The Ivy League grad co-founded Rézme to help marginalized job applicants enter the workforce and build a future.

At 10, Jodi Anderson Jr. got his first job in his foster family’s drug trafficking business. By 15, he was serving eight to 25 years in an upstate New York prison after being convicted as an adult for auto theft. Anderson defied the odds facing young Black men who are incarcerated by earning his GED and associate degree and then enrolled in Cornell University’s Prison Education Program, where he took classes in neuroscience, law and Mandarin.

His strong academic record won Anderson early release, and the opportunity to enroll in person at Cornell through a grant from philanthropist Doris Buffett’s Sunshine Lady Foundation. Going from prison to the university’s picturesque campus in Ithaca, New York, was a challenge, but also “mesmerizing,” Anderson says. “That really opened my eyes that the world is much larger than the one that I had been kind of born into.” To pursue his interest in Mandarin, one of Anderson’s professors advised him to transfer to Stanford, where he switched course, studying labor issues and tech and earning his bachelor’s degree in political economy, and then getting his master’s degree from the Stanford Graduate School of Education.

When it was time to look for a job, though, the roadblocks piled up. Despite his prestigious academic credentials, internships and glowing recommendations, he couldn’t land one interview during the pandemic-era hiring boom. “I was just getting automatically filtered out of the candidate pipeline,” Anderson says. “It’s because I have that gap in work history and because of what happened to me as a child, which shouldn’t have appeared, but I learned this later on.”

After about 30 rejections, Anderson turned to Stanford professors and employment law experts, who helped him create an application packet summarizing his unusual backstory and developed a customized insurance policy designed to reduce any risk prospective employers might face by hiring him. It worked. In 2022, Anderson landed a job at Reddit, just as the social media company’s fortunes soared. 

Fair Chance Hiring

His own job search ordeal gave Anderson, now 34, the idea to create Rézme. It’s an HR software tool that matches hard-to-place job candidates with employers interested in qualifying for government fair-hiring incentives for people who have been incarcerated as well as for other groups — veterans, individuals 55+, the unhoused or those returning to work after long absences. Unlike automated job portals, which often trigger candidate red flags, Anderson says Rézme software develops a customized profile — the kind his lawyers and advisers invested dozens of pro bono hours to create for him — so that the employer sees a potential asset rather than an automatic liability in a candidate. 

“There is an information gap,” says Anderson. Employers are not aware of incentives the government is trying to give them to address workforce shortages, nor are they seeing the candidates who have the skills and eagerness to work for them.

While Anderson initially developed Rézme for people who share his experience — 70 million Americans have been either incarcerated or charged with a crime according to the Brennan Center for Justice — there are longevity implications as well. As people live and work longer, the once fixed arc of school, work, retirement is giving way to a less predictable path. People will need flexibility, second and third acts, on-ramps back into the workforce after illness or time off for caregiving or gaining new skills.

The old credentialing systems, built for a linear life, are poorly equipped for that reality, says Mitchell L. Stevens, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, who leads the Stanford Center on Longevity’s Learning Society initiative. “What Jodi’s work is trying to combat are some of the hidden consequences of the credentialed society — a system arranged around credentials rather than actual skills,” says Stevens, who advised Anderson on his master’s project, the prototype for Rézme. A college degree is a positive credential, Stevens explains. A criminal record is a negative one. Both can follow a person for decades, long after they’ve ceased to reflect who that person is. “We need innovations like Jodi’s while we’re figuring out the next generation of how to recognize and reward accomplishment.”

The platform is gaining traction. Rézme’s first two clients were universities — Cornell and the State University of New York system — followed by the City of New York and veterans’ organizations.

Seeing Past the HR Filters 

The startup is now working with manufacturers, logistics firms and healthcare providers in Arkansas, Michigan and Memphis, Tennessee, a region that’s attracted so many data centers it’s earned the nickname the “Digital Delta.” Unlike the tight job market for white-collar workers, labor shortages and tight deadlines are forcing manufacturing, construction and logistics companies in these markets to reconsider who counts as a qualified candidate. Rézme helps them see past the filters — criminal records, credential gaps, age — to hire workers they would otherwise not consider. 

Veterans and older workers have some advantages. As logistics or manufacturing companies hire rapidly, Anderson says employers will ask, “Can you get someone in here who has a sense of maturity, who’s from the community and can help manage?” 

Rézme is placing workers in positions paying $18 to $25 an hour at the entry level, Anderson says, and $60,000 to over $100,000 for skilled trades — wages that represent, for many, especially in the rural South, a real chance at economic mobility. Since launching in 2022, Rézme has placed more than 700 applicants and has raised almost $400,000 from investors, with another $500,000 committed.

The placement Anderson says was most meaningful came not from a data center, but in a domestic violence shelter in Lebanon, Ohio. Nearby food packaging companies needed workers and, with migrant labor pools drying up, could not find applicants. Anderson and his team gave residents of halfway houses and domestic abuse shelters access to Rézme and “we ended up getting 16 women hired in a very short window,” Anderson says. “These women were able to get a job, get out of the halfway house and reunite with their children, because of some software.” 

In April, Anderson and his team pitched Rézme to SHRM, the association of HR professionals, to advocate for redesigning hiring systems that automatically turn away workers like him, people with skills and hard-earned life experience. “It’s going to take thousands of us doing this. Collectively we will make a dent.”

Karen Breslau is editor of SCL Magazine.