Using positive action to attract disabled talent
By Dr. Natasha Hirst on 21 October 2024
Employers who are proactive in seeking disabled talent by removing unnecessary barriers from their recruitment processes will be well placed to attract the best candidates. Although not well understood, the Equality Act 2010 allows the use of positive action in recruitment and promotion. Using this provision strategically signals a genuine commitment to disability inclusion.
Professor Debbie Foster is a Professor of Employment Relations and Diversity at Cardiff Business School and explains that employers have the law on their side to remove barriers in recruitment processes. Foster said, “employment law is often ineffective because employers don’t understand that disabled job applicants and employees can be treated differently. For example, ACAS guidelines clearly state it is not possible for a non-disabled person to claim disability discrimination. This means you can legally treat a disabled person more favourably than a non-disabled candidate and positively discriminate when you advertise a job and recruit a disabled person.”
This is an area of confusion for employers since for most protected characteristics, positive action is lawful but positive discrimination is not. However, an exception for disability allows positive discrimination to be used if there is an occupational requirement. The ACAS guidelines note that “the law only applies when comparing a disabled person with a non-disabled person, not specific disabilities.”
Foster adds, “Employers and public institutions must be more willing to utilise provisions in the Equality Act that allow for the recruitment of disabled people as a ‘Genuine Occupational Requirement (GOR)’ to achieve a fair representation of disabled people in their workforces.”
Positive action in action
There are fantastic examples of how this has been used to great effect. Robbie Crow, Strategy Disability Lead at the BBC, explains how they have set out to increase representation of disabled people, “as a public service broadcaster, we feel it is important that our workforce is representative of the UK. We have set ourselves an ambition of 12% representation of disabled people in our workforce, as a minimum. Our current representation is 9.3% identifying as disabled and 2.4% as neurodivergent.
“BBC Extend is our positive action employment scheme that ring-fences roles for people who are disabled as defined by the Equality Act (2010), often including those who identify as deaf or neurodivergent, too. It’s not a work experience or placement scheme with no hope of a job at the end of it – BBC Extend takes roles that the business needs and ringfences them. It could be HR, production, marketing, or radio, with roles at all levels, from entry level to senior manager. It goes beyond the Disability Confident scheme in that only disabled people make it to interview. These are not tokenistic roles and range from 6-month contracts to permanent jobs.”
To promote the scheme and bring in talent, the BBC has created staff-led digital content showing current disabled staff experiences working at the BBC. They were honest about where the BBC is at in the journey towards disability inclusion, promoting a philosophy of progress, not perfection. The scheme has been advertised widely on social media, including across LinkedIn, and created in-person and virtual opportunities to engage and find out more. This has taken the talent pool of potential candidates to over 2,000. The BBC also has a variety of staff networks to support disabled staff, including BBC Ability, the BBC stammer support network and BBC Enigma for neurodivergent staff.
Crow says “The BBC Extend scheme has become so popular in the BBC over the last six months that we’ve advertised over 100 roles. Managers are seeing the top quality of candidates coming through the scheme and it’s playing a small part in helping us shift perceptions about disabled people and employment.”
Positive action benefits the wider workforce
Positive action to increase disability inclusion has wider benefits across the workforce, playing a key role in the development of diversity strategies. Employers should reflect on their employment practices and recognise that it can’t be left to workers from marginalised backgrounds to carry the weight of creating change by ‘diversifying’ the makeup of their workforce. Organisations will benefit by becoming more welcoming workplaces and this process starts from recruitment onwards.
Inclusive Journalism Cymru is a network to connect, support and campaign for marginalised journalists in Wales. In 2024 they launched an inclusive recruitment guide which emerged from conversations with Wales-based journalists. It sets out steps towards creating inclusive recruitment practices through a series of checklists for before, during and after recruitment. This addresses how to identify gaps in the workforce and how to design job promotion such as careful wording of adverts, transparency of salaries and noting the accessibility of the role and reasonable adjustments to the interview process. Outreach work is vital to build relationships and trust.
Shirish Kulkarni, journalist and founder of Inclusive Journalism Cymru said, “we and our members are frustrated with the glacial pace of change in the industry. We’ve also found most so-called “diversity” initiatives to be superficial and performative. They may help organisations feel slightly better about themselves, but they do nothing to change the systemic conditions in the industry.”
“Genuine change will only happen when organisations take a hard look at themselves and take action to address their values, mindsets and cultures. Disabled people are not a problem to be fixed, it’s workplaces that need to change how they think about disabled people.”
Addressing the challenges
Paul Deemer, Head of Diversity and Inclusion at the NHS Confederation/NHS Employers points to the need to have a clear evidence base, “Positive action can be a significant part of those crucial steps to tackle inequality, historic discrimination and be a driver of the change that we all agree is overdue. The reality is that many of our colleagues working in the NHS still view positive action with suspicion and that’s the challenge.
“Harnessing positive action is daunting because, action needs both preparation and planning. We must first recognise and acknowledge that things are wrong; we also need to take an evidence-based approach. Additionally, the ‘we’ means there is a need to work in collaboration; being proactive also means engaging with staff and others who might be directly affected: “Nothing about us, without us” is a great approach.”
Recruitment into organisations is only the start if employers want to make a long term improvement to developing disabled talent. Foster states that “it’s also important that organisations address the under-representation of disabled people in senior roles. Equality Impact Assessing sickness absence policies, flexible working policies, performance evaluations and promotion procedures to ensure that criteria does not indirectly discriminate against disabled employees is essential. Asking yourself how many disabled people are represented among key decision-makers is also important if you are going to root out taken-for-granted organisational ableism.”
Kulkarni concludes that “no employer will ever be perfect, or get everything right. However, the best ones reflect honestly and openly on where their organisations create barriers for marginalised people, and then take decisive action to dismantle them. Those barriers currently contribute to the waste of huge amounts of talent. By doing the work on themselves, the most inclusive organisations will be in prime position to reap the benefits of that talent in the future.”
Related links:
- EHRC positive action guidance – click here to read
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