With universal fashion on the high street and disabled TV stars winning top competitions like Strictly, the time is now to create an inclusive and accessible workplace, says Alice Hargreaves a disabled and neurodivergent entrepreneur and founder of SIC.
Did you know that one of the first typewriters was invented, so a sighted man could send and receive secret love letters with his blind lover? Or that the electric toothbrush was created for people with limited mobility?
Sixteen per cent of the UK student population are disabled. They represent a hugely diverse talent pool and make fantastic employees.
Teams that are ‘diverse by design’ make better decisions than homogenous groups 87% of the time and are 70% more likely to capture new markets.
Disabled people are also problem solvers, navigating a world that wasn’t generally built for them. Before founding my social enterprise SIC in 2021, I spent over a decade as a marketer, focusing on low-cost marketing solutions that had a huge impact.
Here are five of my top tips to attract, encourage and engage disabled students.
1. Get to know the language of disability
In 2022, Beyonce went viral for a mega gaff when releasing her new album. She used ableist language in one of her new songs. What makes this matter worse is that Lizzo had made the same mistake just weeks before.
To avoid the PR mistake, a simple guide on the government website details the dos and don’ts of inclusive language. If you’re ever not sure, ask, no one will judge.
2. Provide support without a diagnosis
Within universities, we’re faced with a very unique situation. Disabled students have to provide proof of a medical diagnosis to obtain support. Neurodivergence, which is a particularly common experience for younger disabled people, can take years to diagnose, so many young people leave university having never accessed support.
This means that in their early careers, they are at their most vulnerable. They do not know what adjustments will help them, and they fear that an employer will require the previously vital piece of paper before they can ask for help.
Employers can create an environment of trust by offering adjustments in interviews and during onboarding. Even better, if you can make processes more inclusive from the off. Providing interview questions 48 hours or more in advance is a great place to start.
3. Explore innovative ways of recruiting
In October 2024, we hosted our first (of many, we hope) reverse jobs fair. We supported 20 disabled people from the West Midlands who were either unemployed or underemployed. Over two months, we provided training, one-on-one mentorship, and expert speakers, culminating in a jobs fair where the candidates showcased their skills to local and national employers.
The idea was to flip recruitment and focus on skills-based hiring, role shaping, and creating a more comfortable environment for the participants. The outcomes were fantastic: Three people left the day with a job offer, and many more found roles in subsequent weeks.
Two lessons can be learned from this. One is to consider changing your hiring practices. The other is to explore partnerships with organisations that work on the ground and support fantastically talented people.
4. Train your team
The Games Industry released its Raise The Game report in 2021, which showed that it hired more neurodivergent talent than average. From the insights from the report, studios that had experienced high employee turnover realised where their issue lay.
Creative teams were neurodivergent, while project managers and project leads tended to be neurotypical, and there was a clash in communication. Together with two studios, we developed training for managers on neuroinclusion, rapidly improving turnover rates.
When we build our strategies with the social model of disability as our guiding light, we create a more inclusive and accessible environment for everyone. For example, providing meeting agendas in advance has been shown to directly impact an organisation’s leadership diversity, while flexibility benefits everyone.
Some basic training on the models of disability, language, and how to access schemes like Access to Work (which can provide vast amounts of support) can empower people to support your future employees.
5. Support disabled students
In previous years, we’ve run pop-up career clinics providing one-to-one advice for students, regardless of their diagnosis. These sessions focused on key skills such as CV and interview skills and soft skills like confidence building. They also advised on navigating the workplace as a disabled professional and what that might look like.
If you’re an organisation that provides volunteer days or has a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programme, then hosting your own career clinics could be a fantastic way to support disabled students and enhance your reputation as a great place to work.
Plus, current employees will learn by doing, recognising how best to support disabled colleagues and how to create a more inclusive team.
By making just a few simple changes, you can enhance your workplace not only for disabled employees today and in the future, but for everyone! Each of us has our own unique ways of working and styles of communication, but sometimes, we might not even realise it.