How about we stop speaking in riddles.
It's about the lengths we will go to break a stacked deck. It's about prima facie privacy.
[EDIT: And who should be afforded that prima facie privacy. (We're obviously going to cherry-pick based on arbitrary characteristics like "shady".)]
The riddle does not exist. If a question can be put at all,
then it can also be answered.
—Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
In the end, nothing beats a Classical education.
It's postmodernism you're thinking of.
Fascinating.
Do you know of posey? It's right good stuff, even on Sundays.
I'm dodging the question because you should be focused on the "shady" characteristic. Even a morally reprehensible felon can appear non-shady. And a "shady" person with "negiligible" felony probably overly skews or augments their own perception of it, which makes them appear even "shadier" than they would without the felony, whatever its stripe.
Whatever the case, "felony", whatever its qualification, has a legal (non-personal) meaning, and it only has a meaning in that sense. Look at GEM Anscombe's distiction of institutional and brute facts. There's no such thing as a "brute fact" of felony.
What matters is what you think is negligible. The question is intended to tease out whether or not you believe absolutely that felony = no hire, or if there's some nuance to it.