GettingHired’s disability talent and branding solutions expert Ryan Carroll shares how his company ensures their website is accessible to people with disabilities and how other employers can do the same.
My name is Ryan Carroll. I’m a disability talent and branding solutions expert at GettingHired. GettingHired is one of America’s largest online career communities, connecting employers to individuals with disabilities. And my role at GettingHired is really to help make sure that employers are getting the most out of their partnership and that they are getting all the tools—making use of—all the tools that we offer, to effectively attract, recruit, and hire individuals with disabilities.
One of the things GettingHired does on a regular basis is we actually ask our partners at the National Industries for the Blind to audit our website both from an accessibility standpoint and from a user experience standpoint. Where visually impaired job-seekers using assistive technology can go through our process and provide feedback on how our website needs to be improved for those who would face the highest barrier to finding equal access to information. In order to get the most qualified through the process, you can’t think of anything sadder than doing everything right from a recruitment marketing standpoint and getting every job seeker who wants to work for your company and then they just can’t get through the door because of an accessibility issue or pre-employment testing.
Ultimately, 19% of our job seekers say that they face a challenge applying to jobs with an employer because of, specifically, the website and the career process are not accessible. There’s plenty of employers that we’ve seen who the candidate experience might involve not one, but two or three different logins, different account creations in order to get down to the point of actually applying for a job. You are adding an additional barrier to this high-value talent pool of job seekers with disabilities.
Some of the best things that a company can do specific to the disability space—and this comes from the work that we do at GettingHired with 185+ employer members—is really working on an employee value proposition specific for job seekers with disabilities. The first step there is to go through the type of testing and the type of auditing process that PEATWorks does. There are several GettingHired employers who have made that commitment from the top down to making their career process completely accessible, and the one place where I send them is PEATWorks to start that process.
[narrator speaking] For more information on the Partnership on Employment & Accessible Technology and TalentWorks, please contact www.peatworks.org/talentworks or e-mail us at info@peatworks.org(link sends e-mail).
