7 Strategies for Inclusive Hiring and Empowering Disabled Professionals
The above graphic shows the outline of three people in their chairs at work interacting.
Creating a diverse workforce is key for brands that want to accommodate and serve a diverse market. You must prioritize inclusive hiring to make a diverse workforce a reality for your organization and instill it in your company culture.
Not only should your hiring process be inclusive and accessible, but your workplace should be accommodating if you want professionals with disabilities to consider working with you.
Without further ado, let’s say goodbye to unconscious biases and review seven strategies for inclusive hiring.
1. Increase diversity in sourcing
The first step to inclusive hiring is to increase diversity in your lead sourcing and dipping into the right talent pools. You can’t hire professionals with disabilities if your job descriptions aren’t made available to them. Part of this is ensuring that your job listings and applications are visible and accessible to all potential candidates.
For example, you can partner with group homes and support groups to tap into disability communities. These partnerships are powerful because they help you accomplish your goal of diverse sourcing and creating great connections, and opening doors to qualified candidates within your community.
Another way to increase diversity in sourcing is to hire interns from known groups with disabilities. You could partner with schools for the hard of hearing, blind, and so forth to create programs to empower their students to become successful professionals.
2. Rethink your screening procedures
Many people have internalized biases that they don’t recognize, which can be detrimental to professionals with disabilities during the application and interview process. This is unfair because disabilities affect individuals in different ways, so two people with the same disability may have different workplace capabilities.
With that in mind, it's extremely important to ensure that your screening and selection process is set up to remove all biases. For example, you could use blind screening or blind interviews, which don’t allow you, as the hirer, to see what the person looks like. Even if you think appearances don’t matter in the hiring process, it could trigger your biases.
Many hiring managers are beginning to leverage AI to screen candidates to ensure that all bias is removed. This technology has some limitations when it comes to judging character and such, so it isn’t the end-all, be-all, but it is a helpful tool for leveling the playing field with interview questions from the hiring team.
3. Create a comprehensive benefits package
Disabilities, both visible and invisible, can create added complexities for people and their families. One way to appeal to those with disabilities during the recruiting process is to provide comprehensive benefits that alleviate some of their day-to-day stresses and concerns.
At the very least, this should include PTO, health insurance, dental insurance, and vision insurance. However, you can make the benefits package even more attractive by adding extras like life insurance, tuition reimbursement, student loan refinancing, paid sabbaticals, paid trips to conferences, and more.
Creating a comprehensive benefits package should ease financial hardship and reduce stress for a wide range of professionals with disabilities, especially those who have accumulated educational debt. It portrays your organization as one that actively invests in the well-being and long-term success of its diverse workforce.
4. Offer disability-specific benefits
In addition to the regular benefits that employees of all types can take advantage of, why not offer additional disability-specific benefits?
For example, mobility issues are common with many disabilities, and those can create additional health issues, such as weight gain and degenerative diseases. Providing resources to manage these issues can help your employees with disabilities live a better quality of life and help them perform better in the workplace.
You can partner with companies like Form Health that provide medications and consultations with professionals to help employees take care of their physical and mental health.
5. Make the office more accessible
Small tweaks can make your office more accessible, which, in turn, makes your workplace more attractive to and compatible with applicants with disabilities.
Large accessibility changes, like adding ramps or wheelchair-accessible bathroom stalls, might be the first thing to pop into your head. However, you can make effective changes that are much more quick and affordable to create an inclusive environment in the office.
For example, you can create business cards that provide braille or big print business cards for visually impaired employees and clients. Another simple way to make your office more accessible is to provide dedicated workspaces for those who do better without distractions.
Similarly, you can review reasonable accommodations requests for emotional assistance animals for employees who need them. An assistance animal is an animal that works, provides assistance, or performs tasks for the benefit of a person with a disability, or that provides emotional support that alleviates one or more identified effects of a person’s disability. Allowing emotional assistance animals into the office building will make a huge difference for disabled professionals used to their assistance animal.
These small changes can be a huge benefit for those in your office that work best with specific accommodations. These simple acts not only recognize varied needs but also represent an organization's dedication to accessibility and diversity.
6. Improve your systems and tech
Some workplaces have outdated systems and standard operating procedures (SOPs) that don’t account for candidate pools with disabilities. If your business is guilty of this, you should consider hiring a consultant to help you improve your systems as part of your strategies for inclusive hiring.
When it comes to inclusive hiring and empowering professionals with disabilities, it's crucial to leverage the right tools and technologies. Workday, a leading human resources management system, offers innovative solutions for optimizing the inclusive hiring process.
With its inclusive design and customizable features, Workday empowers organizations to create accessible job postings, efficiently manage candidate applications, and facilitate a more inclusive recruitment process for all, regardless of sexual orientation or gender.
Organizations can also seek the expertise of reputable Workday consulting services to fully harness the capabilities of this tool. This allows them to receive professional guidance and support in enhancing their inclusive hiring practices, promoting an inclusive workforce, and increasing diversity and equal opportunities in the workplace.
7. Consider customers with disabilities
Making your products or services more accessible to buyers with disabilities requires the support of professionals with disabilities on your team. By hiring people with disabilities, you’ll have access to the information you need to make your offers more accessible.
For example, let’s say you run a courier service. Your delivery protocols may assume that package recipients don't have a disability. They may not accommodate those who can’t bend down to pick up a package from their doorstep.
By employing professionals with disabilities, you’ll have someone on the team to call out these oversights and create a plan to offer better accommodations.
Final thoughts
Fostering a diverse, accessible workplace is key for serving diverse audiences. With that as a goal, it's important to break barriers in your hiring process by implementing a diversity recruitment strategy.
Small changes to your hiring process can help make a huge difference in empowering professionals with disabilities and opening your arms to a range of candidates. With these efforts, you can help make this world a more accommodating place for those with disabilities.
Happy hiring!
About the author
Mike Bandar is an award-winning UK-based entrepreneur. A Founding Partner of Turn Partners, the startup studio focused on the acquisition, turnaround, or creation of digital businesses. Through Turn Partners, Mike co-founded Hopper HQ the Instagram planning and scheduling tool, working with thousands of influencers, brands and agencies around the world.