Recruitment hints and tips
The business case for making e-recruitment barrier-free for everyone
Making e-recruitment barrier-free for disabled people brings significant benefits for any organisation, including improved access to talent, cost savings, enhanced performance, reduced legal and financial risk and improved reputation.
Research undertaken by McKinsey & Company for the Forum, has shown:1
- At least 1.3 million disabled people of working age in the UK face ongoing exclusion because companies are using inaccessible e-recruitment websites. Inaccessible sites can be expected to affect similar proportions of the population worldwide, including an estimated 7.4 million disabled people in the United States, 5.9 million in Europe and 91.5 million worldwide. 2
- Many more people, including up to 386 million people of working age worldwide (including 6.9 million in Britain) as well as people with minority languages and diverse backgrounds, are excluded by processes which make provisions for reasonable adjustments difficult or impossible. This includes CV sorting technology, which can be discriminatory; inflexible short-listing criteria; inflexible (and inaccessible) online testing and inaccessible communications such as some html email.
- Building an e-recruitment site which is barrier-free is no more expensive than building an inaccessible site
- Making an existing website accessible costs, on average, less than five per cent of total development expenditure. This investment can significantly increase market share by improving the accessibility and usability of a site for all users. It also lowers maintenance costs, enhances reputation and reduces legal liability.3
- The global business community must anticipate that the trend towards discrimination legislation worldwide will result in an increased threat of litigation based on discriminatory e-recruitment systems and failure to make reasonable adjustments. There is more information available on the legal and regulatory environment.
The cost-benefit equation
As the cost of building a barrier-free e-recruitment site was found to range from negligible, in the case of a new website, to only 5%6 of the original website cost in the case of an upgraded site, the potential benefits will in most cases outweigh the required expenditure. McKinsey & Company
Benefits for employers
"Barclays would like to set itself apart from the online competition by embracing barrier free e-recruitment, demonstrating its commitment to building a truly diverse workforce." Barclays
"Diversity is central to our brand... Respect for individuals of all types will inspire loyalty in both employees and customers, which will have a direct line of sight to the achievement of business goals." HSBC
"We identified website accessibility as a key aim of our recent project to launch the next version of reed.co.uk. Reed is an equal opportunity employer and, therefore, providing equal access to all is core to our beliefs. As well as being the socially responsible thing to do, the decision to work towards accessibility was supported by a strong business case."
"There are about 7 million people of working age with long-term disabilities in the UK, so it simply does not make good business sense for a recruitment website to ignore a talent pool of this size."
"Having recently completed Phase 1 of our Web Accessibility Project, we were surprised at how much had been achieved at a comparatively low cost."
"We found the main investment required was the time spent up front by members of our team in understanding this field and how it could be practically applied."
"We soon discovered that there were many things we could do that were very simple and cost-effective to implement but had a significant impact on the user-experience of candidates with disabilities. In addition, the time devoted to accessibility became an excellent opportunity to introduce an extra area of expertise to our web development team and to support and encourage learning."
"In short, compared to the benefits we are already starting to see from the first phase of the project, the initial investment required was minor and we are looking forward to moving on to Phase 2." Reed
Benefits for disabled job-seekers
Well-designed e-recruitment processes can give disabled people greater independence and control over the recruitment process. The internet is highly valued by many disabled people, enabling access to a huge amount of information on careers and a larger selection of jobs. In addition, e-recruitment enables closer contact between disabled applicants and employers. This reduces the need to rely on intermediaries, many of whom lack experience of the needs, expectations and abilities of disabled people.
References
1
McKinsey & Company, "Making E-recruitment Barrier-free for People with Disabilities", 2003.
2These figures are based on a similar proportion (15%) of working age disabled population, being affected as in the UK.
3This figure is highly variable and depends on the size and infrastructure of your site. It is based on the cost of implementing W3C accessibility guidelines against total Web development expenditure for sites audited by the Employers' Forum on Disability.
4Extrapolated from Family Resource Survey 1999-2000 UK and Population Estimates, Office for National Statistics. Based on number of disabled people and number of carers
5Social and Community Planning, SCPR, 1990
6This figure is based on the cost of implementing W3C accessibility guidelines against total web expenditure for sites audited by the Employers' Forum on Disability.
