2. www.TMPgovernment.com
Public sector agencies lag seriously behind in recruiting
and retaining people with disabilities. And they’ve fallen
behind despite substantial program incentives—many
of them in force for years—from the Office of Personnel
Management (OPM), the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission (EEOC), and several other agencies. For all the
efforts by these in-government advocates to encourage
departments and agencies to reach out to people with
disabilities, this population remains woefully under-represented
in the federal workforce. The government’s
own statistics indicate that the percentage of government
workers with disabilities in its workforce has declined
sharply (from 1.18% to 0.94%) between 1996 and its most
recent measurement in 2006.1
To call this result perplexing is—at the least—an
understatement. After all, there’s much talent and
experience available in the disabled population. So why
aren’t government agencies taking advantage of this?
Research has demonstrated that the typical individual
with a disability is a more engaged, more loyal, and
more technologically-adept employee than the average
worker in the general population.2 What’s more, the
most widespread workplace disabilities—limitations in
vision, hearing, and physical mobility—don’t influence
intelligence, focus, creativity, facility with details, or the
ability to work as a member of a team. And candidates
with disabilities are certainly available to work: studies
peg the percentage of Americans with disabilities who are
unemployed at 68%. Within this group there’s a startling
majority—fully two-thirds—who declare themselves willing
and available to work.3
1 Source: The Equal Opportunity Employment Commission (EEOC). http://www.eeoc.gov/federal/report/pwtd.html#SecIIA
2 Source: Darlene Unger, “Employers’ Attitudes towards People with Disabilities in the Workforce: Myths or Realities,” Employers’ Views of Workplace Supports:
Virginia Commonwealth University Charter Business Roundtable’s National Study of Employers’ Experiences with Workers with Disabilities. (2002)
3 Source: National Organization on Disability, Economic Participation: Finding Good Jobs. (2003)
http://www.nod.org/index.cfm? fuseaction=Page.ViewPage&PageID=13
Abstract
In response to the government’s looming retirement crisis, federal recruiters and hiring managers
can source a particularly promising pool of skills and talent. By acting now to recruit people with
disabilities into the federal workforce, the government can help blunt the impact of the coming
exodus of experienced public employees.
3. www.TMPgovernment.com
So why are public agencies responding so slowly to
this opportunity for bringing in new talent, particularly
when so many of their most knowledgeable and skilled
team members are poised to retire? According to
some commentators, the answer lies in widespread
misconceptions about how well people with disabilities
actually perform on the job; in assumptions that their
physical limitations mean they can’t be as effective as
their non-disabled counterparts; and that the physical
provisions that federal employers must make to
accommodate them are simply too complex or expensive.
All these assumptions, though still pervasive, are patently
false. One government advocate states the case bluntly:
Many in our society seem to believe that people with
severe disabilities are simply not capable of performing
as well as or better than the non-disabled population.
Given the choice between an applicant with a disability
and one without, hiring officials go for what makes them
most comfortable, and that feeling of comfort is based on
internal prejudices.4
How do we reverse these misconceptions? How about—as
the Nike folks say—just doing it?
The impending retirement crisis certainly supplies the
strategic justification for engaging this population more
proactively, let alone assessing its potential more fairly and
objectively.
These veiled prejudices are confidence-drainers for the
disabled candidate, too. They know better than anyone
how the snap judgments of hiring managers can shatter
their chance to win a job. At TMP, we’re experimenting
with new approaches for leveling the field for all
government job applicants. Currently this initiative
focuses on using the online “virtual world” Second Life as
a venue for hiring and initial candidate evaluations that
can take place on the Internet. For the candidate with a
disability the premise is this: without any physical world
interactions, hiring managers have no basis for allowing
personal prejudices to figure in their assessments. We’ve
found that candidates, and particularly candidates with
disabilities, feel empowered by this prejudice-free zone,
if you will, and tend to present their true potential more
confidently.
Recruiting and retaining people with disabilities
4 Confidential survey, TMP Worldwide 2008.
Second Life levels the playing field for job
candidates with disabilities
Even the most talented and qualified job applicants
are more than a little nervous when they face that
initial interview. But for people with disabilities,
first inperson encounters can be devastating. Who
can say if a hiring manager will respond entirely
objectively, or make a snap judgment based on their
disability?
“It happens with depressing frequency,” says
DisabilityWorks’ Jonathan Kaufman, “under the
generally false assumption that a worker-with-a-disability
individual can’t do the job as well as a
nondisabled individual.”
With its Second Life Job Fairs, TMP is taking some of
the anxiety out of these critical first encounters by
staging them in the “metaverse”.
