Addressing Concerns About Your Disability In A Job Interview

Summary:
While an employer may not be permitted to ask questions about your disability, that important person nevertheless has them in mind. Here are some suggestions from employers themselves about how to proactively put their minds at rest.

First Impressions

Basic Preparation

The Hurdles


Don't Ask, Don't Tell?

Final Words


First Impressions

Our ideal of being a "color blind" society in the United States means overcoming decades and even centuries of built-up cultural and racial bias. Likewise, overcoming the preconceived beliefs of a job recruiter about a potential employee with a disability can be a daunting hurdle. In as little as an hour, that job recruiter must assess your fitness to provide possibly many years of value and productivity to the company. And you, as the candidate, must evaluate whether you would like to spend the bulk of your time working for that organization. In this short time, you must make decisions about a relationship that sometimes lasts longer than a marriage.

The job interview is no time to waste. In fact, it is the single most important hour you will spend with your new employer. You must make the best first impression you can and do it with the extra challenge of a disability. A typical advice column for job hunters would include a range of suggestions about how to make the best impression. But, as a job candidate with a disability, you must know how to deal with two other factors: how much the person conducting the interview knows about your disability (remember, he or she are often not allowed to ask) and how much the interviewer might view your disability in a negative light, based on how you present yourself.

In an article written for the Law Info Forum, Lewis Owen Amack, writes: "Of all selection procedures, The FTFI (Face-to-Face Interview) is most likely to function as a vehicle for concealment of bigotry or disparate treatment." For example, he explains, "Any deviation from these meticulous expectations is likely to doom the applicant's prospects, notwithstanding superlativeness (sic) on all other selection criteria. If that were not enough, physical attractiveness alone may be decisive, since interviewing often degenerates into a tacit beauty contest."

About the interview's impact on a candidate with a disability, Amack says, "There are countless examples of productive professionals whose speech or body language is affected by blindness, hearing impairment, stuttering, severe physical disability or even developmental disability. Be that as it may, such individuals tend to be excluded, especially from high-profile positions, by the (Face-to-Face Interview)."

Many countries have anti-discrimination laws when it comes to disabilities and jobs, but the fact remains that prejudice exists and has a devastating impact on unemployment rates for adults with disabilities. You can gain access to redress when discrimination is clearly present, but, as they say, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." How can you succeed in the face of cultural bias and the added individual concerns or lack of awareness of employers about how a blind or visually impaired person might be able to perform the required tasks of a job?

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Basic Preparation

The "Three A's" of preparing for a job interview are:

1. Ability
   
2. Articulateness
   
3. Appearance
   

Clearly you must possess the knowledge, training and skills to do a job - or at least be at the point of readiness to learn it quickly and well in entry-level positions. How this affects your job hunt is simple: Only apply for work you're sure you can do in a field in which you can compete successfully against others. Make sure you have taken opportunities to develop on-the-job skills and experience so you can demonstrate that you have already succeeded in the tasks required. Make sure you already know how to use the typical tools for the position. In most cases, an employer does not want to hire someone who can't start to work successfully right away. This is especially true when a prospective employer has doubts that a sight-impaired person can even do the work.

You can get an edge over all other candidates by doing your homework on the industry and company. It's easier than ever - with the Internet - to learn about the company you are considering as your employer. Read about the industry. Check the company's web site. A command of this knowledge will demonstrate your interest and initiative to the recruiter.

This background, however, is not sufficient. You must be able to communicate it credibly to the recruiter. You must be able to speak articulately about the work itself. You must be prepared for the types of questions recruiters typically ask during job interviews - plus the questions about your disability, spoken aloud or not.

Two tools at your disposal are informational interviews and practice. Locate a couple of recruiters in your desired field and ask to chat with them over coffee. Ask them to be candid about what they look for in a candidate and how you can ensure a best first impression. And pay for the coffee!

"The applicant should be well versed in difficult questions that may arise. They need to practice their answers before they go to any interview and be prepared to show the interviewer how well they can work in an office setting," urges consultant Billie Sundell. Talk about how you work and how you solve problems - not what you can't do independently.

See every interview as the practice session for the Right Job. Those in which you are unsuccessful or discover the organization is not the right match for you are not failures but steps to success.

Finally, like every other job hunter, you must look and act your very best. A job club leader in a disabilities organization told me that one of the club members refused even to wear clean clothes in good repair. The man said, "If they don't want me the way I am, then I don't want to work there." Being properly dressed, neat, punctual and aware of good manners is a great deal more than a matter of personal choice: It communicates who you are to others. Employers are looking for people who value themselves and others, are cooperative, sensitive to the appropriateness in a situation and simply positive, hardworking people. The job club member was, in fact, revealing his disinterest in others and a general laziness, not the characteristics of a great employee in any company.

Appearance is especially important for a candidate who has a disability because sloppiness can be read as poor self esteem and a generally negative outlook. Meriby Sweet, founder and CEO of Cynosure, a Business Accelerator, Inc., company that provides expertise and coaching to small and startup companies wanting to grow to the next level, advises, "Look like a victor, not a victim." Remember, employers who might interpret poor manners in a non-disabled applicant as bad upbringing may also decide that it reflects on you, a person with a disability, as just plain incompetence.

