Relationship of business practices and characteristics to supervisors’ perceived effectiveness of disability recruitment

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Employers are increasingly interested in the inclusion of employees with disabilities in the workplace. To be inclusive, employers need effective strategies for recruiting people with disabilities (PWD) that supervisors can endorse, as they are ultimately accountable for the success of all employees that they supervise, including people with disabilities. To date, little research has focused on effective practices for recruiting people with disabilities or the supervisors’ perspectives on successful disability recruitment practices. OBJECTIVE: This study presents results from the 2017 Kessler Foundation National Employment and Disability Survey-Supervisor Perspectives (KFNEDS-SP) that utilized a novel approach to investigating employer organizational characteristics and practices related to the recruitment of PWD. METHODS: The KFNEDS-SP is a web-based survey that used standard, replicable survey methods to collect data from a Qualtrics business-to-business panel of supervisors at U.S. organizations. Respondents included 6,530 supervisors ages 18 and older from private, nonprofit, and governmental organizations across industries. RESULTS: The results show that several organizational characteristics and practices are significantly associated with supervisor perceived effectiveness of disability recruitment processes. The degree of effort put forth to recruit people with disabilities, commitment from upper management in hiring and accommodating employees with disabilities, training hiring managers in accessible recruitment and interview practices for people with disabilities were all positively related to supervisors’ perceived effectiveness of their organizations’ disability recruitment processes. However, organizations that put a lot of effort into recruiting for diversity or had diversity hiring goals were less likely to be perceived by supervisors to have effective disability recruitment processes. CONCLUSION: Supervisors are at the center of an organization’s effort to include people with disabilities in the workplace and, as such, are good barometers of what works and does not work to support the recruitment, hiring and onboarding of people with disabilities. The results of this study point to several organizational characteristics and practices that individually and together are likely to support efforts to include people with disabilities in the workplace. Disability workforce intermediaries can use these findings to assist businesses successfully include people with disabilities in their workforce.