For Employers

Why Hire Young People with Disabilities?

In addition to enhancing your workforce, recruiting and hiring young people with disabilities makes good business sense.  Youth bring fresh new perspectives on strategies for meeting business challenges and achieving success.  Hiring young people with disabilities is also a valuable way to reach out to an important market base.  According to the 2005 American Community Survey (ACS), there are approximately 2.4 million young people with disabilities (ages 16-24) in the United States.

Finding Qualified Candidates

While many employers indicate that they want to include young people with disabilities in their internships and hiring efforts, they don’t always know where to recruit them.  The answer is fairly simple.  Young people with disabilities can generally be found everywhere that other youth are found, such as at college career fairs, through job search Web sites, at the mall, or at the student union hanging out with their friends.  Because they also are reading and writing blogs, exploring Web sites, and connecting to listservs to search for jobs, you can increase the likelihood of grabbing their attention by explicitly stating your desire to recruit and hire people with disabilities in your vacancy announcements.

Interviewing

As employers well know, the job interview plays a critical role in the hiring process, allowing them the opportunity to identify the individual who possesses the best mix of knowledge, skills and abilities for the position available. Below is information that may assist employers in ensuring maximum benefit from an interview when the person being interviewed happens to have a disability.

Preparing for the Interview

-Ensure that your company’s application and interviewing procedures comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which prohibits asking disability-related questions before a job offer is made.

-Check that your application forms, employment offices and interviewing locations are accessible to persons with a variety of disabilities.

-Be willing to make appropriate and reasonable accommodations to enable an applicant with a disability to participate in the interview, explaining ahead of time what is involved in the process. For example, if an applicant who is blind states that he or she will need help completing forms, provide that assistance. Provide an interpreter as an accommodation or other assistance that is reasonable for an applicant who is deaf, if he or she requests assistance in communicating. Provide details or specific instructions to applicants with cognitive disabilities, if this type of accommodation is required.

-Inform applicants ahead of time if they will be required to take a test to demonstrate their ability to perform actual or simulated tasks so that they can request a reasonable accommodation, such as a different format for a written test, if necessary. (Such tests are permitted under the ADA as long as they are uniformly given to all applicants.)

    Conducting the Interview

    -Relax and make the applicant feel relaxed. If the applicant has a visible disability or reveals a disability during the interview, concentrate on the individual, not the disability.

    -Treat the individual with the same respect you would treat any candidate whose skills you are seeking. Likewise, hold individuals with disabilities to the same standards as all applicants.

    -Ask only job-related questions that speak to the functions of the job for which the applicant is applying.

      -Concentrate on the applicant’s technical and professional knowledge, skills, abilities, experiences and interests.

      -Do not try to imagine how you would perform a specific job if you had the applicant’s disability.  He or she has mastered alternate ways of living and working. If the applicant has a known disability, either because it is obvious or was revealed by the applicant, you may ask him or her to describe how he or she would perform the job.

      It is important to note that medical examinations are prohibited under the ADA at the pre-employment offer stage. However, a job offer may be conditional based on the results of a medical examination if all employees entering similar jobs are also required to take an examination. If, after the medical examination, the employer decides not to hire an individual because of a disability, the employer must demonstrate that the reason for the rejection is job-related and consistent with business necessity.

      Don’t Forget Accessibility

      Another important strategy, which will also assist you in your broader recruitment efforts, is to ensure that your company’s online information and job applications are available in alternative accessible formats.  For example, providing information in larger print or in simplified language may assist you in reaching not only young people with and without disabilities, but also older workers and individuals with limited English language proficiency.  It is also important to ensure that your online application processes provide sufficient time flexibility so as not to screen out potentially qualified workers.

      The key to making online job information accessible to people with disabilities is Web page design.  In order to consider the accessibility needs of the end user, there are several design tips and validation services available to webmasters.  For a summary of these, visit Tips for Designing Accessible Web Pages at www.jan.wvu.edu/media/webpages.html.