Recommendations for hiring Persons with Disabilities (PwDs)

Laharee

I was talking to an HR professional in a big BFSI-Consulting firm the other day and I asked him, “Why did you decide to hire Persons with Disability (PwD) in your team?” He responded saying, “Do you know how much I would have lost if I did not hire them?” Now, I was curious. On any other day, I would have heard comments like, “Umm…not sure if we want to take up PwD hiring.” Or “I don’t think they will be able to fulfill company’s expectations” or sometimes even “We do have some Cleaning roles, if you are interested” and frankly, we were just NOT interested.  

I, thus, asked him why he felt he would lose out and his reply made me nod my head and smile. I did not have anything else to tell him. But then I thought, I really needed to share some of what he said with everyone because we NEED to KNOW. We have to come out of our cocoons and break the barriers that we have built over the years.  

The first thing he mentioned was that Hiring PwDs is not merely a CSR activity but a Business Case for them. A PwD customer would want to take our services if he/she knows that they have someone on the inside with whom they can connect; who will understand and be able to help them in the most optimum way possible. For instance, suppose I am a deaf customer who wants to buy insurance. Now, won’t I be far more comfortable knowing that there is someone in the company with whom I can interact freely without facing issues in communication and get the services without facing any glitches?! 

According to him, if we look at PwDs as potential customer who are ready to pay, then having PwDs as employees helps in designing, developing products and services suited for PwDs.  He also mentioned that diversity improved innovative ideas.  PwD candidates come with reasonably good skills with better retention rate. 

We have come across companies who recruit PwD candidates to do accessibility testing for their web and mobile applications. 

Erik Larson, the founder of Cloverpop, in one of his company’s research, found that inclusive teams at the workplace make better business decisions almost 87% of the time and that too at a 2x speed with a 60% better delivery rate. Isn’t this much more advantageous to the businesses than merely sticking with a non-inclusive team!! (Well, you can still choose to be non-inclusive if you are okay spending more time to make not-so-optimum decisions and take risks). 

Whilst sharing all this is surely beneficial, we want all the stakeholders to understand that we are in this together. As someone rightly said, “If many little people in many little places do many little things, they can change the face of the earth”. 

Are you interested to recruit Persons with Disabilities? Do you want to take your first step of the ‘many little things’? Then check out our  Best Practices for Corporates in Hiring PwDs  deck and reach out to us. 

Let’s take the step together and drive towards an Inclusive World.