Two questions: internal and ex-offender hiring

Hi all, 

My project of the last few years has been to implement MT guidance to the fullest extent possible in my company. I do regular internal management training for our senior team. For context, we are a small organisation of 60 and each of the senior team manage between 2 and 8 directs. I have two questions:

1. Is there any particular guidance I can find on MT surrounding internal hiring ie. people interviewing for promotions with a hiring manager they already know well. Some of the team have told me they find it difficult to interview internal people; e.g. asking questions like TMAY are not as enlightening as it might be for someone they've never met before.
2. Our company, Redemption Roasters, (https://www.redemptionroasters.com/) is a for-profit social enterprise (soon to be a B Corp). We are not a charity, but part of our corporate purpose, as stated in our written company constitution, is to improve employment opportunities for ex-offenders (ex-prisoners) in our industry. Primarily, this means taking people who have done courses with us whilst in prison and placing them in our coffee shops. The shops are entirely commercial in nature (and, in fact, relatively successfully so). Almost none of these ex-offenders would receive job offers from us if we hired on merit alone. It's regrettable, but incontrovertibly true. They often lack any experience of employment at all, let alone interviewing skills. Their technical skills are usually not as refined as other candidates' either. Although they often develop fast and turn into excellent employees, we do positively discriminate in their favour initially to 'get them in the door'. It's been brought up that there is inherent conflict with MT: we continue to hire people who do not 'meet our standard' at time of hiring. Strictly speaking, we are violating the MT guidance on hiring here.

So I'm not coming at the community with 'problems and no solutions', I'll volunteer what my approach/responses would be but for any corrections from you:

1. It simply doesn't matter. As a professional, it is your obligation to reduce the number of variables in a hiring process and so there should be no difference in approach in the interview. As usual, each interview should contain the same core behavioral questions. The interviewee should be specifically told to assume the interviewer has no knowledge of them and their experience: tell them what they already know. Whilst it is impossible to completely divorce yourself of the knowledge you already have of this person (and, in fact, it is useful data), as far as their interview and process goes, there should be no difference.
2. I have two answers for this: (i) this is one of the rare circumstance where there is a genuine 'exception' to MT guidance based on the very specific nature of our organisation. MT would not advise doing anything that compromised the very core of a corporate purpose, which hiring ex-offenders is. (ii) MT would say that, actually, ex-offender are being hired into a different role altogether compared to 'regular' hires. The hiring requirements and standards are different. We should write a seperate JD for ex-offender hires and assess against that standard.

I'd very much appreciate any advice on these two questions as well as comments on my suggested responses.

Thank you very much for your help in advance,

Ted