Reflecting the Market in the Workforce

Chicken or the egg? Yes, it is a children’s game meant to perplex. It pre-supposes that one preceded the other. The answer of course is simple, yet the question has become the inane focus. The same is true when we look at raising the involvement of people with disabilities in the workforce. The answer is simple, but there is a whole industry around studying the question. At the end of the day, an organization must reflect its market in order to understand it and deliver to it.

Let’s assume for a moment that a firm wants to count the 1.1 billion person disability market amongst its customers. Seems to be a rather robust assumption. How does that firm know what the market wants? Yes, the stop-gap method is to engage consultants who carry portable knowledge for hire. In the shorter term, this is a workable solution. In the longer term, firms need agents who have their best interests at heart, and agents who can build legacies through their careers. These employees build both intangible and tangible assets that allow the firm to embrace and serve the market better, while ensuring requisite returns for shareholders. Customers can also see when a firm’s employee base is a reflection of themselves by simple interaction. Is it any surprise that the percentage of female race fans raises when Danika Patrick wins?

There are some existing programs out there, both external and internal, that strive to increase flow of PWD into the workforce. Results can be described as minimal at its charitable best. Even various governments have lost thousands of employees with disabilities over the last few years. So why are they failing? In a word, ghettoization. A few firms have parallel programs by which they go out to source people with disabilities, train them, and actually hire them in quasi-material numbers. They work alongside one another, attend separate social events, and report to supervisors who are outside the business line hierarchy. The only champions the employees have in these firms are the program leaders. This author was even told that each candidate was a “labor of love” by a program leader. A ‘labor of love’? This was one of the largest tech firms in the S&P 500, not the Peace Corps!

This same program leader went on to say that the firm could not retain these employees for even one year because managers ‘didn’t know what to do with them’. Of course they didn’t. The managers were not involved hiring, developing or championing these employees. These programs often seem to follow the ‘Special Ed’ model; segregate, attend to special needs, hit upon basic curriculum, and repeat as needed. This model is deader, and more irrelevant than Carl Marx.

Let’s be clear, these parallel programs are not the same as Diversity & Inclusion recruiting. D&I efforts reach out to talent pools that the firm is not otherwise capturing. Once a candidate is sourced, they are injected into the ‘normal’ recruiting stream. A good comparison would be baseball teams scouting in Japan or the Caribbean. Once the player is found, they enter the farm system to compete for a shot at the Big Leagues. Without the global feeders, these teams would miss out on world-class talent. The ill-fated parallel systems may get the players into minor league line-ups, but they play in Alaska and the coaches never see them hit.

To be successful in building an inclusive workforce that reflects your desired customer base, candidate ownership by line management is the key. For any career to progress, PWD or not, one must be recognized by one’s peers as a leader, or at least competent. In a parallel system, this information does not get disseminated to peers. Disability cannot be a ‘hobby’ for hiring firms, it must be critical to the growth of the firm. Would a hiring manager be thrilled about any ‘parachute candidate’ on her team? Reality is, no. Yet parallel systems for hiring PWD advocate just that.

In the short-term, a firm may need to open a separate door to gain entrance to the process, but once inside, these candidates need to be integrated into the ‘normal’ hiring system. Both HR and the line need to treat PWD hires as any other inclusion hire, knowing that there are some characteristics that are outside the ‘norm’. They also need to understand that these characteristics do not, in any way, preclude success. By focusing on the firm’s everyday hiring practice, and tweaking it slightly to account for PWD, managers own candidates. When a manager owns a candidate, the prospect is more likely to succeed.

This is not difficult to accomplish. Firms are already adept at feeding other segments through their recruiting process. Women, racial minorities and GBLT already have effective feeder systems into firm’s umbrella recruiting efforts. All firms need to do is refocus on PWD and tap talent pools using proven practice. Start small, and then scale it up.

Oh, some of you may be wondering what the answer to the question posed at the top of this article is. Simple, either way you get the same result. It is how you manage the result that denotes whether you are in the chicken business or the egg business. Ignore the question and get on with managing the answer.