Making adjustments reasonable
I'm unwell and can't think of a jazzy title I'm sorry :(
Hello!
Thank you for joining me, I’m so glad you’re here.
I am very unwell, and I come to you live from the sofa, wrapped in a duvet, having eaten some soup [Instagram] (looks like vomit but tastes amazing), with my cat Juniper’s favourite tv show Birder King playing on YouTube on the TV.
With that in mind, and with my face feeling like it’s full of concrete, this will be a shorter post than normal.
I’ve been thinking about reasonable adjustments in recruitment recently. As I recently mentioned on LinkedIn, I’ve been working on the accessibility of our recruitment processes.
When wanting to be more inclusive, there are so many things to consider. As I discuss in my LinkedIn post, our application process has been tweaked to ask applicant if they have any disability or situation where they’d benefit from support from my recruitment team. I explain in the wording that this won’t be passed further than the recruiter unless with the consent of the applicant.
It’s amazing to see that we’ve had an increase in people disclosing that they would need support (up from the previous disclosure method of a tickbox, with corporate wording asking them if they have a disability). The new method is transparent about how the information will be used, and builds trust with the candidate.
But this isn’t the first step - weeks before I made this change, I ran a session with my team to make sure they would know what to do with the information disclosed. It’s not a case of the recruiters needing to diagnose people, or even be able to suggest adjustments based on conditions, it’s about them knowing that with every condition that’s disclosed, there will be challenges but also strengths (therefore, think again before judging someone’s suitability for a role based on that information), and that everyone is different, even if they have similar conditions.
Within this session, I used Texthelp’s free online guides for information on the challenges people may have.
The next step is reasonable adjustments. It can be hard, because many recruiters will just default to asking the applicant themselves what they need - when the applicant may not know the recruitment process ahead of them, let alone the world of possible adjustments.
This is where the Reasonable Adjustment Menu comes in. We’ll be creating a list of potential support, that can be put on our careers site, within our application support documents, and placed in the interview scheduling emails. The candidate will be able to see everything that’s possible in our process, and judge for themselves what would be useful. We’re not going to ask for evidence before we give these adjustments - if they say they need it, they’ll be given it.
But what to include? This is where I’m at right now.
One point I’d really like to be included is inspired by my former colleague Dana, who I know reads this every week so shout out to you boo. When we worked together and she was conducting video interviews, she would say the question, then copy and paste the text into the chat for the person to read. It was brilliant, and really helped interviewees.
While we conduct our interviews on-site, I’d like to take this same idea and give the candidates the questions to read in front of them. We have played around with a more challenging question to start interviews with, giving candidates 10 minutes to plan it before answering, with huge success. There have even been candidates ace this part and find the easier, more traditional questions too challenging.
At one previous employer, we found that our interview questions were being leaked online, and candidates were coming in over prepared, reading from scripts. While in theory I totally support questions being given in advance of the interview, it’s my experience that it can hinder a candidate more than support, so I think the questions in front of them may be a happy medium.
I would really love to know what others out there are doing for adjustments. I think this is important for my education-world subscribers, as I think it may be a knowledge-gap, and would increase the support SEND students may get when transitioning from education to career.
I know I often do a call out for feedback but if you’re a recruiter out there, please do get in touch and share what you do! I’d love to collate amazing ideas for us all to benefit from. Can’t wait to hear from you!
Links
OK I’m going in with the worst link. New Statesman came out this week with an article saying that Britain has the fastest growing HR sector, and that we are holding the country back, and are the reason why the country isn’t growing. I know. It made me sad too. But the thing is, we need to sort out this image of ours, and when the CIPD does one of its “what do you want from us???” surveys I wish they would get up and help us solve this problem. Rant over.
Meanwhile, Bustle and Samsung wrote a report on Gen Z in the workplace, mentioning that the lack of flexibility and creativity is driving the next gen into having side hustles.
I spotted this post describing the pain that is the graduate job market right now. It’s interesting, but also includes a section on “entry level” roles that require experience. I’d not taken a trip into entry level job posts for a while, so did a quick search in my area, and found that things listed in the entry level tag weren’t entry level at all. I don’t think it’s companies trying to get people on low salaries, or even that they’re not willing to take on young talent, I think it’s recruiters ticking the wrong box when posting the vacancy. I wrote my own post about it.
Really loved this video post of students giving advice to their first year selves. Such a simple premise but would be great content for those in education marketing.
I’ve been loving Joe Grover’s posts on recruitment recently. As a marketing business owner, he’s been recruiting into his team recently and his honesty as been refreshing. This post of his where he spotted a truly awful job advert is a great example of why it’s a really bad idea to trim off experienced recruiters in favour of cheaper options such as AI. Recruiting is hard. Not everyone can do it, and as I said above in the link from New Statesman, we really need to play our part in making HR respected and trusted again.
Really enjoyed Leigh Fowkes’ post about the kind of careers advice being peddled on TikTok right now. Massive bugbear of mine, and I’m certain that this is fueling young people being disengaged, as they are pumped in poor advice.
Content idea of the week
I feel with these that I always go for the wacky ones. I guess I’m living vicariously through people working at organisations that have a little more scope in what they can post. The above LinkedIn post about advice for first year students could easily be used now in orgs - get your current grads and apprentices to advise those looking to apply to your programmes which may be open to application now.
But if you do have scope to be wacky…
Welcome to the “trauma candy salad” trend. In it, a group of people will say “Hi I am ____ and [tells traumatic story], and I brought the _____” before dumping the sweets into a mixing bowl.
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The human ones can get pretty trauma-y… But I found this adorable animal version too:
I actually don’t know which animal is my favourite. They all tickled me.
So how to make this into corporate content? You could easily do mild workplace trauma with this. An HR colleague of mine recently found that the in-date milk she’d bought from the canteen shop had curdled, so bought another, and that was also curdled and both times she’d poured it into her tea without looking, and taken a big gulp. Perfect office trauma.
I’m going to leave you today with the best TikTok creator I’ve seen in a while - Evolve with Elvis. It’s perfect for if you want to learn to use Excel better! Enjoy!!
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Have a great week ahead!
Until next week,
Charlotte