, Provoke Insights delivered a clear, cohesive roadmap for growth.

The research enabled the non-profit to:

1. Align internal stakeholders around shared priorities and challenges.
2. Clearly identify high-value employer segments and decision-makers.
3. Understand role-specific barriers to fair chance implementation.
4. Refine messaging to move beyond awareness toward action.
5. Develop actionable personas to guide marketing, partnerships, and sales strategy

By combining internal insight, qualitative depth, and quantitative data, the non-profit gained the clarity needed to strengthen its employer engagement strategy and position itself as a trusted, implementation-focused leader in fair chance hiring.