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Make Your Recruiting Efforts Disability Inclusive

YOU’VE DONE YOUR HOMEWORK. You’ve raised awareness of disabilities within your workforce. You’ve nurtured your corporate culture into one that is inclusive. Your employees value differences in people because they realize, in doing so, they are helping to ensure continuity of your business—and their jobs.

Now you’re set to recruit job candidates with disabilities. This chapter shows you how to do that. We’ll start with the basics: provide answers to questions you’ve always wanted to ask about recruiting job candidates with disabilities and then look at the broad implications of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) for you as an employer as the law stands today. Please note that the information in this chapter (as well as the rest of this book) is not presented as legal advice but as guidelines from experts and expert sources.

Frequently Asked Questions About Hiring Employees with Disabilities

Candid questions about employment of people with disabilities often go unasked and, therefore, are generally unanswered. Here is some information about how to effectively relate to a job candidate with any type of disability. The answers are based on recommendations provided by the U.S. Department of Labor (http://www.dol.gov/odep/pubs/fact/laws.htm); the Job Accommodation Network (JAN), a service provided by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Disability Employment Policy (http://www.jan.wvu.edu/Erguide); and the New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, Inc. (NYLPI), 151 West 30th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10001-4007 (www.nylpi.org).

Question: What’s the correct term for people with disabilities?

Answer: Terminology confuses everyone. Some people with disabilities, for example, are fine with being called a “disabled person,” a “blind person,” etc.

Others who subscribe to the “people first” philosophy insist on “person who is disabled” terminology. They may say, “Don’t refer to us as ‘the disabled,’ ” but you will hear about a group called the National Federation of the Blind. It really is a matter of taste.

In general, the word “handicapped” is out of favor, so avoid “physically handicapped,” for instance, even though “handicapped parking” seems to stay with us.

It’s safe to take your cue from how the person with a disability describes himself. Without that feedback, it’s best to use “person with a disability” or “person who is disabled.”

Question: Do I have to give preference to a job candidate who has a disability?

Answer: No. The ADA and state and local laws protect people from employment discrimination on the basis of disability. But they do not require you to hire or promote an individual with a disability over other people.

According to the NYLPI, there are three guidelines you need to keep in mind as an employer:

1. These laws prohibit you from refusing to hire or to promote or from taking other adverse action against a person because of that person’s disability if he or she can perform the essential functions of the job.

2. You can, under the ADA, choose a person without a disability with more experience over an individual with a disability even if the individual with the disability is qualified for the job.

3. You can choose a person without a disability over an individual with a disability if the two individuals are equally qualified, as long as the choice was not made because of the individual’s disability.

Question: What can I ask a person with a disability during a job interview?

Answer: You can describe the essential functions of the job for which she is interviewing, and then you can ask the job candidate if she can do the work and how she would do it for your company.

You cannot phrase your questions in terms of the disability. For example, if driving an automobile is part of the job at hand, you can ask if she has a driver’s license, but you cannot ask if her leg braces prevent her from driving.

The ADA says that during job interviews or on job applications you cannot ask questions about medical conditions, past hospitalizations, the nature of a disability, or the severity of a disability.

Under the ADA, it’s still questionable whether asking about gaps in employment history is allowed because such a question could lead to an unlawful discussion about a job candidate’s disability.

Question: Does the ADA allow affirmative action in the hiring of people with disabilities?

Answer: You may invite job candidates to voluntarily self-identify for purposes of your affirmative action program if you are undertaking affirmative action because of a federal, state, or local law that requires affirmative action for individuals with disabilities or you are voluntarily using the information to benefit individuals with disabilities.

According to the Employee Equal Opportunity Commission (EEOC), if you invite job candidates to voluntarily self-identify in connection with providing affirmative action, you must state clearly that the information requested is used solely for affirmative action purposes, that it is being requested on a voluntary basis, that it will be kept confidential in accordance with the ADA, that refusal to provide it will not subject the candidates to any adverse treatment, and that it will be used only in accordance with the ADA.

For additional information, see “ADA Enforcement Guidance: Preemployment Disability-Related Questions and Medical Examinations” at http://www.eeoc.gov/policy/docs/preemp.html.

Question: Will we have to pay for lots of expensive equipment for an employee with a disability?

Answer: Not usually, but it depends on the individual situation. Does he need special equipment to do the work outlined in the job description? If he doesn’t, there are no costs for accommodations. If he does, JAN reports, “The average cost of hiring people with disabilities is the same as hiring a person without a disability, according to three-quarters of the employers surveyed.”

JAN also states that for disabilities in general the cost of reported accommodations breaks down like this:

Thirty-one percent cost nothing.

Fifty percent cost less than $50.

Sixty-nine percent cost less than $500.

Eighty-eight percent cost less than $1,000.

For more information, see http://www.jan.wvu.edu.

Question: Will hiring a person with a disability make our health insurance rates go up?

Answer: Not necessarily. Health insurance premiums are based on the health care costs (or “experience”) of an entire group, not just one person. And people with disabilities don’t necessarily have higher medical expenses.

Question: If I hire a job candidate with a disability, will I ever be able to lay off or fire that person for the same reasons I would let go someone without a disability?

Answer: If he is incompetent or commits any offense that calls for firing under your employment policies, you can most certainly fire him. If you have to lay off staff, you need not keep a disabled person on just because he’s disabled. The point is that unless you are firing a worker because he is disabled there is no prohibition against it.

But are you actually asking, “How do I fire a person with a disability without feeling like a monster?” If so, realize that it’s never easy to fire someone. A person with a disability deserves no less and no more fairness.

For more detailed information about these issues, see the next section of this chapter and Appendix A, “Comprehensive Resource List for Hiring People with Disabilities” at the end of this book. FAQs in Chapter 5 address reasonable accommodations and issues about information and confidentiality once you have hired an employee with a disability.

Now let’s look at the broad implications of the ADA as it stands today.

What You as an Employer Need to Know About Current Interpretations of the ADA

The big picture of today’s ADA from an employment standpoint needs to include these four components:

1. An overview of the original ADA of 1990 provisions for employers

2. A summary of some of the major Supreme Court rulings since 1990

3. A summary of some of the lower court rulings since 1990

4. A summary of what the ADA Amendments Act (ADAAA) of 2008 is all about

The ADA of 1990

Title I of the ADA deals with employment. In simple language, the JAN overview describes Title I’s overall provisions like this:

Business must provide reasonable accommodations to protect the rights of individuals with disabilities in all aspects of employment.

Possible changes may include restructuring jobs, altering the layout of workstations or modifying equipment.

Employment aspects may include the application process, hiring, wages, benefits and all other aspects of employment. Medical examinations are highly regulated.

The language in the original ADA left these three questions to be determined through interpretation by case law:

1. Who is disabled and, therefore, covered by employment provisions of the ADA?

2. Which employers must observe employment provisions?

3. What aspects of employment are covered and what steps will satisfy the employment provisions of the ADA?

Let’s first look at how these questions have been answered by the U.S. Supreme Court in rulings on ADA-related cases during the last fifteen years. Then we’ll look at lower court rulings. Finally, we’ll see how the ADAAA of 2008 attempts to bring the law back to what Congress intended it to be when it passed the ADA in 1990. Of course, these are all snapshots of a fluid situation. For a current update, it’s best to consult your legal counsel.

U.S. Supreme Court Decisions: Issues and Cases

The rulings in the cases discussed here are a sampling of how the U.S. Supreme Court has decided the ADA should be applied. The summaries are interpretations by the U.S. Supreme Court alone and do not include those ADA provisions that may not have been challenged yet.

Issues Involving Employment

Who is disabled?

Here’s what the language of the ADA states. With respect to an individual, the term “disability” means:

a. A physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more of the major life activities of such individual;

b. A record of such an impairment; or

c. Being regarded as having such an impairment.

The ADA further clarifies that the person with a disability covered by its provisions must also be “qualified.”

The term “qualified individual with a disability” means an individual with a disability who, with or without reasonable accommodation, can perform the essential functions of the employment position that such an individual holds or desires. That’s according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

But many critics of the ADA have commented that this definition does not adequately spell out definitively what constitutes a disability. To this charge, one of the ADA’s authors, Congressman Steny Hoyer, replies, “Is this what we had in mind when we passed the ADA—that lawyers for businesses and individuals should spend time and money arguing about whether people can brush their teeth and take out the garbage? Not at all. The whole tenor of the debate at that time was far broader.”

Which employers must comply?

Here’s what the ADA (and U.S. Department of Justice) says. In general:

The term “employer” means a person engaged in an industry affecting commerce who has 15 or more employees for each working day in each of 20 or more calendar weeks in the current or preceding calendar year, and any agent of such person, except that, for two years following the effective date of this title, an employer means a person engaged in an industry affecting commerce who has 25 or more employees for each working day in each of 20 or more calendar weeks in the current or preceding year, and any agent of such person.

Exceptions:

The term “employer” does not include:

i. The United States, a corporation wholly owned by the government of the United States, or an Indian tribe; or

ii. A bona fide private membership club (other than a labor organization) that is exempt from taxation under section 501(c) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986.

How must employers comply?

The ADA has always referred to a concept called “reasonable accommodation” (that is, what changes really need to be made to permit a disabled person an equal opportunity to work).

The term “reasonable accommodation” may include:

a. Making existing facilities used by employees readily accessible to and usable by individuals with disabilities; and

b. Job restructuring, part-time or modified work schedules, reassignment to a vacant position, acquisition or modification of equipment or devices, appropriate adjustment or modifications of examinations, training materials or policies, the provision of qualified readers or interpreters, and other similar accommodations for individuals with disabilities.

For example, an employer may need to provide a blind or visually impaired employee with memoranda in an accessible format, if she cannot read standard print. But the employer does not have to pay for her lunch unless he pays for everyone else’s. This is because the blind person cannot read the print on her own, but nothing about her disability prevents her from bringing or buying her own lunch. She could not sue under the ADA claiming that furnishing lunch is a “reasonable accommodation” for her blindness.

