For organisations working with and for disabled people, accessibility is central to their values and services. But when it comes to recruiting your most senior leaders, do your recruitment processes always live up to those same principles?
Accessible recruitment is about much more than adding a line to an advert inviting candidates to request reasonable adjustments.
Accessible executive recruitment starts with the role
The criteria you set and the assumptions you make about the ‘right’ candidate can decide who gets considered.
Through our executive search work across disability, health and social care, we spend a lot of time with boards at the beginning of a search looking at the person specification and asking what is essential. Requirements around career background, travel, location, ways of working or previous experience can all sometimes unintentionally narrow the field. Weighing each one against what is essential to the role keeps the search open to more people.
Making our own executive searches more accessible
Working with organisations where accessibility, inclusion and lived experience are so important has made us look closely at our own processes. Where might we be putting barriers in the way? And are we thinking about accessibility early enough?
At the start of every assignment, we ask clients how accessibility should shape the format and timing of assessment. We try to give candidates different ways to engage with us throughout the process, and we have started sharing interview questions or themes in advance when it makes sense to do so.
Some people worry that sharing questions in advance makes an interview less rigorous. In our experience, giving someone time to think leads to a more considered conversation about their background.
Read more: Should organisations share interview questions in advance?
Involve service users in assessing candidates
Some of the best processes we have supported have involved people who use our clients’ services. They met and assessed prospective leaders. For their involvement to genuinely count, their views should form part of the evidence the panel considers when making its decision.
Give candidates different ways to show their thinking
Executive recruitment has traditionally relied on a familiar combination of written application, panel interview and presentation. All of those can be useful, but they can also favour people who are particularly comfortable performing in those formats.
We need to be more flexible about how people demonstrate what they can do. Time pressure in an exercise should test something relevant to the role. The venue and the technology need to be accessible, and the timetable needs enough flexibility to suit different people. Disabled people and people with lived experience should be able to shape the process at the design stage.
You could start by getting clear on what you are assessing, then stay open to how someone shows it.
Why executive recruitment needs accessibility built in
Encouraging more disabled candidates to apply only works if the process is flexible enough to meet different needs.
What one person needs to do their best, another may not. But the more we can design accessibility into a process, the less we rely on candidates having to identify a barrier and ask us to remove it.
The way organisations working with disabled people recruit leaders should reflect what they stand for.
Read more: Why diverse shortlists don’t always lead to diverse appointments
We don’t see accessible executive recruitment as something we have ‘solved’. We are still learning, and every search allows us to look at what worked and what we could do differently next time. Some of the most useful changes to our own approach have come from listening to clients, candidates and the people our clients support.
If you are planning a chief executive, senior leadership or trustee appointment, get in touch to talk through how to build accessibility in from the start.
Lucy Kennedy-Mavers is Director, Charities at Peridot Partners. Since 2010 she has recruited senior leaders, trustees and chairs across health and social care charities and other not-for-profit organisations, including those supporting people with complex disabilities and learning needs. Lucy is a trustee of Haven House Children’s Hospice and an advisory board member for Out for Good.
