Abstract
Purpose
This study explores small businesses’ knowledge base and practices concerning interviewing and hiring job candidates with disabilities, as they are not required to comply with the provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
Methods
We first conducted 18 in-depth interviews with small business owners to explore their knowledge of the ADA, their practices surrounding hiring (for those with and without disabilities), and their sense of the best practices for how a candidate should navigate the interview and request for accommodations. Responses were then used to create a survey of an additional 110 small business owners.
Results
Six themes arose from the interviews, illuminating the steep learning curve involved in each (1) hiring well, (2) the need to trust an employee’s character as much as their skill set, (3) the need for an employee to fit within the small business’s family-like environment, (4) the preference for job candidates to be transparent about their needs as early as possible, (5) the importance of personal experience with disability, and (6) the difficulty in obtaining precise information about the ADA. Survey responses supported the general findings of the interviews while also providing information about the relative rarity of encountering a job candidate with a disability.
Conclusion
Hiring employees with disabilities is challenging for small businesses, and bias is difficult to avoid. The availability of clear information on how to comply with the ADA and other laws and practices would be welcome by many small business owners.
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Data Availability
The study transcripts analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request, with redactions of all personal information of participants.
Notes
Note that although businesses under 15 employees are not covered by the ADA Title I, they are still required to provide public accommodations to customers via things like websites and retail areas, under Title III. In addition, many states have anti-discrimination laws that cover disability, potentially for companies at any size (the language of “undue hardship” make it difficult to know for certain whether and how these laws apply to small businesses).
Note that even those business owners without other full-time employees described regularly hiring contract workers to help them, so the questions of interviewing and hiring were still relevant to them.
Although there is the risk that unprompted, participants will tend towards imagining the most dramatic and tragic forms of disability, as will be seen below, our interviewees ranged widely in how they discussed the topic and the types of disability that they focused on.
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Acknowledgements
This study was funded through a seed grant from the Rutgers University Research Council and from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR) for the Rehabilitation Research & Training Center (RRTC) on Employer Practices Leading to Successful Employment Outcomes Among People with Disabilities Research Grant [Award Number 90RTEM0008-01-00]. The author would also like to thank Jeffrey Robinson, Jasmine Cordero, and the Center for Urban Entrepreneurship & Economic Development (CUEED) for their assistance with recruiting participants.
Funding
This study was funded through a seed grant from the Rutgers University Research Council and from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR) for the Rehabilitation Research & Training Center (RRTC) on Employer Practices Leading to Successful Employment Outcomes Among People with Disabilities Research Grant [Award Number 90RTEM0008-01-00].
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All authors contributed to the study’s conception and design. MA and TK performed material preparation, data collection, and analysis. Both authors wrote the first draft of the manuscript and read and approved the final manuscript.
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This study was performed in line with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. Approval was granted by the Institutional Review Board of Rutgers University on March 20, 2020, Study ID Pro2020000652.
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Ameri, M., Kurtzberg, T. Small Empires: How Equipped are Small Business Owners to Hire People with Disabilities?. J Occup Rehabil (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10926-023-10152-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10926-023-10152-0