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Reasonable Adjustments: How Do You Decide What Is Reasonable?

Graduate Recruiter’s Breakfast Seminar (BS’2)
Hosted by Bloomberg

On the 12th July, 2011 members of the Graduate Recruiter Disability Café Club (GRDCC) came together for the second Breakfast Seminar exclusively for members of the GRDCC. The focus of the seminar was implementing adjustments during the recruitment process. The event provided attendees with the opportunity to discuss key issues in depth and to explore concerns in a safe and confidential environment.

Noel Hastings, from the National Autistic Society, provided expertise into how to approach making adjustments to the recruitment process for people with Asperger’s Syndrome. Noel started off by reminding us that having Asperger’s Syndrome does not affect intelligence however it may mitigate against the recruitment process.

Noel suggested that in some instances employers have fallen into a pattern of how they recruit: this is how we do it because it has always been done this way. He suggested that employers needed to step back and reassess how individuals can best show their potential.

One area explored in depth was whether it was ‘fair’ to take out part of the process to ‘allow someone in’. In the majority of cases this was not deemed either the appropriate thing to do or indeed wished for by the candidate; on the whole candidates want to feel as if they have been assessed as rigorously as everyone else and to gain their role on merit alone.

Helen Goss, Partner at Boyes Turner and an expert employment lawyer, was at hand to provide legal input and clarity around some of the more complex questions which arose during the morning. However, as a whole, the session focused on the practical issues of how to make adjustments during the recruitment process and what is considered to be reasonable.