Most companies combine online and offline recruiting practices, but the efficiencies gained from technological practices can also impose limitations by unknowingly discouraging qualified candidates, particularly those with disabilities. Cornell ILR School professor Susanne Bruyère examines approaches to designing career webpages to attract job seekers with disabilities.
Cornell University research sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Disability Employment Policy has identified approaches to designing employer career webpages that can significantly heighten the likelihood of a company’s success in attracting job seekers with disabilities and encouraging them to apply for open positions.
Susanne Bruyère, a professor of Disability Studies and academic director of the Yang-Tan Institute on Employment and Disability at the Cornell ILR School, takes a close look at this research—and what it means for employers as well as people with disabilities—and offers insights for recruiting applicants with disabilities, finetuning hiring processes and understanding how a person with a disability may choose to self-identify to potential employers.
What You'll Learn
The Cornell Keynotes podcast is brought to you by eCornell, which offers more than 200 online certificate programs to help professionals advance their careers and organizations. Susanne Bruyère is an author of these programs:
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Chris Wofford: Today on Cornell Keynotes, we are looking at hiring people with disabilities online, and we're looking at it from both the employer and on the employee side. We discuss how and why employers should recruit applicants with disabilities, then look at how to fine-tune various hiring processes, and in addition, we will closely examine self-identification to potential employers during the application process for people with disabilities.
Joining me in conversation is Susanne Bruyère, who is professor of disability studies and the academic director at the Yang-Tan Institute at Cornell's ILR school. Susanne is a well-known authority and leader in this space and happens to be a favorite guest here at Cornell Keynotes. Note that this episode features a number of useful resources for both employers and for job applicants, a lot of which comes from a fruitful research partnership between Cornell's ILR School and the U.S. Department of Labor's Office of Disability Employment Policy. And be sure to check out the episode notes for the details on Susanne Bruyère’s online certificate programs, including the Workplace Disability Inclusion and Neurodiversity at Work online courses. These are just some of eCornell's online HR certificate programs brought to you by Cornell University.
And now here's my conversation with Susanne Bruyère from the ILR School at Cornell.
So Susanne, what is the experience like for people with disabilities who are applying online for jobs? What's it like out there?
Susanne Bruyère: In response to employer interest about what can they do to more effectively, affirmatively recruit. And so, we at Cornell University have been thinking about that. We've done some interviews with people, we've done some surveys with job seekers with disabilities and they tell us there definitely are signals in career pages, signals on company websites that encourage them to apply or discourage them from pursuing that employer for employment. And sometimes it's just, you know, how they view the website, the information provided. In some cases, websites are also very difficult to navigate and people get discouraged just from trying to figure out how to apply.
But indeed, it can be problematic and discourage lost talent. Talent left on the table.
Chris Wofford: I want to get to that. So that's a through line, almost in every conversation we have, right? We talk about why it's critical or strategically important for organizations and companies to, to hire disabled people, to look at that as a valuable talent pool.
And if you're not tapping that, you're, you're leaving a lot of talent on the table.
Susanne Bruyère: Absolutely, absolutely. We know that about 11 percent of working age Americans are, are people with disabilities. Half of those people are actually getting into the workforce, even though they are eligible, they're interested, often they're trained up for it.
And so, the work of the Yang-Tan Institute has been to try to figure out where those barriers are, both for the job seekers, but also in the employment setting. How are we inadvertently, and often disproportionately, keeping people out of those pipelines, where we can access that talent?
Chris Wofford: So let's talk about the experience of job seekers with disabilities online.
You kind of described high-level, what the landscape looks like, but how might somebody go about this? What kind of blockers do they typically run into, you know?
Susanne Bruyère: Well, I think there's, there's a couple of things that we can talk about. In our research, we did ask people how they pursue jobs, and I would say half of them.
We entered, we surveyed almost 900 individuals who are job seekers, who are people with disabilities, who'd had recent experience, and we found out that, I would say almost about half of them, use social media. I think it's good for employers to know it's not just their webpages. They should, if they're recruiting in other ways, signaling in that social media outreach, that people with disabilities, people who are neurodivergent, are a part of the different pools of talent that they're looking for.
But where their own webpages, the company webpages and the career webpages are concerned, candidates have told us that they look for navigability, which I already mentioned, for people with visual impairments, or hearing impairments, it's accessibility, and we can talk a little bit more about that.
But for, in the general population, people are looking for signals about how their talents fit the open positions, but also how the culture of the organization fit what they're looking for, in terms of really being included. Is the employer signaling that they want people with disabilities?
