Depends on the business and the conviction. E.g. if I'm sending cleaners into people's homes, I probably feel a little wary if you stuck up a liquor store. Maybe don't make a car thief a valet. That kinda thing.

Some dumb drug/gun charge, etc.? I probably wouldn't care.

Sex crimes are a no-go across the board for me. Take that shit back to the White House.

I'd be more likely to hire them if they didn't claim innocence.

I run a small business and: hard no.

"Yeah it was stupid but I was younger then" okay I can look past that "Nah man I didn't do nothin, actually" maybe so, but I'm not gonna take that chance

Distrust of police is separate from distrust of the legal system, at least in my eyes. Your question is about two different groups - Two applicants walks in and one is exLEO and one is not. Thats different than two applicants walk in and one being a felon/one not.

For criminals, people draw all sorts of lines. Sex crimes, violent crime, robbery, crimes of any kind against children. Different people in different fields will draw different lines. A great example is people who work with money obviously get leery around people charged with theft, embezzlement, or tampering. This is why convicts working trash services is such a "popular" job for the deeper end of the crime spectrum. They dont work with people, children, or money. You can be a sex pest, violent home invader, fraudster, and none of that matters because you sling cans and don't talk to homeowners. If you can wake up at 4am, and show up not drunk, and can move 60-120 lb trashcan, you have a job. All this to say, it would depend on what my hypothetical small business is doing, and what position applied for, where I'd draw that line with regards to monetary crimes. Violence and sex crimes are harder to justify allowing as customer facing the worse they get, but in accounting? Hardly relevant I'd think unless its egregious or consistent enough to think I'll be replacing them in 6 months as they caught a repeat case. I worked with a man who was charged with assault over a decade prior for getting in a fight, and nothing else. No issues as a cashier - because it was a fight with a dude over something not a recurring anger issue. Case by case.

As for exLEO, as the question probably wants to ask, people in this thread would probably get leery about why they are looking for new work. Retired and Forced to Quit are very different reasons that HR won't answer and the person is not obligated to be forthcoming about yet probably what people would want to know. Its also generally a highly prized skillset, honestly. On the professional end, you (generally) have report writing skills, documentation, and hypervigilance skills. While honesty of LEOs is probably the OPs aimed weak point, most customer facing jobs do not have the one thing LEOs perceptually abuse - authorisation to use force. Most customer facing jobs dont allow you to talk back, get in confrontations where you might be the cause, or put hands on people. For these reasons most people who distrust former police will still hire them.

Edit: I guess all this to say, it depends on the crime, and depends on how deeply you distrust former cops. I don't even trust my regular coworkers/employees to show up on fucking time, and they arent either felons or former cops. I'd be their boss hiring them cuz I need a job done - I'm not interviewing for new BFFs and looking to get chummy about their idiosyncrasies. So for me the only important part I see is "does their history with these institutions show they are so distrustful that I will have to fire them quickly?"

Family business here that hired a veteran homeless man. He had prior convictions and a drug problem. My dad gave him a job and a place to stay. He worked for 1 week and left without a trace. We found him on the streets one day and he said he didn't trust himself to not commit another crime and decided to continue living on the street.

Not everyone wants to be helped by us small business owners. Some need more help than just a job and a place to stay.

Depends on the business I am running, how otherwise qualified they are, what their supposed crime actually was, their side of the story, and general demeanor. I'm going to be honest though, it's mostly the last one. You can usually tell real fast by how someone acts if they had trouble with the law because they're an uneducated degenerate or a con man. It's not impossible to manipulate me, but most criminals are not geniuses. If it really seems like they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or they have learned from their mistakes if they admit to it, that's a different story.

I was friends with a murderer for a long time actually. He got blackout drunk, woke up, some dude was dead. He used to have a drinking problem. Doesn't remember it, but is positive it was him. Was in jail a long time, used the time to read a lot. He was significantly older than me and would give me and others advice on how to not be an idiot like he was. His words. I doubt the family would forgive him but shit happens. He told me once sometimes he wished he'd gotten the death penalty because it was hard af to turn his life entirely around, but it got better once he had a daughter. I'd still be friends with him if he didn't become annoying and stubborn over the years. He wasn't always wrong, just mildly an asshole sometimes.

Depends on the conviction. If it was something that was settled in front of a judge with police as the primary witnesses, I probably wouldn't care. If it was a serious crime decided by a jury, I'd give that a lot more weight.