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Inclusive Recruiting: Reasonable Accommodation During the Hiring Process

Planning to hire in the new year? Your recruitment and hiring practices offer a key opportunity to demonstrate your business’s commitment to disability inclusion. Indeed, being disability-inclusive isn’t only about supporting your current workers, but also the way you welcome prospective employees. This includes ensuring the availability of reasonable accommodations during the application and interview process.

Accommodations are modifications or adjustments to a job or work environment that enable a qualified person with a disability to apply for or perform a job. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), covered employers must provide them for qualified applicants and candidates upon request unless doing so would create an undue hardship.

To assist on this front, the ODEP-funded Job Accommodation Network (JAN) has released a new resource — “Employers' Practical Guide: Reasonable Accommodation During the Hiring Process” — which offers guidance on common situations related to reasonable accommodation requests from job applicants and candidates with disabilities.

Featuring sample scenarios and easy-to-follow tips, it covers a range of helpful topics, from making it simple for prospective employees with disabilities to request accommodations, to choosing and implementing accommodations when needed. Among the advice? Employers can use the same interactive process they use for employee accommodation requests but should aim to minimize the amount of personal medical information received about applicants and candidates.

By implementing these important practices during the hiring process, businesses can open their doors to a wider range of job candidates and reap the benefits of a more diverse and inclusive workforce.

For more information and to learn about providing job accommodations, access the guide and visit JAN.