4. www.TMPgovernment.com
The federal establishment has a lot to gain if enough
individual agencies ramp up their programs to recruit
from this talented population. Integrating more people
with disabilities into agency workforces won’t be enough
in itself to reverse the retirement crisis, but it can help
soften the blow. At the same time, the agencies who
take the early lead in engaging people with disabilities
will underscore the real-world value of a more inclusive
workforce government-wide.
Consider the extensive range of physical and cognitive
conditions that the disabled category covers. The
Americans with Disabilities (ADA) Act5 set the bar, framing
the category to encompass any person with a physical or
mental impairment that substantially limits one or more
major life activities, such as hearing, seeing, speaking,
thinking, walking, breathing, or performing manual tasks.
Nearly 20% of the American population qualifies under
this standard.
“That statistic always seems to surprise hiring managers,
both in the government and in the private sector,”
notes Jonathan Kaufman, President of DisabilityWorks,
Inc.6, a consulting firm advising clients on disability
recruitment. “And anyone, his or her past state of
health notwithstanding, can join this twenty percent at
any moment through illness or accident. The disabled
population is the only federally-protected minority where
this is possible.”
At fully 20% of the American population, people with
disabilities are all around us. And the statistical likelihood
of our joining their number increases markedly as we pass
the age of forty. But it’s not just about you and me. Think
about our military veterans, many of them returning to the
stateside workforce with disabilities incurred in the war.
They’ve certainly earned the right to serious consideration
for federal employment, and just as certainly, our
government could put their skills and experience to
productive use as the pace of senior retirements quickens.
As for the costs of accommodations, studies have
demonstrated that they generally cost less than a few
hundred dollars per person entering the workforce.7 For a
government on the verge of a severe skills and experience
crisis, doesn’t this seem like a reasonable price to pay?
The government sponsors an array of programs to assist
you in recruiting people with disabilities. Perhaps the
most immediately applicable is the Excepted Service
appointment process8, which authorizes hiring agencies
to fill vacancies at all levels with qualified individuals with
disabilities, without posting vacancy announcements.
The Computer/Electronic Accommodations Program
(CAP)9, led by the department of Defense, provides work-related
adaptive technology for people with disabilities
working at some 60 agency partners. Several other
departments and agencies (including Education, Housing
and Urban Development, the Internal Revenue Service,
and the Social Security Administration) sponsor their own
adaptive technology programs.
5 29 C.F.R. Parts 1630, 1602.
6 http://www.disabilityworks.com
7 Source: U.S. Department of Labor Office of Disability Employment Policy, Myths and Facts about People with Disabilities. [2003]
http://www.doleta.gov/disability/htmldocs/myths.cfm
8 See http://www.opm.gov/disability/appointment_disabilities.asp
9 See http://tricare.mil/CAP
10 See http://www.eeoc.gov/initiatives/lead/resources.html
Recruiting and retaining people with disabilities (Continued)
5. www.TMPgovernment.com
The LEAD (Leadership for the Employment of Americans
with Disabilities) Initiative10 was launched by the Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in 2006
to coordinate interaction among agencies interested in
making use of special hiring authorities—like Excepted
Service and several others covering disabled veterans—to
recruit and integrate people with disabilities.
The federal Disability Workforce Consortium11, a cross-agency
working group comprised of senior-level
participants from four cabinet departments (Commerce,
Labor, Transportation, and Treasury), has taken the lead in
advocating disability employment.
Either with or without direct support from the formal
programs that we’ve discussed above, an agency can do a
lot to improve the workplace climate it creates for persons
with disabilities. This in turn is likely to prompt job-seekers
with disabilities to consider this agency favorably, even as
it helps current non-disabled employees to see first-hand
that inclusive cultures make sound mission sense. Here are
a few ideas.
11 See http://www.fdwc.info/
Recruiting and retaining people with disabilities (Continued)
Here candidates and hiring reps meet online, in
a virtual world, under the guise of “avatars”, i.e.,
self-representational characters whose appearance
they create and control. For a disabled candidate,
this is a chance to highlight his or her best qualities
free of potential snap judgments that a disability
may trigger in an interviewer. So far this approach
has enjoyed phenomenal success in attracting
candidates. TMP has sponsored Second Life Job Fairs
under its Network in World (NiW) program, and
has slated a third, focused largely on government
hiring, for candidates with disabilities. Says TMP’s
John Bersentes: “We’ve made a special effort to
encourage candidates with disabilities to attend
our Second Life Job Fairs. This is a rich opportunity
for any government agency that’s looking to recruit
from this under-represented population.”
