As a Disability Confident Leader we are committed to encouraging applications by offering an interview to an applicant who declares to have a disability, if the person meets the minimum criteria defined by us (for example sometimes shown as desirable skills).
As Disability Confident Leader, we have agreed to the following commitments:
1. Inclusive and accessible recruitment
We apply and promote an inclusive and accessible recruitment policy and we work to increase the understanding amongst employers about disability and the benefits disabled people can bring to their businesses.
2. Communicating vacancies to disabled people
We design our job adverts in order for them to be accessible to all those who can do the job, whether or not they are disabled. When writing job adverts:
3. Offering an interview to disabled people
We ask applicants if they need an adjustment to the interview process to allow them to be considered for the job and we make any adjustments if they are reasonable, for example:
When interviewing a disabled applicant, we help them to perform to the best of their ability by:
4. Providing reasonable adjustments
This means ensuring disabled people can overcome any substantial disadvantages they may have doing their jobs and progressing in work (Equality Act 2010).
4. Help with the extra costs disabled people face in work
We can access help from Access to Work towards some costs where an individual requires support or adaptations. Access to Work usually provides a grant to pay for the cost of the support. For example, it can provide funds towards:
5. Offering disabled people work experience or work trials
We are committed to offering people with a disability work experiences or job trials in order to promote future employment and job retention.
Exceptions
We reserve to make exceptions in some circumstances. In compliance with the guidance for level 1, (Level 1: Disability Confident Committed (gov.uk) there may be occasions where it is not practicable or appropriate to interview all disabled people that meet the minimum criteria for the job. For example, in certain recruitment situations such as high number of applications, seasonal and high-peak times, we may wish to limit the overall numbers of interviews offered to both disabled people and non-disabled people.
In these circumstances we could select the disabled candidates who best meet the minimum criteria for the job rather than all of those that meet the minimum criteria, as we would do for non-disabled applicants.