Recruitment hints and tips
Minimising the risk of outsourcing
Many companies choose to outsource all or part of their e-recruitment systems to numerous different suppliers. Ensure your partners do not put you at risk, either of litigation or failing to meet your equal opportunity and diversity commitments and targets.
Employers frequently outsource some or all of the following:
- Design and maintenance of websites
- Provision of technology which manages data online and allows new jobs to be posted etc
- Initial screening of CVs or application forms
- Online testing
Job boards
Insist that job boards on which you advertise are accessible to disabled people. There are a number of specific job boards aimed at disabled applicants (e.g.Youreable.com, Jobability.com, DisabilityNOW.org.uk) which you may want to consider, but bear in mind many, if not most, disabled people will prefer to use mainstream sites.
There are a number of points to consider when outsourcing.
- Make your business reasons for adopting e-recruitment and your expectation that your system will be barrier-free explicit when you invite suppliers to tender
- Ensure your contract stipulates the supplier will, where relevant:
- Apply your web accessibility standards to the website
- Not discriminate against disabled people when screening CVs or by failing to make reasonable adjustments at any point in the recruitment process
- Apply any policies benefiting disabled people when undertaking candidate screening (e.g. guaranteed interview schemes)
- Set standards for the provision of reasonable adjustments for disabled applicants (e.g. time taken to make adjustments, preferred alternative format suppliers, who needs to be involved from your organisation in decisions)
- Stipulate who will be responsible for meeting the cost of adjustments
- Ensure the technology can be used by any disabled employees who are involved with managing recruitment, including those who use adaptive technology
- Give your suppliers and business partners a copy of this guide
Influencing suppliers: Explaining the benefits
Consider how you can influence your recruitment suppliers. Your company will have considerable power to influence their behaviour, to the benefit of your organisation and many others.
- Make disability awareness a criteria for 'Approved/ Preferred Supplier' status
- Develop an awareness-raising programme for suppliers. Models for this include 'Dining with a Difference' where suppliers come together to learn about disability issues in a theatrical and fun way over dinner. For further information contact the Employers' Forum on Disability
- Consider an awards programme for your suppliers to reward innovations in the field of equality and diversity
- Give your suppliers a copy of the guide "Barrier-free e-recruitment: Recruiting disabled people online" and encourage them to use this website.
" At Barclays, we have conducted a detailed review of all current sites in line with Barclays standards and are working with third party suppliers to ensure that we are truly barrier-free." Barclays
"All our adverts are placed on our website and, managed through Barkers our recruitment agents, we monitor stats from responses by a range of groups, including applications from people with disabilities. Our jobs also go onto several core sites automatically, including youareable.com" Learning and Skills Council
"Encouraging Accessible Web Design - at UnumProvident, the income protection insurer, we had a target of 750 company days for staff volunteering in the local community during 2003. Each employee has the opportunity of spending at least two 'company' days per year on community projects."
"One such volunteering project was completed by marketing and IT staff who designed and developed a bespoke website for Sabre, a charity which helps match disabled people to quality employment opportunities."
"The website www.sabre-employment.co.uk was designed to a high standard of accessibility for disabled people, particularly visually impaired users, and has received level 2 Bobby approval for disabled access, an achievement shared by very few companies in the UK, not even UnumProvident. A key feature of the site are coded images, which can be picked up by a screen reader used by people with visual impairments so that pictures, as well as words, come to life on the screen." UnumProvident