Is it in their diversity statement? Is there a statement by the CEO that it's a part of the strategic imperative? And do they see themselves in the candidates, in the, how is it reflected in the imagery on the website?
Chris Wofford: That's what I was getting at, or more so what I intended to ask, which are, what is something either in the imagery or the messaging that either indicates promise, right, for an organization, kind of like what you described, or red flags?
What might be some red flags that, both on the employer side and on the employee side, what should we all be looking for?
Susanne Bruyère: Well, I think, I think all of us look to see ourselves, right? When we're looking for, when we're looking at an employer. Is this a place that has similar values? Is it, is this a place that wants someone like me?
And I mentioned a couple of things. A statement by the CEO that this is affirmative hiring for people with disabilities is part of the strategic plan for this organization, but there are many other things that send signals about disability being a part of the agenda. It might be an affirmative hiring portal for people with disabilities, there, that where recruiters are actually looking for these candidates.
Chris Wofford: What is an affirmative hiring portal?
What is it? How does it work?
Susanne Bruyère: It means that it rather than just having the generic application process or career pages, that there are separate entries that say if you're an individual with disability and you'd like consideration, please apply here so that the recruiters who are, it's probably more likely it's an individual and not an algorithmic screening, that is occurring.
And recruiters are hiring managers who know that the company is affirmatively looking to draw from this talent pool. And so, we'll give personal attention to the resumes coming through that portal. So, that's a significant signal to the individual that candidates like themselves are wanted in that organization to apply.
And also community organizations that are partners to these companies and provide qualified candidates as a part of the labor force pipeline. All of these things signal that this is an organization that is affirmatively recruiting people with disabilities.
Chris Wofford: Good. So these are high level indicators, a good general practice to think about.
Susanne Bruyère: Absolutely.
Chris Wofford: So, you, you talk about this idea of distinguishing between instrumental parts of the job. I'm talking about the job description right now, right? Factual and objective job attributes. What are the things that you're going to do? Distinguishing between the instrumental and the symbolic, the subjective attributes.
You know, the idea, the company personality, values, culture and all those kinds of things. Can you just talk about how those two things are distinguishable? And as someone who's creating a job listing or coming up with a position description, what those things look like and why they're both so critical as part of the mix.
Susanne Bruyère: Yeah, and you are absolutely right. They are both critical, Chris. I mean, people want to understand what the job is, right? And be able to make an informed judgment about whether their skills and interests and their talents match a specific job description. So enough specificity is really important so the person can make an informed judgment.
What we do hear from candidates is that sometimes the specificity is in such great detail that they're put off. They feel like they cannot approximate all of the expectations and many other, any other of us, sweep aside some of those and, and we'll go ahead and be emboldened to go out to apply.
But sometimes people with disabilities, who may have not had great experiences before, might be discouraged by that. So those, instrumental or factual information, we should be thoughtful about how, what is a real requirement of the job and what is maybe something that you could have a conversation. What else did people bring to the table?
So you don't needlessly discourage people. On the subjective side. I started talking about what are some of the symbolic things that are flags. I'll add to that, flexibility in the workplace.
Chris Wofford: Huge. That's number one.
Susanne Bruyère: For all of us. For all of us. Work-life balance. Signals that there are resources to support people, an accommodation process, you know, an employee resource group that addresses disability interests.
Those are some of the other features and facts in the subjective realm that talk about what's in this job, what's in this workplace for this person.
Chris Wofford: Okay, generally speaking, what are some challenges that everybody faces? A lot of people in our audience will think about this. Recruiting online, it's pretty tricky, but it’s how you do it.
What are some common challenges that organizations are facing as it relates to this right now?
Susanne Bruyère: We've now had enough experience with algorithmic screening. We know that it's helpful. I mean, some companies get just thousands of applications for jobs. But we also know that we're losing a lot of candidates with non-traditional, who have non-traditional backgrounds in this process.
You know, the very diversity that we know will bring creativity and an expanded labor pool to the organization, we are sometimes with these screening tools working against ourselves. So part of it is that screening process. Part of it is how the organization presents itself and maybe discouraging some of this talent as we just talked about.
And part of it is preparing your recruiters and hiring managers so they understand that you really want more of an openness about who can be a part of that workforce.
Chris Wofford: I have a question from Julie, who checks in and asks, How does a separate portal for persons with disabilities impact our compliance in regards to our system of record documented processes?
Getting in the weeds a little bit, but, so, if we're talking about record keeping around this, are there particular challenges within having an external portal, for people with disabilities versus what might otherwise be a traditional channel.
