The disability employment gap, which measures the difference in employment rates between people who have disabilities and those who don’t, currently stands at over 30 per cent. Web accessibility and language cloud software company Recite Me explain why digital accessibility is essential to help in-house recruiters employ more people with disabilities in order to tackle the disability employment gap.
One in five people in the UK have a disability and 19 per cent of working age adults are disabled.
But there is a disability employment gap of more than 30 per cent in the UK and many people with disabilities face barriers that stop them from entering the workplace.
Clearly in-house recruiters (and agencies) need to do more to help organisations employ more people with disabilities and tap into this huge pool of talent, especially as so many organisations and industry sectors are reporting skills shortages.
Grow disability confidence
Research from organisations like the Recruitment Industry Disability Initiative (RIDI) shows that many organisations want to employ more people with disabilities, but they often don’t know what to do.
The government’s Disability Confident employer scheme is a great initiative to help organisations become more confident about employing people with disabilities.
The scheme helps employers to understand more about disability and the reasonable adjustments they need to make to help people with disabilities.
Reasonable adjustments
All employers are required to make reasonable adjustments for people with disabilities under The Equality Act 2010, and these adjustments should cover physical and digital accessibility.
That means it’s essential to ensure that your recruitment process is accessible to people with disabilities, including the application stage.
RIDI’s 2017 RIDI candidate survey of 200 job seekers with disabilities, which was conducted in conjunction with VERCIDA, showed inaccessible online and digital communications stop jobseekers who are disabled flourishing in the recruitment process.
The survey’s findings include:
- 75% of the jobseekers with disabilities surveyed find their condition has an impact on their job search
- 54% find hurdles at multiple stages of the recruitment process
- 28% find online assessments challenging
A guide to Digital Accessibility in Recruitment
As in-house recruiters you know that the modern recruitment processes relies heavily on digital technology, from online job adverts on both websites and social media platforms, to online application forms and skills assessments.
There is clearly a need to educate and support recruiters to make the recruitment journey more accessible and allow them to tap into the pool of talented disabled people.
That’s why Recite Me teamed up with Guidant Global to create The guide to digital inclusion for recruiters.
The guide helps recruiters understand how to make the digital and online parts of the recruitment process more accessible for job seekers who are disabled.
Understanding Digital Accessibility
It explains how all digital job adverts and other parts of the recruitment process should meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
The guide also shows recruiters how they can make their social media profiles as accessible as possible by using the accessibility settings on platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
It then goes on to explain how recruiters can add web accessibility software like Recite Me to their websites to ensure that the widest possible audience can access the entire recruitment process online.
Recite Me have partnered with In-house Recruitment for the Diversity & Inclusion Conference on 5th June 2019, where key in-house recruitment and talent acquisition leaders have gathered to share their positive change successes. We hope we were able to help in-house recruiters learn more about how to ensure their online recruitment process is fully accessible.
Recite Me helps future talent, employees and customers consume the content of your website more easily.
Our software is often added to websites by those focussed on talent acquisition as a means of supporting neurodivergent job seekers as well as those with vision and language challenges.
We do this by providing options such as text to speech, translation into over 100 languages, a document reader, an audio MP3 creator and much more.