Another concept introduced into the mix is “undue hardship.” Here is how the ADA itself defines it:

The term “undue hardship” means an action requiring significant difficulty or expense, when considered in light of (certain) factors. Factors to be considered, in determining whether an accommodation would impose an undue hardship on a covered entity, include:

i. The nature and cost of the accommodation needed under the ADA;

ii. The overall financial resources of the facility or facilities involved in the provision of the reasonable accommodation; the number of persons employed at such facility; the effect on expenses and resources, or the impact otherwise of such accommodation upon the operation of the facility;

iii. The overall financial resources of the covered entity; the overall size of the business of a covered entity with respect to the number of its employees; the number, type and location of its facilities; and

iv. The type of operation or operations of the covered entity, including the composition, structure and functions of the workforce of such entity; the geographic separateness, administrative or fiscal relationship of the facility or facilities in question to the covered entity.

For instance, a large supermarket chain may be expected to provide expensive assistive technology for a blind or visually impaired cashier, but a tiny mom-and-pop grocery store may not, since the latter does not have the financial resources the former does.

The Cases Involving Employment Issues

Bragdon v. Abbott, 524 U.S. 624 (1998): HIV is a physical impairment covered by the ADA whether or not symptoms have appeared.

Wright v. Universal Maritime Service Corp., 525 U.S. 70 (1998): If an employer and its employees’ collective bargaining organization have an agreement that arbitration must take place concerning employee grievances, the agreement cannot replace civil action when an employee invokes her rights under the ADA. In other words, she will not have to abide by the arbitration decision and may sue privately.

Albertson’s, Inc. v. Kirkingburg, 527 U.S. 555 (1999): A person’s natural ability to correct for a condition (in this case having monocular vision) satisfies the definition of “correction” and the employer need not accommodate “a mere difference in an individual’s manner of performing an activity” unless the employee herself can prove she has a “substantial limitation.”

Cleveland v. Policy Management Systems Corp., 526 U.S. 795 (1999): A person who has applied for or is receiving disability benefits may still invoke the protection of the ADA.

Sutton v. United Airlines, 527 U.S. 471 (1999): If a person’s condition can be corrected (in this case, by eyeglasses or contact lenses), she is not to be considered disabled under the ADA.

Murphy v. United Parcel Service, 527 U.S. 516 (1999): If a person’s condition can be corrected by medication, she is not to be considered disabled under the ADA. Also a person who is limited in regard to only one work task may not be considered disabled under the ADA.

EEOC v. Waffle House, Inc., 122 S. Ct. 754 (2002): An employee’s civil rights cannot be signed away by her, even with mutual consent.

Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Kentucky, Inc. v. Williams, 122 S. Ct. 681 (2002): In regard to manual tasks, a person may only be considered to have “substantial limitations” if these limitations are visible and functional.

Chevron v. Echazabal, 00-1406 (2002): Under regulation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, an entity can refuse to hire an individual because his performance on the job would endanger his own health, owing to a disability.

U.S. Airways, Inc. v. Barnett, 122 S. Ct. 1516 (2002): When an employee with a disability seeks reassignment as an accommodation under the ADA, that employee’s right to reasonable accommodation does not trump another employee’s seniority rights when the employer has a seniority system.

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Waffle House, Inc., 122 S. Ct. 754 (2002): An agreement between an employee and an employer to arbitrate employment-related disputes does not bar the EEOC from pursuing victim-specific judicial relief, such as back pay, reinstatement, and damages, in an enforcement action alleging that the employer has violated Title I of the ADA.

Lower Court Decisions: Issues and Cases

Lower courts in the United States have ruled on many more individual cases that have not been considered necessary for consideration by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The ADA is like a growing child, so just as no photo of a child truly reflects what he looks like at the present moment, no summary of ADA cases can be complete and up-to-date. In many cases, there may be a split between circuit courts. In other instances, the cases may no longer be law based upon subsequent decisions in that circuit or the Supreme Court. It is wise to contact an attorney who specializes in employment law to keep you current about how the ADA is being applied to specific circumstances.

However, here is a sampling of decisions so you can get a sense of the direction the lower courts are taking with the employment provisions of the ADA.

The rulings by the many lower courts have resulted in three general findings:

1. Congress had the right to create and continues to possess the right to enforce the ADA.

2. The definition of disability must be tested case by case, and there is no one definition of disability.

3. The requirement that an employer make “reasonable accommodation” so the disabled employee can perform work tasks is not unlimited and does not necessitate Herculean efforts.

Here is a little more detail about these three main decisions and some of the cases that were involved in making them.

Congress had the right to create and continues to possess the right to enforce the ADA. Numerous cases considering the status of the ADA as law may be summed up as validation of the law’s constitutionality. Some questioned whether the ADA violated the Eleventh or Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The Eleventh Amendment concerns whether “the judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by citizens of another state, or by citizens or subjects of any foreign state.”

The rulings have determined that the states and their officials do not have immunity from suits brought under the ADA and further may be enforced by injunction. However, the Supreme Court ruled that suits for monetary damages are not allowed to be brought in federal courts (Board of Trustees of the University of Alabama v. Garrett, 531 U.S. 356, 121 S. Ct. 955 [2001]). The case invoking the Fourteenth Amendment challenged whether the U.S. Congress has the authority to pass and enforce a law such as the ADA. To date, rulings have affirmed this right.

The definition of disability must be tested case by case, and there is no one definition of disability. Once the ADA was enacted, it quickly became obvious that the definition of “disability” is difficult to pin down. Different courts have ruled on what constitutes a “major life activity”—with the outcome that one court deemed that procreation is a major life activity while another ruling held that if one can enjoy some major life activities, a limitation on ability to do a particular work task may not be limitation enough to make the worker “disabled.”

Courts have concluded that a correctable condition is not a disability. And courts have narrowed the definition by declining to call anything but an inability to perform similar tasks across a broad spectrum a disability. For example, a man who could no longer teach but could perform another occupation was determined not to be disabled under the ADA.

Under the ADA, an individual with a disability is a person who has a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities, has a record of such an impairment, or is regarded as having such an impairment.

The two bones of contention have been about what constitutes a “substantial limitation” and what is a “major life activity.” Neither is precisely defined. As a result, different courts have interpreted these two concepts differently.

Is there an objective definition that covers all disabilities? No. Different rulings appear not only to be different but sometimes to be at odds.

According to The Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law:

In Muller v. Automobile Club of Southern California, 897 F. Supp. 1289 (S.D. Cal. 1995), an insurance company claims adjuster who developed posttraumatic stress disorder after being threatened by a customer was found by the court to be capable of doing similar work for other employers or in other jobs. Thus, the court held, Ms. Muller was not a person with a disability as defined by the ADA.

The Bazelon Center also notes:

In Mustafa v. Clark County School District, 876 F. Supp. 1177 (D. Nev. 1995), a case decided under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, a teacher who developed panic disorder and anxiety contended that he was substantially limited not only in working but also in other major life activities. The court rejected Mr. Mustafa’s claim, however, apparently relying in large part on the fact that Mr. Mustafa’s doctors had advised him to engage in physical exercise. Also, although the court acknowledged that Mr. Mustafa’s impairment was a barrier to his employment as a teacher, it held that he was not barred from employment generally.

What constitutes a “major life activity”? The original language of the ADA made reference to faculties such as seeing and hearing. But even this question has no simple answer. For example, a woman’s request for time off to receive fertility treatment was turned down by her employer. The court determined, when she sued for redress under the ADA, that procreation is a “major life activity” (Bielicki v. City of Chicago, W.L. 260595 [N.D. Ill. 1997]).

Is a person disabled if the effect of a condition can be fully alleviated? Is a person blind if she can put on glasses and see fine? The United Transportation Union reported in Daily News Digest:

The court ruled that protections under the Act (ADA) are limited to people whose conditions cannot be corrected with medication or devices, such as glasses or hearing aids.

This opinion is supported by lawsuits that were struck down: one by a truck driver who is nearly blind in one eye, Albertson’s v. Kirkingburg, and another by nearsighted twins who applied to be commercial pilots, Sutton v. United Airlines.

Yet, other rulings affecting the definition of who is disabled have held that use of medication, a prosthetic device, or adaptive tools does not affect whether the person using them is disabled.

The requirement that an employer make “reasonable accommodation” so the disabled employee can perform work tasks is not unlimited and does not necessitate Herculean efforts. The ADA puts forth that business must provide reasonable accommodations to protect the rights of individuals with disabilities in all aspects of employment. “‘Reasonable accommodations’ may include restructuring jobs, altering the layout of workstations, or modifying equipment,” it says.

Several lower court rulings have addressed what constitutes “reasonable accommodation.” These decisions have held, among other situations, that:

An employer need only restructure the nonessential functions of a position in order to provide equal access for a disabled applicant.

The employer must address accommodations whenever a worker’s disability changes significantly enough to require it.

Regular attendance is to be considered an “essential function,” and employees may not demand an open-ended schedule as an accommodation. However, as long as personnel policy requirements for applying “unpaid leave” are followed by the employee, it can be used to meet accommodations needs.

Employers are only required to provide accommodations that are effective. They do not need to provide those accommodations recommended as “best” by the worker or consultants.

The courts are split over whether reassigning a person to a different job is sufficient for “reasonable accommodation.” Further, other issues may impact this, such as collective bargaining agreements.

The lower courts have addressed other aspects of work life as well. For example, courts are split as to whether limitations to employee benefits (such as limitations on mental health treatment within health insurance coverage that may disproportionately affect employees with disabilities) are allowable.

The ADA Amendments Act of 2008

On September 25, 2008, the ADAAA was signed into law and became effective on January 1, 2009. The ADAAA was supported by more than 220 national organizations, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Society of Employers, disability organizations, veterans’ groups, church organizations, and the National Association of Manufacturers. The bill passed the House on a vote of 402 to 17 and unanimously passed the Senate.

To understand what the ADAAA means, though, it’s important to understand why the ADA needed amending in the first place. When it was passed in 1990, the ADA had a definition of disability based on the definition used in the Rehabilitation Act of 1973: An individual with a disability has a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities, a record of such an impairment, or is regarded as having such an impairment. So Congress used that definition in the ADA because it seemed to work well in the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.

However, according to Jacquie Brennan of the Independent Living Research Utilization program, a national center for information, training, research, and technical assistance in independent living, the Supreme Court in 1999 started to narrow the definition of disability in unexpected ways.

In a case called Sutton v. United Airlines (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/
getcase.pl?court=US&vol=000&invol=97-1943), for instance, the court said that when you determine whether an individual has a disability under the ADA, you have to consider the effects of mitigating measures (such as corrective lenses, medications, hearing aids, and prosthetic devices) when deciding whether an impairment is substantially limiting.