Susanne Bruyère: And, and Julie, it's, that's a great question, which has come.
Chris Wofford: It’s a tough one.
Susanne Bruyère: It is a tough one, but it's certainly been asked by many of the legal consultants, the lawyers of companies, because they wanted to be sure that they weren't running afoul of equitable recruiting practices and indeed companies can have these specialized portals. People are self-electing to identify as a person with a disability, so it's really up to them whether or not that they come in through these portals. It makes it easier for companies to know that this labor pool are identifying this part, this, people coming in through this portal are identifying as a person with a disability. They don't have to come in through that portal. They can come in through the generic portal if they choose not to, but it makes it easier for companies to know if they have this kind of element of diversity in their talent pipeline.
And for federal contractors or actually, for the federal government, who really are looking to approximate percentages of people with disabilities in their recruitment efforts, this makes it easier. And it is perfectly appropriate from a legal compliance point of view.
Chris Wofford: Good, because I was going to ask about the compliance component of Julie's question, and that's what it's all about, right?
Susanne Bruyère: Right.
Chris Wofford: Perfect. We had discussed in our pregame huddle a little bit about third party HR organizations that some of us work at companies that are small, right? And, and outsource or have third party vendors who work in this space contract with organizations, right? Take care of a lot of the administrative functions, the hiring functions, to some degree, the strategic functions.
Are any of those kinds of organizations doing, frankly, a better job than some of our own organizations might do? How do they stack up?
Susanne Bruyère: It's certainly mixed. I think some of them are, perhaps aren't thinking about this. I think the employer who is hiring through party venders, if they are affirmatively recruiting, needs to guide that recruiter. Tell them that they want to be affirmatively including this, this part of the diversity of, of the population. I do also know that others that are using AI tools and are being secured by companies because they are using more innovation, different kinds of ways of approaching it.
It could be video capture, two or three minute interviews, it might be different kinds of screening tools online. I know many of these companies have confronted this already and are really working to try to minimize any bias in those processes. You know, none of it is perfect, but each of these are tools that can be useful to employers, maybe useful to candidates if we pay attention to the ways in which we've inadvertently screened out people in the past.
Chris Wofford: What do you mean by that?
Susanne Bruyère: Well, I think we know all these algorithmic tools might have biases. Potentially can have biases built in, right? And so people who may have untraditional, non-traditional resumes or work experience often might be set aside, where in an inter, more personalized interview opportunity, we recognize that there is a good match there that might not have been adequately reflected on a resume that would have been screened out with AI tools.
Chris Wofford: I have another viewer who checks in. Lita Gibbs checks in and says, is it safe to say that if you disclose that you have a disability, that you will truly be given any priority in the application process? What does that process look like once TA receives the app of a person with a disability? Forgive me, I don't know what TA is, do you?
Susanne Bruyère: Technical assistance? I'm not sure.
Chris Wofford: certain. I'm not certain, but the idea about priority within an application process,
Susanne Bruyère: So that's great.
Chris Wofford: Depends on the organizational, whatever their objectives are.
Susanne Bruyère: Absolutely, absolutely. If the organization does have an affirmative hiring program, it is very likely that there is this conduit, where the resume is more likely to get screened by an individual and not just an automated process that hopefully those recruiters and hiring managers have been trained to know about the fact that this is a strategic imperative. And that there is a greater opportunity that that person will be considered and afforded an opportunity to talk about their skills or demonstrate their skills. That is what I have observed in, in more affirmative hiring, targeted hiring opportunities, whether it's disability or neurodiversity.
We've seen a lot of this in the last 12 years in tech companies that have been affirmatively hiring neurodivergent individuals, autistic individuals.
Chris Wofford: Talent acquisition.
Susanne Bruyère: Yes.
Chris Wofford: That's what we're talking about.
Susanne Bruyère: That’s what we're talking about.
Chris Wofford: Yeah good. Alright, so we had a little clarity. Thanks for the clarity on that one. I want to talk about downstream a little bit.
When a person does self identify, what does it mean for the employer? What does it mean for the employee? What actually happens?
Susanne Bruyère: Well, that very much depends on the person, who is disclosing, and on the context, absolutely. And it's always a personal choice, particularly for individuals who have non-obvious disabilities.
First of all, because we do so much remotely now, it may not be obvious, even if the person has an obvious disability in the virtual interview space, or if the person is working 100 percent remotely and they don't need an accommodation, no one may ever, it may, even with an obvious disability. With a non-obvious disability, the person has more of an opportunity to choose whether or not they disclose. And we always say it's very much a personal choice. I would say if the person needs an accommodation, it's great for them to be in a context where they can get what they need to stay productive and to thrive in that job, but also to be able to fully represent who they are, right, as an individual.
