In Illinois, you can't turn someone down over a conviction just because you found one. State law says you need one of two things: a "substantial relationship" between that specific offense and that specific job, or proof that hiring the person would create an unreasonable risk. No connection, no risk, no denial. That's the rule.
This comes from the Illinois Human Rights Act, specifically the part added in 2021 that deals with conviction records. Let's slow down and go through what it actually requires, because "substantial relationship" sounds vague until you see how it's supposed to work in practice.
It means the conviction has to connect to the job in a real, specific way. Not a vague, general way. A theft conviction from eight years ago probably doesn't disqualify someone from a warehouse job with no cash handling. That same conviction is a much harder call for a role managing payroll.
The test isn't "is this person a felon." It's "does this exact record say something meaningful about this exact job." Those are different questions, and Illinois law makes you answer the second one, not the first.
Even without a tight job connection, an employer can still say no if hiring the person poses an unreasonable risk to property, or to the safety or welfare of specific people, or of the public generally. Think a violent offense for a job that puts someone alone in a client's home.
That's a real standard too, but it's not a rubber stamp. "Unreasonable risk" means you can point to something concrete, not just a general feeling of caution. Vague nervousness about a criminal record isn't the same as risk you can actually explain.
If this sounds familiar, it should. The EEOC has pushed employers for years toward what it calls individualized assessment before excluding someone over a conviction, weighing the offense, the job, and the time that's passed instead of a blanket policy. Illinois took that same spirit and wrote it into an actual state law.
So to say that a different way: the EEOC's version is guidance, something employers are urged to follow to avoid discrimination claims. Illinois's version is a statute, with its own enforcement agency and its own consequences for getting it wrong. That's not a small difference. Treat it accordingly.
Before you disqualify someone, Illinois expects you to actually consider a handful of things, not just glance at the record and move on:
Run through that list before you make a call. That part's not optional.
If you land on "no" because of a conviction, Illinois requires you to tell the candidate in writing, and it has to name the specific conviction and the specific reasoning behind the decision. A generic "we went another direction" letter doesn't cover this. It has to be specific enough that the candidate understands why.
Here's where I want to be careful with you. There's a real window built in for the candidate to respond before the decision is treated as final, and I've seen it described as a matter of days, not weeks. I'm not going to hand you an exact number and have you build a process around it, because these procedural details are the kind of thing that gets fine-tuned by regulators over time. Confirm the current notice requirements with the Illinois Department of Human Rights or your own employment counsel before you finalize a template.
If you're a five-person HR team in Illinois, here's the practical version. Don't have a policy that says "no felonies." That kind of blanket rule is exactly what this law is written to stop, and it won't hold up if it's ever questioned.
Instead, look at the actual record, look at the actual job, and write down your reasoning either way. If you reject someone, your notice needs to say why in specific terms, not in a form letter. And if you're not sure whether a given conviction clears the bar, that's a sign to slow down, not a sign to guess.
This is exactly the kind of judgment call a background check partner should be helping you make, not leaving you to sort out alone from a statute you found at midnight. If your current vendor can't walk you through how Illinois's conviction-record rules apply to your hiring process, that's worth a direct conversation before your next Illinois hire.