I know there's lots of positive stuff out there if you are disabled but I am still concerned about discrimination. I know it exists – how best do you think I should handle it?
Reply courtesy of John who is blind.
This website gives a highly positive view of the career prospects for people with disabilities. Quite rightly, it says that, if you can prove yourself to employers, you are more likely to be offered full-time employment. While this is undeniable in theory, it is in practice much harder to prove your worth to an employer or to one of the many recruitment agencies claiming to help people with disabilities gain employment than this site would have us believe. The main reason for this is that, due to fear of the unknown, many recruiters still do not look beyond the disability and hence do not notice the real person beneath. The sheer determination to succeed which emanates from the disabled candidate can prove so unsettling for the recruiter that they may subconsciously reject the disabled job seeker without consciously realising they have done so. If a recruiter is of this frame of mind, there is, in my experience, very little that the disabled job seeker can do to improve things. Rejection letters – I have had many in the past – avoid giving a reason why the candidate was rejected at all and attempts to find out generally result in the employer becoming defensive. This happened to me on numerous occasions and I could only assume that the real reason for my rejection was the employer's fear of my never having seen. This is, of course, discrimination, but the employers in question got clean away with it because I couldn't prove a thing! Despite the Disability Discrimination Act of 1995, I firmly believe that discrimination against disabled people still goes on in the recruitment process. It is far more covert than it used to be because employers must be seen to comply with the law. In practice, I feel this can make finding work more difficult for disabled people than it was before the DDA came into force.
While there is probably no way to solve the discrimination issue other than by fundamentally changing our mental attitudes to disability from a young age, I think we should at least acknowledge that the issue of discrimination exists. I would also mention that it is very important for disabled job seekers to be themselves throughout the recruitment process. They need to be proud of who and what they are and should not try to hide parts of their personality or disability which they feel the employer may not approve of. In practice, being yourself at interview or on an assessment centre is far easier than forcing yourself to be the superman you think the employer wants you to be.
In addition, I think we need to acknowledge that being offered a job is as much a matter of luck as it is skill and that rejection is not necessarily a bad thing. For example, when my current employer offered me a position on their graduate training scheme, I believe it was chiefly because the recruiters had decided to look beyond my lack of sight and to explore who I really was. By their very nature, interviews and assessment centres can only gain an overview of who someone is and how they will perform in a particular role and I think the recruiters here realised that such assessment techniques would be less effective for me than for sighted graduates. I think it is also very important for disabled job seekers to have their own personal definitions of what 'Success' means for them. At all costs, they must ensure that they are happy in their working life and must not feel that they have to aspire to what able-bodied people tell them they ought to be.