6. www.TMPgovernment.com
Either with or without direct support from the formal
programs that we’ve discussed above, an agency can
do a lot to improve the workplace climate it creates
for persons with disabilities. This in turn is likely to
prompt job-seekers with disabilities to consider this
agency favorably, even as it helps current non-disabled
employees to see first-hand that inclusive cultures
make sound mission sense. Here are a few ideas.
Establish a disability council. Create an advisory group of
employees to help your agency recruit and retain persons
with disabilities. It should be sized appropriately. The
objective is to produce a visible impact not just on your
planning to engage the disabled population, but on your
concrete results as well. Too small a group could result
in overtaxing its members with too ambitious a slate of
activities, or creating the impression among your other
employees that your disability council has no real power
and shouldn’t be taken seriously. On the other hand, if
you make your disability council too large, it may become
unmanageable, drifting into “honorary” stasis with no real
momentum and fewer results.
Compose your advisory council with an eye on results, and
take pains to include disabled members who are widely
respected by their peers, and who have demonstrated
creativity and initiative in their own work. In this way you
start with a team that enjoys high prestige among your
workforce, and one likely to inspire confidence among the
people with disabilities who already work at your agency.
Build credibility at this stage and you will end up with a
built-in community of rank-and-file allies for your program
as it begins to make a difference.
Draw on experienced support from other organizations.
Even if you have started auspiciously on your own, you’re
missing an opportunity if you don’t explore the resources
available to you through non-profit advocacy organizations
that champion the hiring of persons with disabilities. These
organizations range widely in emphasis, from a general
focus on the disability category, to specific targeted
disability conditions, to specific populations of people with
disabilities, for example, disabled veterans.
Collectively, these organizations can provide a wealth of
practical advice and useful background for your efforts.
On the previous page, we’ve assembled a roster of these
organizations, along with their URLs. Use our list as a
starting point, but bear in mind that it represents only a
sample of the scores of similarly helpful resources available
through the Internet.
Remember too that other federal departments and
agencies are already tackling this challenge and can
provide you with the benefit of their experience as well.
These agencies can offer what is likely to be the most
immediately practical guidance for your efforts. We
suggest you start at the department of Labor’s website
for its Office of Disability Employment Policy12
(http://www.dol.gov/odep) and/or the Office of Personnel
Management’s site for federal Employment of People with
Disabilities13 (http://www.opm.gov/DISABILITY). Both
are excellent sources of guidance on hiring persons with
disabilities for government service.
Take stock of your situation before you implement
a disability strategy. While the good will and enthusiasm
are critically important, you’re not likely to make a lot
of progress until you get a handle on the dimensions of
your challenge. This means understanding where you
are, quantitatively speaking, before you begin, and then
setting reasonable short-term goals that will mark early-stage
success. A few quick wins will take you far in winning
hearts and minds, both inside your agency and among the
disabled populations you set out to engage.
12 See http://www.dol.gov/odep
13 See http://www.opm.gov/DISABILITY
What you can do to help create a disability-friendly workplace
7. www.TMPgovernment.com
Start by understanding your agency’s current distribution
of people with targeted disabilities. You should build an
accurate profile of where persons with disabilities are
currently working in your organization. This informal
census provides a benchmark for your program. It can
also uncover favorable surprises, e.g., notable successes
in individual units already, or even unit Best Practices that
you didn’t know you had going for you. And if you have a
disability council, this census is an ideal kick-off project for
this group.
“Brand” your agency or department as a culture of
inclusion. One particularly effective way to reinforce the
progress you make is to subtly remind people in all your
communications, internal and external, that your agency
or department is committed to a culture of inclusion that
welcomes and supports people with disabilities.
This simply means that the language and visual/photographic
imagery in which you customarily communicate about
your activities underscores your commitment to an
inclusive workplace culture. On your website (and not just
your “Careers” micro-site), in your print materials, events,
and multimedia presentations, you should make it clear
that you respect the contributions of all team members.
This doesn’t necessarily mean obtrusively trumpeting
your integration of people with disabilities, but simply
showing all segments of your inclusive workforce in action
as they contribute to your mission. Your audiences will get
the point, and word-of-mouth will go much farther than
self-promotion in building your agency’s reputation as an
inclusive and productive culture.
Communicate with your workforce and your potential
recruits in more than one cognitive mode. We’re all so
accustomed to making ourselves clear in purely textual
modes that we forget how effective the use of other
communication styles can be. Broadening your agency’s
communication “bandwidth” to include what has come
to be known as rich media can enrich your interactions
with not just Generation-Y (a no-brainer), but with team
members with certain disabilities as well.
