How do I request or manage accommodation needs during the hiring process?

Interviews take time – the candidate’s time, but also the employer’s time. As a candidate, you don’t want to be prevented from doing your best because you can’t access part of the interview. As an employer, you don’t want to spend time on someone you really cannot assess because relatively straightforward adjustments have not been put in place. If you’re reading this, you’ll know that workplace accommodations are not about giving someone an advantage, but, rather, ensuring that they are able to have the same opportunity to do their best as everybody else. The hiring process is no different.

For an employee, the main thing is to be specific about what you need and why you need it. Giving the hiring manager some context about what you need and why you need it will allow them a fair opportunity to put what you need in place, and will also give you an idea about whether this is an organisation you want to work for, based on their response to your accommodation request. It’s OK to ask about the format of the interview, with an explanation of why, which will help you pinpoint the aspects that may prove challenging from a disability perspective. Think carefully about what these might be and what you would need to overcome them.

From an employer’s perspective, the key is to proactively ask whether there are any needed disability accommodations as part of every communication you have with applicants. An effective way of accomplishing this is to provide a page with information about how to request an accommodation during the hiring process on your website, and then link to it in the job announcement, in communications acknowledging the application, invitations to interview, job offers, etc. It is also important that this information includes a named contact with an email address, so a candidate can get in touch proactively and arrange accommodations, knowing that this is entirely separate from the hiring process itself. The person arranging this should ideally be different from the hiring manager, underlining that the hiring manager is making a decision only on the relative qualities of the candidates, rather than on how easy or difficult it was to put their accommodations in place.

Resources:

• Guidelines from Stanford University

• Job Accommodation Network (JAN)

• The Muse