Transcript:Dean Halstead Makes the Business Case for Hiring People with Disabilities
PEAT asked Dean Halstead of Microsoft: If you were riding in an elevator with a Fortune 500 CEO, what’s your pitch for why hiring people with disabilities is important to their company?
When you’re talking about why is it important to hire people with disabilities within your company, when you’re looking at designing your products or when you’re looking at providing either citizen services or services to your customers, you’ve got to have a complete 360 view of all of your customers. And the only way to do that is to have representatives within your company that can actually give you feedback and be part of the design up front. One of the core principles that we’ve seen across the board is the fact that you want to shift from essentially “bolt on,” where you’re doing things after the fact instead of actually “built in,” where you’re actually looking at, from the beginning, bringing all of that together and addressing all of your constituents, different types of disabilities and providing better services across all of your users or constituents.