Brennan points out that the Court did one other thing in Sutton. It essentially overturned an old Rehabilitation Act of 1973 case, School Board of Nassau County v. Arline (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/
scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=480&invol=273). Arline had broadly viewed the part of the definition of disability that mentions having a “record of” an impairment. The Court in Sutton required a more restrictive view of that part of the definition, which practically eliminated it.

In 2002, in a case called Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Kentucky, Inc. v. Williams (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/
getcase.pl?court=US&vol=000&invol=00-1089), the Supreme Court focused on the word “substantially” in the definition of disability and said that it means “considerably” or “to a large degree.” The Court also narrowed the scope of “major life activity,” stating that it must be something that is of central importance to most people’s daily lives.

According to Brennan, between Sutton and Toyota and their progeny, the definition of disability was narrowed to such a degree that most cases became more about whether a person met the definition of disability instead of access or accommodation.

The EEOC did its part, too, Brennan explains. It had regulations that defined “substantially limits” as “significantly restricts,” which was inconsistent with Congress’s intent when it passed the ADA.

So that is why Congress decided that the ADA of 1990 needed to be amended.

At the beginning of every new law that Congress writes, it lists “findings,” which are the reasons why the law is being written, says Brennan. In the ADAAA, there is a list of findings. They include:

“Congress intended the ADA to provide a clear and comprehensive national mandate for the elimination of discrimination against individuals with disabilities and provide broad coverage.”

“While Congress expected that the definition of disability under the ADA would be interpreted consistently with how courts had applied the definition of a handicapped individual under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, that expectation has not been fulfilled.”

Specific statements in the Supreme Court holdings in Sutton and Toyota eliminated protection for many individuals whom Congress intended to protect.

Then it lists the purposes of the ADAAA, which include:

To reject the requirement, under Sutton, that mitigating measures be considered when determining whether a person meets the definition of disability

To reject the Supreme Court’s reasoning, under Sutton, with regard to the “record of” prong of the definition of disability, and reinstate the Arline standard

To reject the Toyota standard that the terms “substantially” and “major” need to be interpreted strictly because that creates a demanding standard for qualifying a person with a disability

To express Congress’s expectation that the EEOC will revise its definition of “substantially limits”

The ADAAA has new rules for the definition of disability. They include:

The definition of disability is construed in favor of broad coverage to the maximum extent permitted.

The term “substantially limits” is to be interpreted consistently with the ADAAA.

An impairment that substantially limits one major life activity need not limit other major life activities to be considered a disability.

An impairment that is episodic or in remission is a disability if it would substantially limit a major life activity when active.

Mitigating measures shall not be a factor when determining whether an impairment substantially limits a major life activity. The only mitigating measures that can be considered are ordinary eyeglasses or contact lenses that fully correct visual acuity or eliminate refractive error.

People who are regarded as being disabled are entitled to reasonable accommodations or modifications. Previously, courts had debated whether the ADA required having to accommodate a disability that didn’t actually exist.

In short, the ADAAA is not some revolutionary new law. It simply attempts to bring the law back to what Congress intended it to be when it passed the ADA in 1990.

Walking a Wavy Line

As an employer, you may well conclude that trying to second-guess future applications of Title I of the ADA is chancy. The rulings will continue to be handed down and the ADA refined indefinitely. So what guidelines would be helpful to follow?

One response is to hire the best candidate for an open position in every single case. The mistake you may make will be to consider a disability a disqualification—a barrier to an applicant who is the most qualified person.

Disability is not inability. You should educate yourself about the realities of disability and look for the person who will perform best in the job you have open—the person who will reflect well on you and extend the success of your company.

So, let’s take a look at each step of your recruiting process and suggestions on ways to make each of your recruiting efforts disability inclusive—starting with how you define “experience.”

Considering Volunteer Experience May Be Essential in Fully Evaluating a Job Candidate

Volunteering not only shows that a job candidate is motivated to work in a job field of his or her choice for free to gain work experience and job skills. It also says something about the individual’s values, mission, and character.

When an individual has motivation, values, a mission, and character, that person probably has been—and will continue to be—successful. That’s the type of individual you will want to hire and groom for more responsibility.

Volunteering: The “After-School” Job for Applicants with Disabilities

When the typical job applicant hands you his resume or job application, you can expect to see part-time jobs and internships he’s held while in college and during summer breaks. The sharp applicant will include any substantial volunteer work he’s done, too. These items under “Work Experience” are what you will use, in part, to decide whether the applicant is job ready and whether he has the work experience and work habits to make him the best candidate for your open job.

But, when the applicant sitting across the interview table has a disability, his resume might be a little thin on work experience gained through part-time and limited-term jobs. This does not mean he cannot do the job—only that certain barriers to typical part-time employment may exist and may have prevented him from getting a chance to show what he can do.

He may have had little extra time to work after studying, for instance, if his access needs (and the available tools or lack thereof) meant taking more time for his schoolwork. He may not have had transportation from home to work during breaks. And most likely he could not get hired for these typically low-paid, short-term, and part-time jobs. How many people with disabilities have you seen working at McDonald’s during summer break?

The truth is that the most motivated individuals with a disability will manage to land internships during college, but upon graduation internships are generally not available. That leaves volunteering as one of the few avenues they have after college for developing their skills and proving themselves on the job.

After college, job candidates with disabilities also often endure long job searches or stretches between jobs. Some use volunteering as one of their job search strategies to widen their contacts with people who have varying experiences, backgrounds, and lifestyles. Others volunteer so they can fill in chronological gaps in their resumes.

Volunteer work can be more flexible than paid jobs in terms of schedules and other work requirements. The volunteer work you see on the resume of an applicant with a disability may be the only work he could get that most easily complemented his personal schedule.

So volunteer experience on a resume is one way a disabled applicant can show you what he can do. As Suzanne Westhaver says to disabled students in her article “Putting Your Best Foot Forward: Tips for Resume Building,” on EnableLink.com:

You need to have an edge if you want an employer to hire you. Something has to make you stand out from the rest of the candidates. Affirmative action doesn’t entitle you to a job. Affirmative action entitles a qualified candidate an equal opportunity for employment. In today’s job market, you need to be computer savvy. You need to be educated, and you need to have experience. “How do I get experience?” a voice in the back of your mind screams. Getting experience is not as difficult as it may seem. If you are having trouble gaining experience through employment opportunities, I recommend volunteer experience.

Some Volunteering Examples

Consider the following interchange about volunteer work among four members of eSight Careers Network, all of whom have some type of disability and are actively pursuing their career goals in today’s job market:

Jeremiah Taylor:

I volunteered without pay for my employer after I lost my sight so I had an opportunity to remove the fears of my colleagues and show them I could perform on the job.

Liz Seger:

I volunteer on a community editorial board with the local newspaper with people from all the municipalities in our area—young people, retired people (for some reason a lot of the board is composed of retired teachers and retired journalists), and a lot from the helping professions (a minister, social workers, etc.). Two of us are disabled.

We’re a very cohesive and funny group, and we’ve only known each other a couple of years. We enjoy sparring because we’re also all philosophical and have political backgrounds.

George Bernard Shaw wrote this about how he saw his role in the world, and I’ve always felt it represented my worldview well, too:

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and, as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. … I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is a brief candle to me. It’s a sort of a splendid torch which I’ve got to hold up, for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it to future generations.

When I wasn’t awarded my B.Ed. degree at a large and famous Canadian university because its elementary school division felt there would never be a board of education that would hire a legally blind teacher, my mother wouldn’t allow me to sit around the house and vegetate.

She had teacher friends who let me come into their classroom and volunteer. Eventually two of the principals were so pleased with my work they had me working as an educational assistant. I did that for two years while appealing my degree with not only the Ministry of Colleges and Universities in Canada but also with the then Handicapped Employment Program out of the Ministry of Labor.

The principals in the two schools where I volunteered sent a petition to both ministries, and I was finally granted my B.Ed. degree in 1980.

I also got into journalism by volunteering. My mom’s friend worked on the newspaper, and she introduced me to her editor who asked me to do a few sample columns about disability issues for him. That led to a bi-weekly column in our local paper that ran from January 1981 until August 1982, when I moved to Alberta.

The paper couldn’t afford to pay me, but by writing for The Port Colborne News, I learned how to craft a news story. I covered local events, and I had my own column at 26.

Volunteering hones your soft skills, such as learning how to be a team player. When I was out of work in the 1990s, I volunteered for our local branch of the Canadian Red Cross and worked my way up to chairman of the branch. During this experience, I not only developed new skills, but I also acquired a large and varied social network.

Melissa McBane:

Volunteer work gives people the opportunity to use the same skills needed for many paying jobs: organizational ability, teamwork, interpersonal communication—the list goes on and on. I am personally impressed by employees, disabled or not, who do volunteer work. It shows good character.

James Elekes:

I have long had a passion to observe the inner workings of government, be it on the local, state, or federal levels. As an observer, you often must take a step back, focusing on the tree rather than the entire forest.

I believe in the dignity of all humanity and expressing my opinion when unfair treatment is focused at a particular segment of the community. Professionally, I am systematic and structured when analyzing an issue.

As a result, [my] “volunteer/community service” has focused on how to improve the service delivery to the disability community—whether it be in serving on an advisory body, focusing efforts on expanding resources to bridge a gap in service funding or opening options for disabled individuals to participate in a heretofore unavailable experience.

It is ironic, but I do not look at what the activity can do for me but what I can contribute to the community to make it better. To this end, it is the life experience gained that is the reward. It is this experience that helps fill in the picture of me as a person, and, time and time again, it is this value-added, intangible benefit I bring to a prospective employer that is the difference in being the successful candidate when compared to others vying for the same employment goal.

Notice how a simple story about volunteer experience reveals much about a job candidate’s orientation: She’s assertive, she’s resourceful, she’s a leader, she’s a life-long learner.…

As a recruiter or hiring manager, you obtain some of the same helpful information when you ask about volunteer experience as you would if you inquired only about on-the-job accomplishments.

Not All Volunteer Work Is the Same When Evaluating a Job Candidate

There is volunteering, and then there is volunteering. Some volunteer projects can be substantive and genuinely lead toward developing necessary work habits, skills, and experience. Some may not.

You will need to find out about the candidate’s volunteer work history to decide whether to take it into consideration when making a hiring decision.

