Our journey to becoming a Disability Confident Leader
We’re facing the biggest talent shortage in over a decade and many sectors are struggling to fill their vacancies as a result. Yet there is an often overlooked and largely untapped talent pool out there looking for an opportunity to shine: disabled candidates.
Although the disability employment rate improved during 2021 over the previous year, the reality remains: disabled job candidates face challenges their non-disabled counterparts don’t. From lack of disabled access, employers being nervous about how they can support disabled staff members, to assumptions about disabled individuals’ ability to do the job – these candidates face significant hurdles on their road to employment.
It’s designed to support organisations to play a leading role in changing attitudes for the better, by providing a framework that challenges perceptions about disabilities and helps businesses build programmes to support a greater number of disabled people into work.
The scheme helps employers recruit and keep great people by:
Drawing from the widest possible talent pool
Securing high-quality staff who are skilled, loyal and hard-working
Improving employee morale and commitment by fostering a culture of inclusivity.
To help you get started, you are encouraged to evaluate your own business; to look at the things you already do and the ones you don’t.
The scheme then guides you to design and deliver a focused action plan.
There are multiple benefits for organisations employing disabled candidates. For example, a 2018 Accenture report found that organisations who employ disabled talent benefit from 30% higher profit margins and 28% higher revenues.
And inclusion is not just important for disabled people; employees, and in particular younger ones, expect to find inclusivity in the workplace.
Progressive employers who recognise the benefits of a diverse workforce must con-sider how they can make a visible commitment to hiring and supporting people with disabilities too. Not only is this the right thing to do, but employers are missing out on a huge pool of skilled talent by not rethinking their perceptions.
ManpowerGroup became a Disability Confident Leader in 2018 and we were reaccredited in 2021; a status we have worked hard to achieve and that we’re continuously working on to ensure our practices are up to standard and evolve.
As a Disability Confident Leader, it is our aim to:
Improve access to work opportunities for people with disabilities and ensure they have the support needed to thrive at ManpowerGroup
Retain the valued and skilled colleagues we have within our business
Support and partner with our clients helping them with their journey to become Disability Confident
Ensure that the mental health of our people is looked after at all times.
As part of our accreditation journey, we’ve had to demonstrate that we are actively attracting and recruiting disabled people to help fill our opportunities, including jobs, apprenticeships, internships and work experience placements. We’ve also ensured that we are providing a fully inclusive and accessible recruitment process, and that we’re offering interviews to disabled people who meet the minimum criteria for the job.
One of our most important initiatives when we first started our journey on the Disability Confident Scheme five years ago, was forming a Disability Leader Affinity Network (then called “Disability Confident Affinity Network”) – an employee-led group with the mission to give a voice to individuals within the organisation who were passionate about disability in the workplace.
Other ways that we have improved access to information, training and understanding of disability include:
Working with Made By Dyslexia to create a Dyslexia Awareness Toolkit.
Building on our internal wellbeing offerings, including training over 60 Mental Health First Aiders within the organisation, and developing an extensive wellbeing hub with in-depth resources on mental health.
Establishing relationships with external organisations such as the Royal National In-stitute for Blind People (RNIB), Fedcap Employment, WorkFit and the UK Women’s Visually Impaired Cricket Team to be a trusted workforce partner.
Download our Dyslexic Dynamic report, explaining why employers must harness dyslexic skills to meet today’s talent challenges and excel.
Create safe spaces where staff can explore the stigmatisation of disabilities: Opening up spaces for staff to talk about disabilities in the workplace is one of the best ways to break down the barriers.
Support staff with disabilities: Be open to modify work arrangements, such as flexible working and accessibility. This is often easier than we might think – the UK average cost of a reasonable adjustment is between £30 and £180.
Provide training: Raise awareness of disabilities in your own organisation. To truly become a Disability Confident employer, it is important that everyone understands the part they play. One way can be to provide unconscious bias training.
Make your Applicant Tracking Systems accessible: “Accessible” is defined as something that you can obtain, get to or use. For able-bodied individuals with no impairment, accessibility is something we generally take for granted, but we need to keep accessibility front of mind, from when we write job adverts, to when we’re offering interviews or online assessments.
Know it will take time: A lot of organisations have questions around resource and the time it will take to become Disability Confident. There isn’t a hard and fast answer. The self-assessment can take a few months of work and commitment, but don’t let that put you off. And remember, your work will continue after you achieve your accreditation; no organisation is a finished article.
In 2021, Experis, part of ManpowerGroup, partnered with Untapped, to help employers remove barriers facing neurodiverse talent. Experis and Untapped teamed up to support the expansion of DXC Technology’s Dandelion Programme – designed to recruit people from within the autism community and provide the technical, workplace and life skills required to build a sustainable IT career. In June 2021 we welcomed the first cohort of eight neurodiverse trainees working in Software Testing and User Experience (UX) to the programme. Read more.
At ManpowerGroup, we’ll keep up our work in this area and stay true to our belief that meaningful and sustainable employment has the power to the change the world.
We’ll continue to raise awareness of the support we can give to clients and candidates as a Disability Confident employer, as well as continuing to build relationships with external bodies and institutions to guide best practice policies and procedures.
To learn more about becoming Disability Confident, watch the on-demand version of our Journey to becoming a Disability Confident Leader webinar.
Here you’ll hear a panel of experts discuss the organisational benefits of being Disability Confident and how to draw from the widest possible pool of talent, as well as one disabled candidate's personal perspective on the recruitment process.