We all want to be accepted for every part of our personal characteristics, but we choose carefully what we might share, and disability is no exception, if a person has to feel comfortable to be able to do so in that work environment.
Chris Wofford: And I think accommodation is a great place to start, right?
And that's also, what do you want your workplace experience to be, right? I’m not going to have a secret, but I want to bring my whole self to work, which we're all encouraged to do all the time, and I think more so than ever, we are able to do that. I think in many different ways.
Susanne Bruyère: I think we are definitely making gains, but we have still some things to keep tweaking and refining, and this conversation is a great example of how to promote that.
Chris Wofford: I hope we're not getting outside of your purview with another legal compliance question, but I think it's.
Susanne Bruyère: I'll do my best.
Chris Wofford: Let's see how we do.
Susanne Bruyère: I am not a lawyer. I'm a psychologist.
Chris Wofford: Alright, Dee. Thanks for this question. Speaking of legal compliance, Dee is curious. I'm just curious about how the affirmative action, within the recent Supreme Court decisions, affects active recruitment of specific groups like those with disabilities. Are you familiar with any Supreme Court cases that may affect this, this particular job applicant pool?
Susanne Bruyère: I believe. I understand, this, this scenario that has been, has occurred recently with the Supreme Court cases.
Chris Wofford: What is it?
Susanne Bruyère: They seemed more focused on race and gender and the affirmative recruitment that has gone on race and gender rather than disability.
You know, within the federal government and within federal subcontractors, there is still aspirational goals of 7 percent for, for subcontractors and 12 percent in the federal workforce for people with disabilities. There have not been any changes to date in those aspirational goals, and disability crosses all the other kinds of differences. So, I think if we were going to start eliminating people with disabilities, we'd be eliminating a lot of people.
I said 11 percent of the working age population are people with disabilities. But disability touches the workforce more broadly and employers in that, I've used this statistic before, Chris, and you probably might recall that one in four households has a person with a disability.
So if we were to start saying we won't support or include people with disabilities in our workforce, it wouldn't just be that 11 percent, it would really be many more people would feel the impact of that kind of exclusionary sort of thinking. So I think disability is the great equalizer, right? I don't, I don't feel that those changes are impacting disability.
Chris Wofford: You brought us up a bunch of cool tools and resources that our viewers can use afterward. I want to dig into those a little bit because I think they're really useful. And I think for nothing else, it gets us thinking about the way that we should be thinking about this. So we have a couple tools that contain some best practices for demonstrating disability hiring priorities that are readily visible on the main career page or career resources page.
First of all, let's talk about the Office of Disability Employment Policy. Governmental organization or agency or administration, what's the function of this organization?
Susanne Bruyère: The Office of Disability Employment Policy is within the U.S. Department of Labor. Its relationship to us at Cornell University is it has funded us 15 of the last 20 years to work on a project called the Employer Assistance Resource Network on Disability Inclusion, which is a concerted effort to conduct research and design online tools, informational assets, share information on social media and webinars about what is inclusive, disability inclusive, neurodiversity inclusive policies and practices for workplaces that can help get that talent in the front door and, and keep people there who are people with disabilities.
Chris Wofford: Okay, so that's, that's where you start.
Then we've got some other resources that are a little more, that were published a little more in partnership with some of our friends over at the ILR School, at Cornell, right? So a good resource is called the Checklist for Employers, facilitating the hiring of people with disabilities through the use of e-recruiting screening systems, including AI.
What's this one about? We're going to share the URL by the way in the chat.
Susanne Bruyère: Absolutely. Well, I talked a little bit about what are some of the good practices that attract people? What would make them apply? Those ideas that I shared with you are based on concerted research that we did, a survey, as I mentioned, of job seekers, looking at 40 fortune 500 company websites that we randomly selected and getting employer feedback, getting job seeker feedback and focus groups.
And from all that background research, we developed a checklist that is easily accessible that says, if you're interested in making your websites more attractive, here are 20 things you can do. And that's a downloadable tool, it's available, open source.
Chris Wofford: Perfect. Good. Glad to share those two. We have the literature review component there. Can you speak to that one?
Susanne Bruyère: Sure, that's how we got started. That was the very first step we did is take a look at what are people saying about what attracts people with disabilities to websites, to career sites, what makes them apply? And also what help, helps them feel comfortable self-disclosing if they need an accommodation or if they want special consideration through a portal, or through it's, a targeted internship.