What’s Your Incentive to Value Volunteer Experience?

But why bother with making sure a job candidate’s volunteer experience is legitimate? Why not just hire the person with the best, more traditional background? You can do that, but you will want to look at his volunteer history, too. It’s in your best interest.

Most volunteers do volunteer work simply because they like to work. If they want to relax, they can do that on their own. If they want money, they have to trade labor for pay. But the incentive for those who volunteer (assuming it’s not a mandatory community service program) is that they care about a cause and want to work for it.

Someone who volunteers is already a better applicant because he or she is a self-starter who values work and is self-motivated and committed.

It’s a mistake to discount volunteering as not “serious work” or to believe that listing volunteer experience in a resume is an attempt to mislead you. Volunteers are the “above-and-beyond” workers you are seeking. As Peg Cheng, an academic advisor for the University of Washington, Seattle, points out, “Volunteering shows initiative and compassion.”

Cheng spotlights internships in particular. “Often,” she says, “interns do substantial, valuable work for an organization.” She explains that they are what she calls “high-end” volunteers, whose work on boards and in grant writing and so forth requires professional-level skills—knocking down the common belief that volunteering generally involves low skills.

Characteristics of “Real” Volunteer Work

The quick answer to “How do I decide if a volunteer job really means this individual has work experience?” is the same as with a paid job. You know what sustained, substantive work looks like. Stability, reliability, responsibility, and performance all can be revealed in work of any kind.

Some paid summer job experiences allow these characteristics to surface, but others do not. Even within the same job (e.g., summer camp counselor), you will find goof-offs and responsible kids as well as supervisors who are lax and supervisors with firm hands. You already have procedures for sorting out these applicants. Apply the same standards to those who highlight volunteer experience.

You may be tempted to dismiss volunteer experience on the basis that “there are no volunteer jobs relevant to our industry.” You may be surprised at the breadth of volunteer projects available today. Not every one involves just stuffing envelopes or answering phones.

Here are two good places for getting a sense of today’s volunteering opportunities: VolunteerMatch, at www.volunteermatch.org, and Idealist, at www.idealist.org. Look at the variety of fields and job responsibilities and check the complexity of many of those opportunities.

Besides, in a lot of cases, it’s the work (not the industry) that counts on a resume. Does it matter to you where an applicant got his experience? Look on Idealist.org for volunteer projects that involve two volunteer opportunities far removed from stuffing envelopes: plumbing and tax accounting. One search found fourteen plumbing projects and sixty-four that were related to tax accounting (and that does not account for the hundreds of individual IRS tax help-center volunteer positions).

As with any other applicant, you can ask the person who defines her volunteer projects as experience to describe the work she did as a volunteer in terms applicable to the work she would do at your company. Volunteer work can be assessed right along with paid work when you know what went into it. For instance, if you read or hear the following, do you really care if pay was involved? “Managed four marketing events, each with up to 2,000 in attendance, which required coordinating registration, topics, and speakers with twelve committee members, including the marketing association’s president and dean of business administration.”

In fact, it is more likely she performed this work on her own initiative, drawing from her own talents. In a paid job, she may have been only an aide to a team performing the work and under the direction of a higher-up.

Sharp job seekers take steps to identify job titles that most closely reflect the work they did as a volunteer and to describe the work as they would for a “real” job. So look closely at the job titles under the “Volunteer Experience” heading of the resumes that come to your attention.

The University of Rhode Island community service program instructs students to document their volunteer experience well. In a study module called “Turning Your Volunteer Experience into Quality Material for Your Resume and Interview,” it recommends that students compile portfolios of their volunteer work with reference letters, evaluations from supervisors, and even photos taken of them volunteering.

You certainly can ask for just this sort of evidence from your job candidate so you can evaluate for yourself his volunteer work experience and how “serious” it was.

But beware of the inclination to discount volunteer experience because the “job titles” involved don’t match those used in paid jobs. Even the paid professional running the program most likely is “under-identified” as a “volunteer coordinator,” when, in fact, he does a great deal more than just schedule the work.

Following are several more characteristics of a substantive volunteer project more than worth your consideration—gleaned from the professional volunteer resource managers involved in the CyberVPM online discussion network. These professional volunteer resource managers recommend looking for experience in well-organized programs with:

A paid professional volunteer resource manager in charge of the program

A volunteer screening and training procedure

Position descriptions for volunteers

Written volunteer performance evaluations

Volunteer hours tracking

Evidence of providing substantive work experience that uses and develops the volunteers’ work skills

Other evidence that the organization makes the most effective use of community involvement in pursuit of its mission

Look for service-learning programs and internships and other volunteer programs that are specifically dedicated to substantive work. AmeriCorps and similar programs have high standards for performance and responsibility.

But, more than anything, look for the applicant who is inspired and enlightened by her volunteer experience and is able to demonstrate this energy and commitment in an articulate and illustrative manner.

Is she taking full advantage of her volunteer opportunities to develop these less “trainable” qualities: reliability, cooperation, punctuality, focus, organization, and collaboration? Does that become apparent during your discussions with her?

With a basic understanding of how to comply with the ADA and how to consider volunteering as experience, you’re now ready to go recruit job candidates with a disability on a face-to-face basis.

How to Locate Job Candidates with Disabilities on the Local Level

Steve Kendall, MR Atlanta West, cites a typical predicament for recruiters—a dilemma he has encountered many times during his 21 years in the recruiting business. Companies are continually being reviewed to see if they are hiring people fairly and often want to hire people who qualify as Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) candidates. However, hiring managers can’t ask if a job candidate qualifies for EEO without being open to a lawsuit for illegal hiring practices. They cannot ask if an individual is qualified due to being disabled, a minority, over age 40, and so on.

“My advice to [job] candidates is that they not hide their EEO status and volunteer the information,” Kendall says. “It certainly cannot hurt—and could actually be an asset.”

Another solution to this problem is to make sure job seekers who may qualify as EEO candidates (including those with disabilities) have access to your job announcements.

You can hope individuals with disabilities are in line with everyone else to find out about your openings through classified ads, job sites, placement services, professional networks, and job fairs. But you can’t rely on it. You must make a special effort to reach qualified job candidates who happen to have a disability.

Those with disabilities, after all, are not centralized. They are a diverse group of individuals who are dealing with specific disabilities in specific ways. Even within a specific disability (such as those restricting physical mobility), there are incredible variations in terms of type, severity, and need. And these individuals are scattered throughout every sector of society.

They come from every subset of humanity: gender, age, race, ethnicity, sexual preference, education, religion, ability, interests, politics, income, values, and so on. They often receive services from disability organizations, but they are even more likely to form relationships with groups that address other interests, such as politics, hobbies, worship, classes, professions, or sports.

Still, if you’re recruiting on a local level, there are ways to make sure your job announcements are reaching qualified job candidates with disabilities. In your hometown, there are three main recruitment tools you can use to reach job candidates with disabilities: job placement/vocational services, community social services, and consumer/affinity groups.

Job Placement/Vocational Services

Check your state or provincial vocational rehabilitation programs. The goal of state vocational rehabilitation agencies in the United States, for instance, is to help individuals with disabilities to become employed. To that end, these agencies (with the support of their federal partners) stand ready to provide employers with qualified job candidates with disabilities to meet the workforce needs of American business. See http://www.ed.gov/rschstat/research/
pubs/vrpractices/busdev.html to reach the vocational rehabilitation person in your state whose job it is to work with you in successfully locating, hiring, and retaining individuals with disabilities for your work group.

Consider veterans who have been injured or wounded. There are 2.9 million disabled vets in the United States, including 180,000 from the recent wars in the Middle East—a number that continues to rise. See http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/05/11/national/
main4086442.shtml?source=RSSattr=Health_4086442. For information about hiring an injured or wounded veteran, contact Jim Arrington, Manager, REALifelines Program, at the Military Severely Injured Center at (202) 693-4724 or e-mail him at [email protected].

Develop contacts at local university/college student employment and placement services and job fairs—as well as disabled student services departments on college campuses.

Learn about local job fairs sponsored by disability organizations.

Check employment listings in disability publications.

Contact your mayor’s office about municipal work programs.

Community Social Services

Contact your local community information center or United Way to find social service organizations for various disabilities (many have programs to inform the public about the abilities and rights of people with disabilities, promote self-determination for individuals, and offer training in independent living skills).

Ask about programs dedicated to helping people with disabilities pursue a variety of interests (including arts, recreation, and sports).

Consumer/Affinity Groups

Get to know people who are active in state and local programs for consumer/advocacy groups, such as National Federation of the Blind, at http://www.nfb.org; American Council of the Blind, at http://www.acb.org; Blinded Veterans Association, at http://www.bva.org; and other such organizations.

Check clubs for people with disabilities who share certain recreational or social interests, such as blind amateur radio operators or wheelchair basketball players.

Your state’s Business Leadership Network (BLN) is also an invaluable source of just about anything you need to make your workplace inclusive of talented, committed employees who have disabilities. Join your state’s BLN. You can start by finding out whether your state has a network. Check the U.S. Business Leadership Network (USBLN®) directory at http://www.usbln.org/affiliates.html.

State BLNs have a variety of tools designed to help businesses become more inclusive. They are useful sources of information about disability awareness trainers, adaptive technology companies, available guest speakers, state regulations, and tax incentives. They also provide great opportunities for networking and mentorships. Many offer publications, videos, or other tools to help you. Most organize training events for their members. They also provide advice and tools for job seekers with disabilities.

You can also contact your chamber of commerce to find out if your city or state has organizations similar to a BLN.

The easiest way to check up on the disability employment track records of your competitors and other businesses, by the way, is to look at your local BLN membership list or similar document. A more challenging (but, at the same time, more revealing) means is simply looking at their websites. The really challenging part is figuring out how to find the sites of those competitors whose Web addresses you don’t already have. A good start would be checking online “yellow pages” sites or local online business directories.

When you find a competitor’s site, check the “Careers” or “Employment Opportunities” section to read about its diversity policy and check for inclusion of disabilities in its HR initiatives.

Also pay attention to competitors who participate in job fairs. How inclusive are they in their job fair presence? How effectively do they use job fairs, which are typically local in scope, in recruiting job candidates with disabilities?

Using Job Fairs to Recruit Candidates with a Disability

Be sure to do everything you can to level the playing field at a job fair so you won’t miss those top-notch candidates who may be disabled but may have just the right skills and experience to help your company (instead of one of your top competitors) continue to succeed.

