The Empire Workforce Solutions president has spent fifteen years placing the workers most companies screen out. He argues the ones still ignoring them are the ones losing.
Ask employers across manufacturing, logistics, hospitality, or the skilled trades what keeps them up at night, and a version of the same answer comes back: they cannot find enough dependable people. Ask them how they hire, and a second pattern emerges. Most of them run applications through filters that quietly reject a large share of the workforce before a human being ever weighs in. Two facts that should not coexist in the same economy sit side by side, and few leaders seem willing to name the contradiction.
Adam Kidan Second-Chance Hiring Philosophy
Adam Kidan has been naming it for years. As president of Empire Workforce Solutions, and across a staffing career that spans more than fifteen years, Kidan has built companies that have placed over 250,000 people in entry-level and skilled roles nationwide. That number, and the second-chance hiring philosophy behind it, was cited by the White House in July 2026 when President Trump granted Kidan a full pardon. Kidan has said he is grateful for it. He is also quick to steer the conversation away from his own record and toward a problem he considers far larger than himself.
“The people who are hungriest to prove themselves are very often the ones an automated screen filters out before anyone can see them,” Kidan says. In his telling, this is not a moral failing on the part of employers so much as a habit, reinforced by a fear that carries almost no data behind it. A gap in a resume, a path that did not follow a straight line, an old record long since closed, and the application never reaches a decision-maker. Companies tell themselves the filter protects them. Kidan argues it screens out precisely the workers who tend to become the most loyal and productive, because someone finally extended them an opening.
Retention and Staffing Economics
The case he makes is not built on sentiment. It is built on retention, which is where staffing economics live or die. Every time a role turns over, a company pays for it again in recruiting, onboarding, and lost output. Workers given a genuine second chance, Kidan contends, show up in those retention numbers, not because they are grateful in the abstract, but because trust tends to be repaid. He has watched the pattern hold across placements for two decades, and he treats it less as a hopeful theory than as an operating principle.
“I would rather be among the people opening those doors than the ones quietly closing them.”
There is a supply-side argument layered underneath. The same companies straining to fill positions are turning away millions of capable candidates through screening choices they rarely examine. Kidan frames the gap between those two realities as a competitive opening rather than a social cause. The firms that learn to close it, he suggests, will hold a durable advantage over the ones still hiring the way they did fifteen years ago, when the labor market looked nothing like it does now.
Practical Decisions
Closing that gap, in his account, does not demand a sweeping program. It starts with a handful of practical decisions. Examine where in the process qualified people are being cut, and interrogate whether the filter is doing what it is assumed to do. Evaluate candidates against what the role actually requires rather than against a clean, linear history that reveals little about how a person performs. And surround a new hire with the same support any new hire needs to succeed, which usually amounts to a clear path and a manager who is paying attention.
That Kidan arrives at this argument from personal experience is not incidental. He has spoken about what it means to be measured by a record rather than by one’s work, and about what it means to be handed the chance to build something regardless. It is a large part of why the mission holds his attention. The staffing industry, he points out, occupies an unusual position in the economy. It decides, every day, who gets seen and who gets passed over.
Opening Doors
“I would rather be among the people opening those doors than the ones quietly closing them,” he says.
The talent, in Kidan’s view, is already here, waiting on the other side of a screen most companies have never thought to question. The only open question is whether employers are willing to look.
Adam Kidan is the president of Empire Workforce Solutions and an experienced entrepreneur focused on connecting employers with dependable talent and expanding second-chance hiring across the staffing industry.