So that is the background of the, who's doing what, where that, from which we launched further, more in depth research after that. And that's available in summary form online.
Chris Wofford: Are there any tools? We have a viewer, Alyssa, who asks about protections for people with disabilities as it relates to employment. Does the ODEP website cover any of that stuff or any of the other resources?
Susanne Bruyère: It does. Sure. The, the EARN website does have information about the Americans with Disabilities Act, with how, ways that employers can be mindful of minimizing discrimination that it can occur not only on the front end, tight now we're talking about people getting in, but inequities can occur in all parts of the employment process. So there's lots of information on there about equitable career development, equitable access to advancement, performance reviews, as well as the front end of recruitment interviewing, you know, and how to be fair in that process for people with disabilities.
Chris Wofford: Good, I hope that's useful, Alyssa, who asks, who kind of preceded that with, in light of the current political landscape, it's Wednesday, and we're just getting started on this, so a lot of things could change. But as far as legal protections, that's probably going to be a developing story, to be honest, as we go forward. Accessibility, we haven't talked about that strictly, right? We're talking about hiring people with disabilities. Accessibility and usability of a website, you’ve talked about it a little bit. You know, for a lot of organizations, they don't do it right. It's kind of an aspirational kind of thing.
And maybe we'll never get it right, right? This is something, we're all works in progress. All of our companies and our organizations have websites that do some things good, some things bad. In your estimation, are there any shining examples? We have viewer, Lilia, who asks. I'd like to look at a few that might be really great websites and kind of tick all the boxes and, and have nailed that checklist that you talk about. Do any of the resources out here that we provided cite any shining star examples of a?
Susanne Bruyère: I think you will find some examples on there. I would say, I'm going to, I'm going to point you to, you know, we've done more in-depth research in the neurodiversity area.
I would encourage you to take a look at the organization called Disability Inn. And Disability Inn has a Neurodiversity at Work roundtable. And there lists three, four dozen different companies that are affirmatively recruiting individuals with disabilities. And I think looking at those websites, you will get some ideas of, I mean, Microsoft, Ernst & Young, JPMorgan, Chase, S.A.P. There, there have been a number of organizations that have been pioneers in this affirmative recruiting for people with neurodiversity whose websites, I think, demonstrate that. And, and, and other companies that now increasingly that are listed in, in that. So also, many of them have more general kinds of information, but I think that's a good place to start.
Chris Wofford: Another good place to start is Susanne and I did a Neurodiversity at Work keynote several months ago. It was in July. I recommend our audience to check that out, right? So go to our website, check out the Neurodiversity at Work. There's a lot of overlap and crossover with what we're talking about today, which was also released as a podcast.
And if you haven't checked out our podcast, I'm plugging things here. Today's episode will be a podcast, within about a week or two. And certainly Neurodiversity at Work is available as a podcast on Cornell Keynotes so check out that channel. Susanne, what's next for your work at the Yang-Tan?
I wanna get a big picture cause you do a lot of work over there. We're gonna share the URL for the Yang-Tan Institute at Cornell, an institute focused on disabilities. What are some of the other things you're working on? You've always got something new cooking, so I had to ask.
Susanne Bruyère: We do.
Well, definitely for our Office of Disability Employment Policy work, we, you know, we talked a lot about the online recruitment. We're doing a lot on mental health in the workplace there, which is a huge issue for employers. So at some point in the future, that might be a great conversation for us to have there.
We're doing more on small businesses too, because, many people, although we're often talking about the big companies, and their affirmative hiring, small businesses are, would employ, you know, a great many of our Americans. And so looking at what can we do to support small businesses in affirmative hiring, we'll be working on that.
And closer to this neurodiversity area, we have a National Science Foundation grant that we're partnering with organizations like the National Association of Colleges and Employers to look at ways to improve how we prepare young people for STEM jobs. People who are autistic or neurodivergent specifically.
So we're working on that as well.
Chris Wofford: Good, good. Cause I wanted you to provide a little baseline for what people can gather from the United Tenants Institute website. Which is a great resource within itself. So, I want to share those links with our audience one more time. Encourage you to go check out the Yang-Tan’s Institute and some of Susanne’s work.
You're also an author, there's so much going on here. More so than anything else, I want to make sure that our audience was able to not learn everything there is to learn about, hiring, online for people with disabilities, but to take the next step and elicit further learning. So I want you to check out Susanne’s certificate programs, and hopefully we've provided enough resources with you to send you on your way, whether you're an employer or on the employee side. Susanne Bruyère, great to have you in the studio today.
Susanne Bruyère: Thank you, Chris. It's great to be back.