A job fair is mostly for information gathering. It’s not necessarily a place where actual hiring gets done. You probably attend a job fair to assess the current availability, skills, and salary expectations of job seekers in general. A job seeker may attend to see what prospects he’ll have before he leaves his current job or to gather data for the salary-negotiation phase of finding a new job.

But hiring does happen. Sometimes it happens right at the fair.

When the job fair has been specifically planned for disabled job candidates, however, the veneer is somewhat thicker. It’s likely some companies are there only for public relations purposes: “See how inclusive we are!” or the more sinister: “Hey, we tried to hire disabled people, but none of them were qualified.”

One subscriber to the BlindJob e-mail discussion group aired her skepticism about the “reality” of job fairs for disabled job seekers. “I have some vision, so sometimes I stand to the side of the booth and listen to the vendors speak to job seekers,” she says, “and I notice that they speak differently to blind people.”

She adds, “I have attended the President’s Committee [on Employment of People with Disabilities] job fair three times here in Washington, D.C., and I’ve never heard of blind people hired from the fair.”

Although she knows it would violate the law, she says she almost wishes the recruiters would come right out and say they don’t intend to hire her. “I have been to job fairs,” she continues, “(where), for the most part, companies just talk enough to you to pacify you and to hurry you off. They always tell you they aren’t looking to fill the position you’re seeking, or (they) give you their information and hurry you away. I would rather hear the truth. I am not a stupid person.”

The more optimistic answer is that these disability-focused job fairs are as “for real” as any other job fair. So some people will be hired. It is up to the organizations involved and their recruiters to make sure their recruiting efforts at these fairs are not a waste of time for everyone involved.

The bottom line is this: Avoid having a booth at a job fair geared toward disabled job seekers if your organization is not serious about hiring people with disabilities. But you, as a recruiter, could attend anyway. It’s your opportunity to assess the pool of job candidates with disabilities.

However, with a little knowledge and forethought, a job fair (dis-ability focused or not) can be a winner for both potential employers and employees.

How to Ensure Accessibility at Job Fairs

Effective communication, of course, is critical at any job fair, but, when you are designing your booth and developing your approach to attract any and all qualified job candidates (including those with disabilities), effective communication becomes more than just speech. It’s a matter of accessibility.

Here’s what you can do to make sure you are accessible at a job fair.

Include your organization’s website and social-networking addresses in all marketing materials about your participation in the job fair. This helps people with visual, hearing, and mobility disabilities prepare for the fair beforehand, saving them time because they will be able to navigate directly to the booths that are of most interest to them. It will also save you time because you won’t be discussing basic information with people who turn out not to be interested in your available jobs.

Make sure the organization hosting the job fair promotes the event not only to disability organizations but to the community at large. There is no “Disabled Central” where you can reach all disabled people. They are in the same work sites, stores, clubs, community meetings, places of worship, schools, movie theaters, and other community gathering places as everyone else. They don’t “flock together.”

Be prepared. Learn about disability etiquette, put your materials in accessible formats (as explained later), and talk to employees already in your company who have a disability to get their tips about accessibility. Check your personal beliefs—most often misconceptions—about what it is like to be disabled. You’ll then be set to meet the candidates on a level playing field.

Include a person with a disability at the job fair—if that person is a member of your recruiting team. But it is not a good idea to assume that every disabled person is knowledgeable about disabilities. The person you include must know the current job market; how people with disabilities use assistive technology; and the current guidelines about discrimination, accommodation, and confidentiality.

Design your booth to be accessible for job candidates with a variety of disabilities. Keep the front of your booth free of obstacles for those who use crutches, wheelchairs, or scooters. An obstacle-free, table-height counter with easily movable chairs is an ideal area for completing applications for those individuals. Play a video about your organization (as long as it does not interfere with conversation) so individuals who have visual impairments can identify your booth. For those with hearing impairments, use visuals within your booth to show what types of jobs you have open.

Encourage the sponsor of the fair to recruit volunteers to act as guides. For those who read Braille, a Braille map of the fair is extremely helpful. For others, a simple large-print or audio list of companies and their booth locations may suffice. At your own booth, have staff on hand to help job seekers fill out forms and so forth.

How to Hold a Conversation with a Person Who Has a Disability

You don’t need to shout, even if a job seeker is hearing impaired (she is most likely a lip-reader). You need not avoid words like “see” or “look” if the person has a visual impairment. Talk directly to the individual with a disability—not to a companion who may be accompanying her. If the individual is using a wheelchair or scooter, pull up a chair so you can sit and converse with her on the same eye level.

Avoid being sweeter and more condescending to someone just because that person is disabled. Says one woman, “I don’t know which offends me more—people being rude or people being extra, extra nice.”

While speaking to a visually impaired person when there are many others about, use his name. Most job fairs give participants name tags. If you turn your attention elsewhere or walk away, let him know so he doesn’t end up talking to the air.

There are other guidelines that specifically apply to the job fair setting. For instance, don’t start a conversation with an explanation of why the person may not be interested in specific jobs. One person with a visual impairment talking to a corporate recruiter was greeted with doubts about whether she could handle the travel involved. Although she was highly qualified and had more than twenty years of experience in the positions currently open, she was instantly told that, in her words, she “would have to travel sometimes every week, and that possibly my family wouldn’t want me to be gone for long periods of time—that maybe going to unfamiliar towns, airports, and hotels could be bothersome for me.”

When her efforts to counter the recruiter’s objections were met only with frustration, she says she “walked around the booth and waited for somebody to visit him. He was completely different with a sighted candidate. He told her that the travel was minimal.” The recruiter’s own assumptions created barriers where there were none. He could have described the travel requirements and waited for her to state any concerns she might have had.

Of course, you will not want to ask personal questions of an individual who is disabled—any more than you would of a nondisabled candidate. Avoid asking how the person became disabled or whether there’s a cure for that person’s disability. Treat the person like any other job seeker in this regard.

Try not to be put off by the adaptive devices some blind job seekers may use. For example, you may see individuals using a small forehead-mounted camera to read information on your whiteboards or in the back of your booth. This small camera provides a clear and focused magnified image on attached “glasses.” Except in appearance, it’s basically the same as corrective lenses for people with correctable sight problems.

Let other visually impaired people waiting to talk to you know you see them and will get to them as soon as you are finished talking to the person in front of them. If you can, ascertain what medium they use to read and invite them to look over your recruitment materials while they wait.

How to Make Your Printed Materials Accessible

Yes, providing materials in Braille is a good idea. But there are two very important things to know about Braille. Only a small percentage of blind and visually impaired people use Braille. Your emphasis should probably be on large-print materials, audio recordings, and CDs. The CDs will allow candidates to use their own computers to read the material however they prefer: Braille output, screen magnification, or speech output.

For the items you do provide in Braille, don’t assume you can just use Braille translation software to convert your existing documents. This software is only the first step in Braille transcription. Braille does not substitute letter for letter but is far more complex (with rules that need human interpretation). If you choose to provide Braille, have your materials prepared by a certified Braille transcriptionist. Check your local library for information.

Ask each job seeker who requests your materials what medium he prefers. By demonstrating your awareness of the various accessible formats, you communicate your company’s interest in hiring people with disabilities, and you put the individual at ease.

Depending on the person’s amount of vision, he may reach out and take the materials you offer or need you to put them right into his hands. Tell him what the items are as you hand them over. You can also use a clock-face example to tell him where an item is: “The company brochure in large print is at two o’clock to you.”

Consider Braille and large-print business cards, too, which highlight your company website—the one all-accessible vehicle you can use to deliver follow-up information to job candidates who have visual, mobility, or hearing impairments.

A Disability Job Fair’s Added Benefit

Those with disabilities have always been in the workforce, but adaptive technology has been changing rapidly, opening up all but a small selection of career paths for them. A disabled-focused job fair itself is a great opportunity to learn how individuals with various physical disabilities use adaptations to perform at the same standard as nondisabled employees.

Often companies or agencies that provide training, adaptive technology, and career services for disabled people have booths alongside your own. Talk to them, try out their equipment, and ask for advice. Ask attendees who use the products to show you how they work.

And don’t miss the chance to interview job seekers with various disabilities during and after a job fair. The candidates themselves are a great resource for learning about the adaptive techniques they use to live independent lives. Ask: “How do you do this?” and “How do you overcome that?” in relation to job tasks. You will learn how they have adapted to their various disabilities so they can perform well in a workplace setting.

After the Job Fair

It is up to you and your recruitment team to make sure the job fair doesn’t end once the materials are gathered up and stored for the next event. Job seekers with disabilities (and their resumes) need to be put through the same process you follow for other candidates so your best prospects come to the top of your follow-up list. Such follow-up is an important key to making your investment of time and money in a job fair pay off.

Next, let’s look at how you can expand your best-prospect list by extending your scope and taking your recruitment online.

Locating Job Candidates with Disabilities Online

How do you find talented job seekers with disabilities beyond your local community?

eSight Careers Network asked four job recruiters on recruitersnetwork.com and at the ACCESS job fair in Seattle, Washington, to think about the perfect tool to help them get their job opportunity information out to people with disabilities so they can reach the broadest possible pool of qualified candidates.

Recruiters need tools that give them access to information about job seekers who meet the qualifications for open positions set by their companies or clients. The individual resume is the primary tool for this task. Many mainstream job sites on the Web are, in essence, huge databases, much like a massive filing system. They have been popular with recruiters because, unlike paper files, they can be easily searched to find candidates with unique characteristics or qualifications.

The recruiters eSight interviewed expressed a strong preference for this type of tool over the more arduous and time-consuming task of simply finding places to post jobs. Since these mainstream websites allow job posting too, they offer another advantage for recruiters.

It is not surprising that this group of recruiters dreamed of a similar tool for finding job seekers with disabilities. Many referred to it as “one-stop shopping.” They want websites that offer easy job posting and an easy job search for qualified candidates. And they want it to be free.

Several recruiters at the Seattle job fair mentioned state job banks (see http://www.jobbankinfo.org) as a mainstream model for any job-matching website with a disability focus. For recruiters, the most popular features of these sites allow them to:

Search through an extensive resume database

Post unlimited jobs

Get tips for creating job listings

Create a resume scout to search out potential employees

By itself, the fact that any job announcements would, by definition, be going specifically to disabled job seekers would solve the problem of making sure disabled people have access to the jobs you have open.

