The Recruitment Junction, established and founded on our Christian ethos, is the national sector leader in supporting people with convictions into sustainable paid work. Since opening our doors in 2020, we have supported over 1,000 people with criminal records into employment – at the highest rate of any UK ex-offender charity. Currently based in the North East and supporting men and women released from the local prisons via our Newcastle and Durham offices, we are now undertaking a carefully sequenced national expansion beginning in the North West, with a new hub opening in Preston in October 2026.

Our model is simple but powerful: relational employment brokerage, intensive candidate support, and deep employer partnerships that create real job starts and sustained employment. We deliver this through two integrated programmes:

'Inside Job'

Weekly in-prison employability support delivered jointly by The Recruitment Junction staff and trained Peer Recruiters (serving prisoners who identify and motivate work-ready men), coupled with monthly employer-led interview surgeries that deliver real job opportunities before release, in partnership with national charity Beating Time; and

'Community Job Finder'

Intensive, in-person community support including CV and disclosure preparation, interview practice and employer introductions, with practical wraparound support as often needed, followed by six months’ in-work support, to ensure job sustainability.

This approach is proving what an effective employment pathway for prison leavers should look like – over 100 socially inclusive employers hiring from us, two thirds of placed candidates sustaining the jobs past their probationary periods and fewer than 5% knowingly reoffending (vs. national reoffending rates of 25-55). Our experience is that finding employment helps people rediscover a sense of purpose, becoming role models who drive positive generational change across their families and wider communities, all whilst substantially lowering crime rates.

We find ourselves in the exciting position of moving from a single-region operation, to pursuing our ambition to become a multi-site organisation with wider national aspirations. The task now is to build the conditions under which expansion becomes financially and operationally sustainable, step by deliberate step, while maintaining the quality and integrity of delivery that has characterised our development to date.

To support this growth, we are recruiting a whole office team to launch in Preston, in close partnership with the local remand jail, HMP Preston. This is an exciting opportunity to play a central role in building our impact and strengthening our presence across the criminal justice system and beyond, and to seeing many hundreds of ex-prisoners and their families build lives in which they can thrive. “Seek after the welfare of the city to which I have called you… for as it prospers, you too shall prosper.”