Section 2: Disability inclusive recruitment

Inclusion and accessibility should start well before a disabled person joins your team.

Before application stage

If possible, ensure those who are involved in recruitment and selection are appropriately trained to ensure they can best assist disabled and neurodivergent people during recruitment processes.
Ensure that your website (or any other job site you use) is accessible. You can find resources to help achive this in Section 10: Resources.
Make sure that the advert itself is accessible and clear including ensuring the job requirements are tailored and specific instead of including generic wording such as 'good team worker', 'excellent communication skills' etc.
Remove jargon wherever possible.
If using competency frameworks, ensure that these are tailored to individual roles.

Make it clear that you are an inclusive employer. You can do this by:

Outlining on your website and in application forms that you specifically welcome applications from disabled and neurodivergent candidates.
Publicly outlining your approach to disability inclusion.
Highlighting role models from your organisation on your website.
Role requirements and person specifications should be necessary for the role and should be considered carefully. For example including the need to have a driving licence excludes those who cannot drive due to an impairment.
Ensuring your processes and firms are accessible. Ask disabled colleagues – or involve disability charities – about this. Are there parts of your process inadvertently putting people off?
Making space in applications for candidates to outline any reasonable adjustment requests (if they wish to). Discuss with candidates how best to support them in advance of the interview. Don’t make assumptions on what adjustments are needed.
Collect diversity data and take the time to review the data regularly to establish if there are any barriers in your recruitment process to disabled candidates.

Proactively offer communication support and make it clear support workers can attend an interview.
If you can adapt selection exercises, then be open with prospective candidates that these can be adapted. Before that carefully consider to why you are using a particular method and the potential impact of doing so.
Providing interview questions in advance can be beneficial to some neurodivergent people. You could consider providing interview questions to all candidates in advance as this will assist them all to perform the best they can.
Ensure that interviews can be done in-person or remotely.
Ensure the interview room is accessible and set up appropriately.
If you use an assessment centre, ensure that adjustments are offered and made available. For some neurodivergent people, assessments in assessment centres without regular breaks and quiet areas can be very difficult to manage, so consider whether you can gain the same insight of all candidates in a different setting which may be more comfortable for e.g. neurodivergent people.

Give high-quality feedback to unsuccessful applicants.
Consider the data: are disabled candidates as likely as non-disabled candidates to be interviewed? Are they as likely to be successful? If not, consider why and look to improve processes.