Such a tool dedicated to disabled candidates would attract even more recruiters if it had some added features. Robert, the recruiter for Washington Mutual at a job fair, dreamed of a site that would connect all the disability job sites—allowing him to submit one job announcement and have it posted on all.

Others said their ideal site would include articles about disabilities, jobs, and accommodations—written specifically for recruiters. Recruiters felt that they would be more comfortable engaging in a conversation with a disabled candidate and then presenting him as a candidate to a hiring manager if they were prepared with details about specific disabilities and what adaptations can be made to make certain jobs accessible.

For instance, one said, “I think I’d like to go somewhere where I can learn about the candidate and his disability, so I know what he can do. Maybe if I could talk to a rehab counselor or something.” Her eyes widened when it was suggested that she ask the candidate himself. “Well, yeah, that would work,” she admitted. “And it would be easier and faster!”

Recruiters from Safeco Insurance expressed a preference for advice that is “not sugarcoated.”

One of those in the quartet said: “When disability information is too ‘nice,’ it doesn’t help me feel comfortable. I would feel much more at ease talking to someone who has difficulty speaking if I knew not only how to do it but how not to.”

Here are several existing resources that match some (if not all) of these recruiters’ definitions of ideal recruiting tools—particularly the functions of learning, posting, searching, and scouting (functions you also probably value as an HR executive or hiring manager).

Job-Posting Sites

GettingHired is a social-networking community and job portal partner with the USBLN, a national business organization currently representing sixty BLN affiliates in thirty-six states including the District of Columbia and more than 5,000 employers using a “business-to-business” strategy to promote the business imperative of including people with disabilities in the workforce. See http://www.usbln.org.

The Hire DisAbility Solutions career site (http://hireds.monster.com) has teamed up with Monster.com to provide you with the most current career placement information to ensure you have fast access to the best opportunities.

ABILITYJobs.com (http://www.jobaccess.org) offers job and resume posting, a job search agent, a resume builder, and other career search tools. It includes a tool for applying to companies directly via the site.

Disaboomjobs.com (http://www.disaboomjobs.com/companies) showcases jobs for people with disabilities. It also features companies that position themselves as great places to work.

About.com’s Resources for People with Disabilities (http://jobsearch.about.com/od/disabilities/Resources_for_People_with_Disabilities.htm) includes links to job sites for people with disabilities in the United States and elsewhere.

General Diversity Employment Sites

Recruiters Network (http://www.recruitersnetwork.com)

Diversity/Careers magazine (http://www.diversitycareers.com)

DiversityLink (http://www.diversitylink.com)

Informational Sites That Focus on Disability Employment Issues

eSight Careers Network (http://www.esight.org) is a cross-disability online community for addressing disability employment issues.

Lighthouse International (http://www.lighthouse.org/services-and-assistance/career) offers practical, real-world articles for and about employees and entrepreneurs who have visual impairments. It also includes information specifically for employers and recruiters about how to effectively tap the potential people with disabilities offer as employees.

HireDiversity (http://www.hirediversity.com) is a general diversity employment resources site that has news about employment of people with disabilities. It also includes job and resume postings, a job search agent, a resume builder, and other career search tools.

Staffing Services

These staffing services specialize in recruiting and placing qualified disabled and other minority and disadvantaged workers:

Bender Consulting Services (http://www.benderconsult.com/index2.html) is not strictly a staffing service but, rather, a company that employs disabled individuals who provide consulting services on computer and information technology issues. BCS can place consultants throughout the United States. Its founder, Joyce Bender, received honors for her work in disabilities and employment from President Bill Clinton.

HirePotential (http://www.hirepotential.com) is a national consulting firm that works with corporations committed to diversity by assisting them with integrating, accommodating, retaining, and employing people with disabilities, mature workers, veterans, and individuals from other niche groups.

Just One Break (http://www.justonebreak.com) has been placing qualified employees with disabilities in New York City for sixty years.

Local Goodwill Industries (http://www.goodwill.org) and Easter Seals (http://www.easterseals.org) are programs that provide on-site employment opportunities and direct financial assistance.

Kelly Services (http://www.kellyservices.com) is a regular participant at job fairs for people with disabilities, so it may be a promising source of applicants. Tell your usual staffing outsource service, by the way, that you expect it to send you qualified temps and job applicants who have a disability.

Resume-Posting Sites for Qualified Disabled Job Seekers

To find sites designed specifically to help companies and qualified job seekers with disabilities find each other, visit these resume-posting sites:

JobAccess (http://www.jobaccess.org) offers job and resume posting, a job search agent, a resume builder, and other career search tools specifically for job seekers with disabilities. It includes a tool for applying to companies directly via the site.

Workforce Recruitment Program (http://www.dol.gov/odep/programs/workforc.htm) specifically seeks to help employers target disabled students in on-campus recruiting efforts. You can search for candidates based on criteria that you select. It offers its database of “Top Talent from Top Colleges” (disabled job seekers) on a free CD as well as on its website.

WORKink (http://www.workink.com) offers advice about disability employment and access to resumes from disabled job seekers across Canada.

Diversity Staffing Group (http://www.diversity-services.com) matches qualified individuals for temporary or temporary to full-time positions, payroll services, full-time and executive-level positions, and employee leasing.

The National Business & Disability Council (http://www.business-disability.com) is the leading resource for employers seeking to integrate people with disabilities into the workplace and companies seeking to reach them in the consumer marketplace.

Social Media Sites

Once you have located interesting job candidates (online or in person), you can often use social media networks to find more information about them.

Commissioned by CareerBuilder.com, Harris Interactive surveyed 2,667 HR professionals in June 2009. About 45 percent of them said they were using social-networking sites (such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and StumbleUpon) to research job candidates. An additional 11 percent said they planned to implement social media screening in the very near future.

While many recruiters now use LinkedIn as a “must use” tool for locating active and passive candidates for jobs (especially those with unusual qualifications), the real benefit of social media from a hiring standpoint is the opportunity to get to know about a prime job candidate before you even meet him in person—or, at least, before you make an offer.

As an employer, you rarely hire people for just their skills. You are looking for skills plus a well-rounded individual who fits well with your work group. A job candidate’s social media presence gives you insight into his interests, communication styles, work habits, work/life balance, and so forth—information you usually didn’t have at your fingertips in the twentieth century.

Essential skills in establishing online relationships include making and receiving recommendations as a networking strategy, asking and answering questions, forming and following online groups, and requesting and making introductions. You can now evaluate a job candidate’s “soft skills” by watching how she handles herself online before you make a hiring decision.

And seriously consider a job candidate who has effectively used social networking (writing an effective profile, answering questions, gaining introductions, participating in groups) to specifically gain your personal attention about a job you may have open or a function you may need that is not, at first glance, readily apparent. That kind of initiative (and social-networking savvy) may be the mark of a winner.

Yet, that’s only part of the story. Yes, online networking (either actively participating or passively listening) can be a real advantage for you on the hiring side of recruitment. But a recruitment environment that includes a social-networking component also further levels the playing field for job candidates with all types of disabilities.

Why? Walking, talking, seeing, or hearing (thanks to technology) is not required to participate fully in an online discussion (and perhaps to stand out due to insight, expression, camaraderie, leadership, and so on).

Effectively using targeted social networking as part of your online recruiting efforts helps you locate talented job candidates with a disability. As mentioned, GettingHired (http://www.usbln.org) is a social-networking community as well as a job portal specifically for people with disabilities. It’s an excellent private-sector starting point for your disability-specific social-networking and online recruitment initiative.

Recruiting Qualified Job Candidates with Disabilities on College Campuses

If, as a college campus recruiter for a major corporation, you’ve had a nagging suspicion that somehow you’re missing the best student candidates for positions at your company, it’s very possible that you are. If you don’t find and visit students who have disabilities, you have probably missed some talented, motivated people.

Why would they be “motivated”? When you live in a world that hasn’t quite figured out that it’s the talent you hire and not the disability, once you have a good job you tend to keep it and give it your all.

Jim Rawls, for example, has twice been named teacher of the year in his community and has had a stellar career. His potential was obvious even before he landed his first teaching job because he excelled in college and won the backing of the head of the education department.

Yet, because he is visually impaired, he says it took him 240 interviews before someone would give him a chance to prove himself. Think of all that wasted time—not just for him, his students, and his community, but for all the principals who overlooked what could have been one of their finest appointments.

By the way, nearly 2.2 million (11 percent) emerging U.S. college students have a disability. That’s not an insignificant number of students to ignore. See http://www.earnworks.com/BusinessCase/
human_cap_level2.asp.

Many major companies have successfully recruited students with disabilities on campus. For example, Katy Jo Meyer, technical recruiter for Microsoft Corporation, expresses her company’s commitment to tap the potential of people with disabilities this way:

Our goal is to continue to create the most multicultural workplace in the high-tech industry. A diverse workplace enables us to attract and retain the most qualified employees and better serve the needs of a wide range of customers, including customers with disabilities. … We believe that people from the various disability-related communities provide us with valuable perspectives on how we develop products and services, how we market them, and how we deal with issues of customer satisfaction. In other words, we benefit greatly in terms of innovation by having these viewpoints present among our employee workforce.

In other words, Microsoft realizes that its workforce and its customer base are one and the same and that its marketing success depends on a broad and representative workforce.

Microsoft’s Meyer says:

In the technology industry, people with disabilities are a large customer audience for us, so it makes strong sense to have that population represented when we’re building the products. When we are out on campus, we’re looking for students who are passionate about building software. We’re interested in talking to anyone who fits that profile.

Meyer’s statement may sound very much like your own approach. But, if you have not tried to broaden your recruitment to include students with disabilities, you may be a bit unsure about how to go about it.

In fact, the problem may not be about you or your knowledge. It is very common for a college or university to have an office called “Student Placement” or “Career Center” but send its graduating students with disabilities back to Disabled Student Services (DSS) when they seek career help.

Be sure to contact the DSS office when you plan to visit a campus. Often the career center and DSS offices on campuses do not work together very closely or at all. If you contact DSS offices in advance of campus visits, those offices can then send out bulletins or e-mails to students with disabilities to encourage them to go to meet with you.

