Attracting candidates with disabilities

Finding qualified candidates with disabilities and giving them an opportunity to thrive and be successful is easier said than done.

Part 1 of a three-part article. Read Part 2 (on employment policies related to people with disabilities and Part 3 (on retaining employees with disabilities)

Historically low unemployment rates and achieving inclusion goals requires recruiting candidates with disabilities. But, it’s an extraordinarily tight labor market at the moment for skilled tech workers. In Silicon Valley, it is crazy tight. Things have gotten so bad here, there are profitable businesses that have been open for decades that have recently announced they are closing. The Prolific Oven’s reasons for closing are in part because so many Silicon Valley companies are hiring bakers and cooks for their high-tech campuses that it is decimating the bakery’s labor pool.

That means that employers are forced to dip their toe into recruiting waters that Talent Acquisition has formerly they shied away from, including:

• people who “job hop”
• people who have done jail time
• people with disabilities

Most Silicon Valley tech candidates wants good pay, decent benefits, stock options and a 401K plan. Those things are not the focus of this three-part article.

• This part of the article focuses on specific concerns that are disproportionately important to candidates with disabilities during the recruiting process.
• The second part of the article focuses on policies that can support employees with disabilities
• The third part focuses on employment-related considerations that subtly demonstrate that an organization actually cares about its employees with disabilities and isn’t just blindly trying to achieve a numeric goal without thinking through what it takes to make employees with disabilities successful.

Unbiased recruiting

The first thing that people with disabilities need to become employees is an unbiased recruiting process. They are less likely to have finished college or grad school and more likely to…