One last point: this is more than a chance to do the right
thing in hiring disabled candidates. This is a chance to
make your workforce more like the real America, and to
take practical steps to bring in much of the talent you’ll
need to counter the experience drain that’s about to hit
with a vengeance.
14 Available at http://data.bestplacestowork.org/bptw/demographics/large/hispanic_09
What you can do to help create a disability-friendly workplace (Continued)
9. www.TMPgovernment.com
Since the release of this whitepaper, the Office of
Personnel Management’s (OPM) Disability Report.
demonstrates great strides in hiring people with
disabilities; in fact the share of new hires is its highest in
20 years.
OPM announced that in FY 2011, federal employees
with disabilities represented 7.41 percent of the overall
workforce and 11 percent when the figures include veterans
who are 30 percent or more disabled. The report also
shows significant increases in new hires of persons with
disabilities. Additionally, in FY 2011 people with disabilities
represented 7.96 percent of all new hires and 14.7 percent
when veterans who are 30 percent or more disabled are
included – the highest percentage in 20 years. In total,
more than 200,000 people with disabilities now work for
the federal government, also the most in 20 years.
“People with disabilities are welcome in the federal
family,” said OPM Director John Berry. “We need the
talents and creativity of all people – including people
with disabilities – to help do the work of the American
people. We are doing anything possible to remove
barriers to their employment, and the good news is that
we’re moving in the right direction, and you can see it in
the numbers.”
When President Obama signed Executive Order 13548
on July 26, 2010, he set a goal to hire 100,000 people
with disabilities by 2015. In its own hiring, OPM leads all
agencies in the first two quarters of 2012 with 4.2 percent
of all new hires being people with targeted disabilities.
In addition, in FY 2011, 22.4 percent of all hires at OPM
were people with disabilities, including those veterans
who were 30 percent or more disabled. (For more on
veteran recruitment, retention, and on-boarding see our
whitepaper entitled Americas’ Veterans and the American
Workforce.)
“We still have a long way to go to meet the President’s
100,000 benchmark but we’re well underway,” said
Director Berry. “I’m confident that we’ll not only meet that
goal, but that we will also add talented individuals to our
team along the way.
Over 3,000 federal employees from more than 56
agencies have been trained on recruitment techniques
and all cabinet level agencies have attended trainings
hosted by OPM. The federal hiring community is better
prepared to hire the talented members of the disability
community by using the Schedule A accepted appointing
authority to hire people with disabilities, providing
reasonable accommodation via the Computer/Electronic
Accommodations Program (CAP), and getting employees
who become ill or injured on the job back to work.
15 To view the report, visit: http://www.opm.gov/diversityandinclusion/reports/disability/index.aspx
Addendum
10. www.TMPgovernment.com
Mark Havard is Senior Vice President of TMP Government,
focusing on developing marketing programs to support
the human capital programs of government clients.
Based in Washington, D.C., Mark is frequently called on
by TMP clients nationwide for his expertise in interactive
engagement and workplace cultures. Before taking on
his current role, Mark oversaw client development
throughout North America for TMP’s advertising
division. He holds a master’s degree in education/labor
relations as well as a bachelor’s in political science/public
administration from Virginia Tech. You can reach him at
mark.havard@TMPgovernment.com.
John Bersentes is TMP’s Vice President of Business
Development, specializing in the federal government
space. An expert in social marketing, multicultural
outreach and online engagement, John manages TMP’s
efforts to keep federal human capital leaders abreast
of relevant new practices and technologies for
workplace enrichment and inclusion. During the last
decade, John has helped develop and launch leading
diversity niche job boards like HireDiversity.com and
WorkplaceDiversity.com. He is a graduate of the
University of California at Santa Barbara. He can be
reached at john.bersentes@TMPgovernment.com.
TMP Worldwide Advertising & Communications
(www.tmp.com) is North America’s largest independent
recruitment advertising agency and the only recruitment
advertising agency recognized among the top 50 U.S.
interactive agencies. We are a single source for companies
to communicate their employment offerings in order to
recruit and retain the best talent. Through online and
traditional communications, ROI campaign management
services, creative and brand management, diversity
enrichment and media planning, TMP delivers Solutions
with an Interactive Edge, achieving industry-specific
results across virtually every sector in business and
government. Headquartered in New York City with offices
throughout North America and affiliates around the globe,
TMP continues to set the standard for measurable and
cost-effective HR communications.
About the Authors About TMP