Often, then, the message to the students, to recruiters, to hiring managers, and to other students is that people with disabilities belong in a different workforce. Part of the challenge is getting past the idea that the tools that permit accessibility belong in one place. DSS often does not have access to all the tools and expertise available at a campus career center, which serves all students. The career center’s services should be accessible.

Unfortunately this “should” doesn’t meet what you need when you’re on campus. When a school does not provide you access to all students (including those with disabilities) in a logical place (a career center), you have to do extra work to find qualified job candidates with disabilities. You need to figure out where the disabled students are. Since they are not segregated, that may be a challenge.

You can start with programs that serve students with disabilities. Just about every campus has a DSS office. In addition, there may be specialized programs such as the University of Washington’s DO-IT program. Government vocational rehabilitation programs based in each state or province can direct you to their own contacts at schools their clients attend. Further, you can check student activity programs for clubs and other associations geared to students with disabilities.

Here’s how Meyer describes Microsoft’s on-campus efforts:

As far as targeting students with disabilities in particular, our team is actively working with organizations such as Career Opportunities for Students with Disabilities (http://www.cosdonline.org) to increase the number of college candidates with disabilities flowing through our recruitment process. We have also fostered relationships with colleges and universities with a high population of students with disabilities through posting job openings, attending career fairs, delivering company presentations, and [conducting] on-campus interviews.

You may want to add some initiatives of your own. Contact your best referral sources, department heads, student leaders, and so forth and tell them you want to make sure you are meeting promising students with a variety of disabilities. Arrange special on-campus recruitment efforts.

Of course, career fairs can be part of your effort. The trick is making sure that everyone hears about your presence at a career fair and that everyone knows he or she is invited. Making connections with leaders among students with disabilities can help you find the best ways to get the word out.

One such leader, for example, is Alicia Verlager, who, as a Boston student with a visual impairment, became a well-known advocate for converting books into electronic formats. She had this to say about her experiences with campus events:

Getting news about events on campus is extremely frustrating for blind students on the campus where I attend school. The basic method of advertising is by putting up posters, which are useless to the blind (and most of the low-vision also). Since most of the bulletin boards are in high-traffic areas and people are usually standing in front of them, you don’t even notice the bulletin boards. I check the news page on the campus website frequently, but I have missed many events.

The only way I know there is an event is that suddenly there are lots of tables in the very narrow hall that leads to the Disabled Student Services office. This makes getting down the hall difficult with a cane and impossible with a wheelchair. Supposedly, the Disabled Student Services office has our e-mail addresses, but they only send a newsletter at the end of the semester. I mostly try to cultivate networks with professors who know me or other students with similar interests.

The really disturbing aspect of this is [that] many opportunities for jobs occur before graduation, through networking, internships, etc., and waiting until graduation often puts a student at a disadvantage, aside from the fact that the student has missed many opportunities to make an impression while a possibly interested employer can see her or his work.

It’s debatable whether holding two separate job fairs or other events, one for everyone and one for students with disabilities, is the best way to go. It can give the impression that students with disabilities are not meant or expected to be at the main job fair.

Terri, a campus disability specialist in Arizona, points out:

Separate is not always equal!

I am in favor of the DSS offices in universities and colleges working hand in hand with the Career Services office on their respective campuses.

I have been working at the university for over eight years and my experience has been that most students with disabilities [who] land jobs in companies such as Microsoft, Motorola, AT&T, Veterans Medical Centers, family social services agencies, etc., have done so through mainstream recruitment opportunities. That isn’t to say that the DSS offices don’t play a significant role in assisting these students with preparation and readiness to go out and participate in these mainstream career recruitment fairs.

Some of the issues that students who are blind or visually impaired face include: awareness of resume format(s) and layout, the most current and appropriate dress, personal grooming, body language and feedback on any mannerisms that are inappropriate. These are simply things that persons who are sighted learn by watching others, so it’s a matter of a lack of access to this information for students who are blind or visually impaired.

But Microsoft’s Meyer recognizes the possibilities in recruiting through mainstream as well as DSS avenues. She points out:

Separate recruiting efforts hopefully enable us to access a greater number of candidates with disabilities who possess the kinds of skill sets and experiences we seek. These kinds of job fairs may also provide candidates with some level of comfort that the companies present are ones that willingly provide inclusive environments. However, our past practices have revealed that many of our employees with disabilities have come through mainstream avenues such as college career placement centers, employee referrals, unsolicited applications, etc. Microsoft recognizes that searching for top talent requires using all available resources.

Best Practices

Meyer says Microsoft’s approach to its fall recruitment efforts is to target those students graduating and looking for full-time jobs. Its spring recruitment is geared to hiring interns.

“Both full-time and intern hires are made throughout the season,” she points out. “During the summer months, we are working with our interns who are at Microsoft, and we’re planning for the following year.”

Accessibility is the key. She adds:

When recruiting anyone, we want to make sure each person has a world-class experience. When recruiting students with disabilities, we do everything we can to ensure our entire recruiting process is accessible. Some examples of this are conducting an initial interview over Instant Messenger for a student who is deaf instead of a phone interview, providing our job descriptions in alternate formats at a career fair for students who are blind or have low vision, and providing wheelchair-accessible transportation for students who are wheelchair users.

Awareness training also plays an important role at Microsoft. Meyer states:

All of our college recruiters have gone through several training sessions about how to most effectively interact with students with disabilities. We continually strive to provide our recruiters and any other Microsoft employee involved in college recruiting with the awareness and resources they need to effectively work with students with disabilities. Some examples of the resources we provide are general etiquette tips and training videos.

Etiquette tips, for instance, include the following very basic concepts about how to work with people with disabilities:

Ask before offering any assistance and wait for the assistance to be accepted. Don’t be offended if the offer is turned down.

Speak directly to the person who has a disability.

The theme in Microsoft’s etiquette tips is in this core principle: When in doubt, treat a disabled person with the same respect and consideration you do anyone. For example, if you don’t use first names when talking to most of your contacts at job fairs, don’t do it with people with disabilities.

Peter Altschul, a consultant on the psychology of change and former diversity manager at Reuters News Service, who also is visually impaired, adds: “The bottom line is that both employers and universities have been involved with diversity efforts for a while now; those best practices that work toward including people from other under-represented populations can be adapted to include students with disabilities.”

How to Make Your Screening Process Inclusive

Your application and interview processes, both of which involve screening job candidates, are prime areas for that “best practices” review toward more inclusive recruiting Peter Altschul recommended.

Both areas come under particular scrutiny as phases where mistakes can be made and lawsuits initiated. You may be in the habit of asking yourself: What questions can I ask during this interview? What concerns can I express? In what ways might my personal bias come through? After all, recruitment activities that have the effect of screening out potential applicants with disabilities may violate the ADA, according to the Job Accommodation Network (see http://www.jan.wvu.edu/Erguide/Two.htm#A).

Then, there’s public perception. According to a July 2005 University of Massachusetts survey, 92 percent of the American public view companies that hire people with disabilities more favorably than those that do not; 87 percent of the public also agree that they would prefer to give their business to companies that hire people with disabilities.

And, when a company acts irresponsibly, it makes headlines, but when a company acts responsibly and ethically, it builds lasting brand trust (see http://www.earnworks.com/BusinessCase/
soc_resp_level2.asp).

When those issues pop into our minds, we sometimes forget to think about the spirit of being inclusive and fair in gaining and interviewing job applicants. Fair hiring processes are intended to remove hiring barriers for the job seeker. But they also can remove barriers to achieving a company’s chief objective—to find and retain the best person for the job. Why let misinformation or simply inadequate data rob your company of an employee who will contribute greatly to your organization’s success?

When your screening process is stacked against someone who has difficulty completing an application, you simply don’t have a way to uncover whether the person is the most highly qualified, committed, and suitable person for the work you need done.

You already have tools in place for recruiting new job candidates. But you must make sure your recruitment tools are accessible for a wide variety of disabilities. Have alternate ways to fill out applications, take tests, and interview people who may have limited vision, hearing, speech, or mobility. For example, make sure your job line has a TTY number for hearing-impaired people.

To help you identify hidden but built-in barriers that block job candidates just because they may have a disability, consider the specific guidelines for streamlining your application and interviewing procedures discussed in the following sections.

Streamlining Your Application Process

The major disadvantage in the typical job application process for people who are blind or print impaired or have difficulty in manual dexterity is that the materials are almost always in print format. When you meet individuals who, for one reason or another, cannot sit down and fill out a neat paper application in a timely fashion, your whole relationship starts out on the wrong foot.

There are several good alternatives to applications in print format, most of which are quite easy to accomplish:

Accept a complete resume in lieu of a completed application. You can always contact the person for additional information you need or ask the questions you may have during the interview.

Allow the person to take the materials home so that he or she may take advantage of a sighted reader’s help, use a magnifier, or even use a scanner so the application can be completed using word-processing software and then printed as a hard copy.

Provide assistance for the applicant in your office. Make sure that the person knows exactly what to do.

Have large-print versions of materials available at all times for those candidates with low vision. You can produce the application with a larger font. “Official large print” is 14 point, but 18 or more serves a larger group. Or you can enlarge the pages of your standard letter-size application on a photocopier so they are printed on 11- by 17-inch paper.

Provide a cassette-recorded, CD, or electronic version of all the application materials, including any position descriptions, applications, and peripheral information. Be sure the candidate has a means to communicate answers to the application’s questions.

Automate your application process by setting it up as a form to submit on your website. Many print-impaired people have computers that are adapted to increase print size or to read text aloud.

Preparing for the Interview

Part of the screening process requires that an applicant demonstrate the ability to do the work, and to do the work the person must be able to get to work. So, unless you plan to have your candidate, disabled or otherwise, work from home, you don’t need to do a telephone interview. A face-to-face interview with a disabled candidate who would work in your office is just as important as for any other person who is under consideration for the job.

First of all, relax. This may be one of the first individuals you’ve interviewed who is disabled, but you can be sure that you are not the first nondisabled person he or she has met. You already know you can’t quiz your candidate about issues that may produce at least the appearance of bias on your part.

So, when you meet a visually impaired candidate, for instance, in the waiting room, behave normally. If your extended hand is not taken, just drop it. Don’t be embarrassed. You can often avoid such awkwardness by simply stating, “I’m pleased to meet you; let me shake your hand,” and then shaking the person’s extended hand.