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The Hurdles

I recently asked some very candid questions of several human resources experts on AskMe.com. I wanted to know what concerned the typical employer about hiring a disabled candidate. One question I asked was blunt: "What do disabled candidates do at interviews that turn off many employers?" Here are some of their comments grouped into two categories: "Their Ignorance" and "Our Behavior."

Their Ignorance

Generally, unless an individual has personal experience with a blind person or has received special training, he is not going to know much about it beyond what is not colorfully portrayed in the entertainment media. Since most blind people are portrayed as either fragile or characters, they haven't seen many everyday "just folks" visually impaired people. Or they just don't know if they have. As a result, they are ignorant and uncomfortable with displaying their ignorance. They are afraid they will say something wrong and upset you. Anything you do that exposes their ignorance or confirms that you are sensitive will be a count, in their minds, against you.

One of the biggest areas of ignorance is around "how we do it" and "it" includes everything from eating to reading to parenting. This is often even more true of those who do the same work. Ron Parker, who is the instructor and supervisor of the machine shop in Seattle's Lighthouse for the Blind, comments, "The first time people see our guys at work it knocks their socks off. But, when a machinist first sees blind people doing this work, they can't even speak." People in an industry can have very firm notions about what faculties are needed for a task - based on those they use, not those they might use if they had to.

Prepare for this hurdle by anticipating every task that is involved with the job and deciding exactly how you will accomplish this independently. Be prepared to be articulate without being patronizing. "Let your skill sets speak for themselves," offers one AskMe.com expert. Showing that you have the skill set proclaims that you can do the related work. But, if you feel you need more credibility, he adds, "describe how you and a former employer created accommodations for you together."

Our Behavior

Many people will interpret any mannerisms or ways of speaking we have as being part of the "inability" they read into disability. So, like it or not, we need to take a hard look at ourselves and try to look more "normal" - not because it is or is not right but because the interviewer almost certainly will notice our beyond-the-norm behavior, if we don't come to grip with it ourselves.

Take a good, long, hard, mental inventory of how you look and sound to others. Look at such things as posture, poise, style and fit of your clothes and your hair. Check out your etiquette IQ to make sure what manners will be expected. For some higher level positions, interviews are conducted over lunch precisely to see the candidate's manners and how they are likely to appear to customers or clients.

Also listen to yourself talk. Do you sound self-assured and intelligent? Do you use jargon or slang that might not appeal to your interviewer? Can you phrase an answer succinctly and do you know when to stop talking?

Those mannerisms that are truly involuntary can be ameliorated by projecting your own comfort with them. Don't draw attention to them, explain or apologize. If you communicate that you are comfortable, others will follow your lead. Be patient with them; they are learning.

And there are other concerns that employers probably won't voice. Will the current employees accept and work with this candidate? What about customers' reactions? How will hiring a disabled person affect my insurance and workers' compensation costs? How much are the accommodations going to cost? And how do I train a blind person? Will his software work with our mainframe or PCs? Will this person be an accident risk? Will he be late or sick a lot? Will he stick around? Will he be a burden rather than an asset? Be prepared, calmly and reasonably, to respond to these very real, if not always valid, fears.

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Don't Ask, Don't Tell?

This topic has been a struggle for many disabled job applicants since the Americans with Disabilities Act and other similar legislation has been in existence. In many of these cases, the employer can not simply ask you if you are disabled, but they are permitted to ask how you will do the work.

Many of us have felt we should not bring up the subject of our disability for various reasons: because we don't have to; because it shouldn't matter; because we won't get the job if we do. But vocational rehabilitation counselor Robert Newman, observes, "No interview is ever complete if you don't talk about your disability." How you will do the work is uppermost on the employer's mind. Even if you don't look disabled, you are smart to bring it up yourself.

When you do that it is up to you, but one bit of common wisdom states that one should never surprise a job interviewer, if you want to make the best impression. It's better to let him know on the phone about your disability than it is to walk in cold with your white cane or guide dog. The person doing the interview will have had a chance to form an image in his mind, and, if you've done your homework, the real you will be better than his image.

When do you bring up your disability? Talk about it when you mention your competence with the tasks required for the job. Be sure you are very familiar and practiced with the accommodations you are most likely to use. If you use computer technology, be sure you know the system requirements for various accessibility tools and adaptations. Have concrete examples of how the tools help you; don't assume it's obvious.

Talk about your disability only when it is necessary. Don't communicate an "us disabled" and "rest of you" attitude. This will just alienate the recruiter. Meriby Sweet says, "I had a candidate once who started most of her sentences with, 'As a disabled woman...'. While I realize that this is her perspective on the world and that she overcomes challenges every day with her disability, it made her sound as if she could focus only on her disability and not the skills, tasks and challenges that the job was going to demand. Her repetition of the phrase, while clarifying her perspective, began to sound didactic - and that the company would be expected to take on her perspective and focus on her disability rather than the job at hand.

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Final Words

Again, the more at ease and matter of fact about yourself and your qualifications you are, the more you will convey not only confidence and competence but also help the interviewer relax and be more open to you as a job candidate. And the best way to be relaxed yourself is to be sure of yourself and well prepared for the questions whose answers may lead you to unexpected, exciting opportunities.

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