The Wall Street Journal
(Career Journal section) 7/24/08
at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121666205789570827.html
Support Grows for Disabled Job Seekers
By SUZANNE ROBITAILLE
Lucy Shi, a job seeker who has a genetic condition that causes short
stature, says she’s happy to be singled out as a disability candidate
as she hunts for a position in New York.
A graduate of New York University, Ms. Shi, 25, recently interviewed
with several Wall Street firms at a recruiting event geared toward
people with disabilities who aim to develop professional business
careers. “It’s hard to have a disability that’s so visible, and it’s
just nice to be able to talk to recruiters without competing with the
rest of the world,” says Ms. Shi, who believes many interviewers view
her as a child because of her height.
There are 22 million working-age Americans with disabilities who have
come of age under the Americans With Disabilities Act — passed 16
years ago this month — which helps to prevent job discrimination
against qualified disabled individuals. But only 38% of the nation’s
working-age disabled have a job, compared with 78% of able-bodied
people.
Over the past few years, companies have begun taking bigger steps to
bring more of the disabled into the professional work force. The
latest effort is partly due to the efforts of Rich Donovan, a former
Merrill Lynch trader who has cerebral palsy, a disability that limits
his speech and movement.
Mr. Donovan recalls the resistance he met from many recruiters who
weren’t sure he was nimble enough to perform the physical aspects of a
busy trader’s job. Even his mentors at Columbia University’s business
school tried to talk him out of it, saying he’d make a “fine risk
manager.” He was hired at Merrill and quickly hatched a plan to get
more disabled people hired at the firm.
Mr. Donovan’s idea was based on the premise that corporate America
should recruit and give qualified people with disabilities the same
sort of opportunities that his firm — and most big companies —
already had in place for minorities and women.
Merrill agreed to give it a try, and in 2006 Mr. Donovan founded
LimeConnect, with the company as its first partner. Today, the
organization matches disabled college-level and professional
candidates through private recruiting efforts led by its four major
partners: Merrill, Goldman Sachs, PepsiCo and Google. Last fall, Lime
helped its partners source more than 300 disabled internship
candidates from two dozen universities, including Harvard, M.I.T.,
Princeton and Georgetown. In May, Lime invited 60 candidates for job
interviews in New York; at least a dozen have been invited back for
further interviews.
It isn’t just a goodwill gesture, say Lime’s partner companies.
“There’s a business case for hiring people with disabilities. This is
a market we need to, and want to, tap into as much as we can,” says
Ron Parker, chief diversity and inclusion officer at PepsiCo.
Corporations are casting a wider net for good reasons. With the labor
pool shrinking, U.S. employers will face a shortage of 20 million
workers by 2020 as baby boomers retire. What’s more, one out of every
10 consumers is a person with a disability, representing $200 billion
in annual buying power, according to the National Organization on
Disability in Washington.
“We want to be an organization that reflects the globally diverse
audience that our search engine and tools serve,” says Jordan Bookey,
Google’s global-diversity and inclusion programs manager, who used
Lime to find applicants for its new diversity summer internship
program.
Building a disability candidate pipeline isn’t easy, as many
companies still lack a centralized talent pool from which to draw.
Still, companies can join corporate partnerships, such as Lime, or
become members of one of several nonprofit organizations geared toward
linking disabled professionals with corporations.
One group, the National Business & Disability Council,
(http://www.business-disability.com/index.aspx)
runs a diversity-internship program called Emerging Leaders. The
program was founded by consulting company Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. and
now has more than 30 corporate members, including AIG, KPMG, Liz
Claiborne and Procter & Gamble. It has placed 75 students in summer
internships since 2005.
Booz Allen’s efforts to hire people with disabilities began at the
top: Its chairman and CEO, Ralph Shrader, has a son with disabilities.
“Finding a job — and gaining the significant benefits that come with
employment — is difficult, but when the right opportunity comes
together, the rewards for the employee and the company are
extraordinary,” Dr. Shrader says.
The group also hosts an annual invitation-only Wall Street job fair
for candidates seeking jobs at financial-services firms, including
Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs. Last fall, Merrill also hosted a
Wall Street consortium with business and government leaders to explore
strategies for recruiting and retaining people with disabilities.
“We’re making an intellectual-capital decision,” says Elizabeth
Wamai, head of global campus recruiting at Merrill. “To continue to
win in this business, we need the creative eclectic approaches that
different people bring.”
Companies like KPMG say they also work to attract candidates by
changing their workplace to include more professionals with
disabilities. Creating an employee network for the disabled,
establishing disabled-specific mentoring programs, or changing
benefits to allow for time off for medical issues can make a
difference.
KPMG recently launched a disabilities network, and this year, Eastman
Kodak, IBM and Pepsi all landed on DiversityInc’s Top 10 Companies for
People with Disabilities list in part because they run employee
networks geared toward disabilities. PepsiCo’s EnAble network gained
fame when it sponsored a Super Bowl commercial featuring two deaf
employees.
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