Offer the person a “sighted guide,” which, at its heart, is just offering the person your arm. If the person refuses, accept that. Walk the person to the interview room without undue ceremony, only warning him or her of obstacles, if there is obvious need. If the person has a guide dog, you may compliment him or her on the dog but otherwise ignore it. Make sure your other staff members know this, too.

Once in the room, guide the person to a chair. Take the person’s hand and put it on the back of the chair. That is all you have to do. If you offer your interviewee coffee, just be sure to put the cup and any sugar or cream where the person can easily reach them. You can say, “The cup is a couple of inches away from your right hand directly in front of you.”

If you’re interviewing a job candidate with a hearing impairment, you may need a sign language interpreter. For such accommodations, you can assume that savvy job candidates will request them well before the interview.

In moving from the waiting room to the interview room, job candidates who use a wheelchair, scooter, or crutches often appreciate help in opening doors and moving chairs to accommodate their particular mode of mobility.

Here are three additional ways to streamline your organization’s job interviewing process for any candidate with a hearing, sight, speech, or mobility impairment:

Ask at any point if there is anything you can provide to make the application and interview more successful for the candidate. Individuals with a disability are often the best experts regarding their own accommodations.

Remember that the candidate most likely has had time to adjust to a disability and that you may not be aware of tools and techniques the candidate is using to build a “normal” life. Go into the interview with an open mind.

Use accessible “surprise” materials. If you give the candidate materials that are not readily accessible to review on the spot, avoid penalizing the person for not being able to review them right then without his or her adaptive equipment.

You may give the person a copy of the job description that includes a list of the essential tasks for the job and ask the person if he or she can perform all of them with or without accommodation. And, if the person volunteers that he or she has a disability, you are free to ask about the accommodations needed, what they do, how they work, and what they cost.

The goal is to make the interview flow as any meeting with a nondisabled job candidate would, so ask the same questions and expect the same high-quality answers you would of a nondisabled applicant.

Let’s take a closer look at the job interview from the point of interviewees who have a variety of disabilities.

Four Barriers Job Candidates with a Disability Encounter When They Interview for a Job

The annual professional football draft in the United States is based on uniformly collected statistics that measure on-the-field performance under a variety of conditions (weather, stadium configuration, location). Yet, one factor is constant: The playing field is always level.

Just a 2 percent grade on one end of the field or the other would skew the results and put the competitors (and the teams) involved in the draft at either a potential advantage or disadvantage.

The same holds true for evaluating and selecting job candidates. The recruiting process must be conducted on a level playing field so you end up hiring the right job candidate for the right job—and you don’t overlook star performers whose potential would not be readily evident if they were continually battling that extra 2 percent grade.

More than a dozen individuals on eSight’s “Swimming in the Mainstream” (SiM) blog discussed how individuals who work within your recruitment process can help make sure the recruiting field is level for job seekers with (and without) a disability.

Following are some snippets from that conversation to illustrate four issues job seekers with disabilities often face in seeking employment, particularly during job interviews. Since these barriers can involve, to some degree, not-deliberate-but-false perceptions on the part of those working within your recruitment process, those barriers are not insurmountable. Resolving these four issues, eSight members say, could give them a fair shot at open jobs. The solution is just a matter of increasing awareness and gaining perspective.

Here are the four issues identified in the SiM blog discussion:

1. Assumptions about disabilities

2. Cart-before-the-horse job preparation

3. The relationship between disability and skills

4. The unresolved internal issues of an employer

So, let’s set the stage for more-open job interviews with candidates who have disabilities by highlighting some of the key recommendations SiM bloggers have made for resolving each of these issues.

Assumptions About Disabilities

Mike T.:

My experience since relocating [from the UK] to Orange County, California, has been decidedly different. At the age of 45, I think age-related discrimination as well as false, negative assumptions concerning my blindness are working against me.

I have to ask the question of employers: “What do I need to do to convince you that I can do a better job than my sighted counterparts?” Come on, step up to the plate, employers, and give me the opportunity to demonstrate that my skill-set can be deployed in your company to add value for you and your customers.

This is certainly not whining. I wouldn’t tolerate that from anyone. I just want the opportunity to use my natural, God-given talents to benefit my local community while being responsible to my wife and stretching myself mentally. I want the chance to learn, to grow, to expand into a broader role where I can bring the greatest benefit to the greatest number. Is that too much to ask?

R.M.:

[Let’s] avoid the classic vocational rehab trap: believing that “there are a finite number of jobs that people who are disabled can hold.” I have had to create every job that I’ve had.

Cart-Before-the-Horse Job Preparation

Roger:

[Resolve this] Catch 22 situation: You want to work, you have skills, but, to be employable, you must have assistive technology compatible with the firms you are applying to. Yet vocational rehab can’t provide this assistive technology unless you are already employed in a job that requires this particular assistive technology. Making the workplace compatible with assistive technology commonly used by individuals who are blind [JAWS, WindowEyes, Magic] is one solution to this common problem.

Jake:

I think one way to have a very successful job interview is to tell the employer about the adaptive technology we use and possibly offer to give a demonstration of that technology. I, for one, having been a JAWS user for several years now, am very willing to demonstrate the program to anyone. One great advantage of JAWS is that a single user can install it on more than one computer at a time. I don’t know if this is necessarily true with the new Internet-based authorization scheme, but it is definitely true of the disk-based authorization.

The Relationship Between Disability and Skills

Barney:

The skills to do the job do not exist despite my disability. My disability has simply created additional issues to be resolved and strengths to be tapped before my capability becomes evident.

It is about what I can do, not what I cannot do. No one is hired for what they cannot do. The focus must be on how I can contribute, which means the hiring manager must focus on the person—not the disability.

The Unresolved Internal Issues of an Employer

Barney:

There are a couple of ways to provide the hiring manager with knowledge of my competency and skills:

Offer to do a project for free—not a money maker, but it will demonstrate loud and clear what I am capable of.

Offer to work for a trial period for free—not a money maker but one that says I will put financial stability on the line to prove that I am capable.

Peter:

I think people sort of expect us (and other underrepresented groups as well) to provide advice and work for free.

I think we need to remember that finding a job in nontraditional arenas is a real challenge and that regular failures may have more to do with employer issues than with the skill-set of the applicant with a disability.

After considering these observations from individuals with disabilities who have experience in today’s work world, it is apparent that creating a level playing field for your recruitment initiatives has to start with your selection process for those important first job interviews. That preparation, in terms of heightened personal awareness, will help you conduct productive interviews—dialogues in which you and your candidates can be candid and authentic.

QUICK TIPS FROM THIS CHAPTER

Questions You Always Wanted to Ask

What can you ask a person with a disability during a job interview? You can describe the essential functions of the job and then ask if the person can do the work and how he or she would do it for your company. For more information, see “ADA: Your Responsibilities as an Employer” at http://www.eeoc.gov/facts/ada17.html.

Current Interpretations of the ADA

Congress expected that the definition of disability under the ADA of 1990 would be interpreted consistently with how courts had applied the definition of disability under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. That expectation, however, was not fulfilled. Therefore, the ADA was amended (the ADAAA), as of January 1, 2009, to bring the law back to what Congress intended it to be when it passed the ADA in 1990. For more about the ADA and ADAAA, see http://www.eeoc.gov/ada/amendments_notice.html.

Volunteering as Essential Experience

The most motivated individuals with a disability will probably manage to land internships during college, but, upon graduation, internships are generally not available. That leaves volunteering as one of the few avenues those who graduate from college without jobs still have open for developing their skills and proving themselves in a work situation. For more information, see “Employing People with Disabilities” at http://www.disability.gov/employment/
employing_people_with_disabilities.

When Volunteer Experience Is Real

How can you decide if a volunteer job really means a job candidate has work experience? Use the same standards you would use for a paid job. You know what sustained, substantive work looks like. Stability, reliability, responsibility, and performance all can be revealed in work of any kind. For more information, see “Some Skills Transferable from Volunteer to Paid Work” at http://www.nald.ca/fulltext/heritage/
compartne/ExprncE.htm#Volunteer.

Locating Job Candidates on the Local Level

Employed adults with disabilities are much more likely to have found their jobs through personal contacts than through structured services. So, make sure job seekers with disabilities have access to your job announcements. You can hope they are in line with everyone else to find out about your openings through classified ads, job sites, placement services, professional networks, and job fairs. But you can’t rely on it. You must make a special effort to reach this pocket of qualified job candidates. For more information, see “Strategic Connections: Recruiting Candidates with Disabilities” at http://www.dol.gov/odep/pubs/
fact/connect.htm.

Recruiting at a Job Fair

Effective communication, of course, is critical at any job fair, but, when you are designing your booth and developing your approach to attract any and all qualified job candidates (including those with disabilities), effective communication becomes more than just speech. Ask yourself: Am I and my materials accessible to all job candidates? For dates and locations of Diversity Recruitment Career Fairs by Equal Opportunity Publications, see http://www.eop.com/careerfair.html.

Locating Job Candidates Online

The USBLN is an invaluable source of just about anything you need to make your workplace inclusive of talented, committed employees who have disabilities. For more information, see http://www.usbln.org.

Recruiting on College Campuses

It is very common for a college or university to have an office called “Student Placement” or “Career Center,” but to send its graduating students with disabilities back to DSS when they seek career help. Be sure to contact DSS offices in advance of your campus visits so those offices can send out bulletins or e-mails to students with disabilities to encourage them to meet with you. For more information, see “Recruitment of Students with Disabilities” at http://www.neads.ca/en/about/projects/
student_leadership/access_to_success/access_aguayo.php.

Inclusive Screening Processes

When your screening process is stacked against someone who has a disability, you simply don’t have a way to uncover whether the person you ultimately hire is the most highly qualified, committed, and suitable person for the work you need done. Why let misinformation or simply inadequate data rob your company of an employee who will contribute greatly to your organization’s success? For more information, see “Opening Doors to All Candidates: Tips for Ensuring Access for Applicants with Disabilities” at http://www.dol.gov/odep/pubs/fact/opening.htm.

Barrier-Free Job Interviews

Creating a level playing field for your recruitment initiatives has to start with your selection process for those important first job interviews. That preparation, in terms of heightened awareness, will help you conduct productive interviews—dialogues in which you and your candidates can be candid and authentic. For more information, see “Focus on Ability: Interviewing Applicants with Disabilities” at http://www.dol.gov/odep/pubs/fact/focus.htm.