Yes, in most cases you can reject a candidate over a criminal conviction. What you can't do is reject every candidate with a conviction, automatically, using one blanket rule. Federal law doesn't ban considering a conviction. It bans doing it carelessly.
That distinction is the whole article. Let's slow down and go through it.
A lot of employers write a version of this rule into their hiring policy: no one with a felony gets hired, period. It feels clean. It feels defensible. It's also one of the more common ways employers end up in front of the EEOC.
Here's why. Criminal conviction rates aren't spread evenly across every group of people. So a policy that never mentions race at all can still end up screening out one group of candidates a lot more than another. That's called disparate impact, and it's been part of Title VII law for decades.
It doesn't matter if you never meant to discriminate. What matters is what the policy actually does, once you look at who it screens out in practice. A rule can be perfectly neutral on paper and still be illegal in effect.
So to say that again a different way: the problem with a blanket ban isn't that it considers convictions. It's that it considers them without looking at anything else.
The EEOC calls this an individualized assessment. It's not a new idea. It's the same three-factor test courts have used for decades to decide whether a conviction should actually count against someone.
The three factors are the nature and gravity of the offense, how much time has passed since it happened, and how closely it relates to the job you're filling.
Nature and gravity. A theft conviction and a violent felony aren't the same kind of risk. Neither is a single offense versus a pattern of them. Look at what actually happened, not just the charge name on the report.
Time passed. A conviction from six months ago and one from fifteen years ago don't carry the same weight. People change. The law expects you to account for that, not treat every record as frozen in time.
Job relatedness. This is the one employers skip most. A ten-year-old theft conviction matters a lot more for someone handling company money than for someone stocking shelves. Ask what could actually go wrong in this specific job, not in general.
Don't auto-reject the moment a conviction shows up on a report. Run it through the three factors first, in writing, every time.
Give the candidate a chance to respond before you decide anything final. Maybe there's context you're missing. Maybe there's evidence of rehabilitation, a stable work history since, a completed program. None of that shows up on a criminal record by itself.
Picture two candidates. One has a fifteen-year-old shoplifting conviction and is applying to drive a delivery route. The other has a conviction from last year for assault and is applying for a job working alone with elderly clients. Same report type. Completely different answer, and that's exactly the point of doing this individually instead of by policy.
Everything above is federal. A number of states go further and put their own rules on top of it, things like lookback periods that limit how far back a conviction can even be considered, or laws that require the individualized assessment step by statute instead of leaving it as EEOC guidance.
I'm not going to hand you a list here and call it final. This is exactly the kind of thing that changes year to year, sometimes city by city on top of the state rule. But check your specific state's current law, or ask a lawyer, before you finalize a policy built around this article. That's not me dodging the question. That's the honest answer about how fast this area moves.
Almost never in the big, obvious decision. Almost always in the paperwork, or the lack of it.
Write your reasoning down every time, not just when a decision feels close. "We assessed the offense, the time passed, and the job duties" holds up if anyone ever questions the call. "We saw a felony and passed" does not, even if the outcome would've been the same either way.
Apply the same process to everyone. If one candidate gets the full three-factor review and another gets an automatic no, that inconsistency creates its own legal risk, separate from everything else in this article. That part's not optional.