20 Disability-Inclusive Online Outreach and Recruitment for Employers

For employers, online outreach and recruitment plays a vital role in attracting qualified candidates with disabilities. For jobseekers with disabilities, initial interactions with employer recruitment practices can influence decisions to explore, apply to, or accept a job. While online recruitment takes many forms, certain promising practices exist for tailoring such efforts to attract diverse candidates with disabilities and for modifying existing practices that tend to exclude qualified jobseekers with disabilities. This chapter provides both a description from the literature on promising practices in disability-inclusive online outreach and recruitment, and results from three sequential studies undertaken by the authors to: (1) identify disability-related messaging and content that exists on employer career websites; (2) understand employer perspectives on effective online recruitment practices and barriers; and (3) ascertain the experiences of jobseekers with disabilities in online outreach and recruitment by employers. The implications of these findings for employers are discussed.