Support Grows for Disabled Job Seekers

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Lucy Shi, a job seeker who has a genetic condition that causes short stature, says she's happy to be singled out as a disability candidate as she hunts for a position in New York.

A graduate of New York University, Ms. Shi, 25, recently interviewed with several Wall Street firms at a recruiting event geared toward people with disabilities who aim to develop professional business careers. "It's hard to have a disability that's so visible, and it's just nice to be able to talk to recruiters without competing with the rest of the world," says Ms. Shi, who believes many interviewers view her as a child because of her height.

There are 22 million working-age Americans with disabilities who have come of age under the Americans With Disabilities Act -- passed 16 years ago this month -- which helps to prevent job discrimination against qualified disabled individuals. But only 38% of the nation's working-age disabled have a job, compared with 78% of able-bodied people.

Over the past few years, companies have begun taking bigger steps to bring more of the disabled into the professional work force. The latest effort is partly due to the efforts of Rich Donovan, a former Merrill Lynch trader who has cerebral palsy, a disability that limits his speech and movement.

Mr. Donovan recalls the resistance he met from many recruiters who weren't sure he was nimble enough to perform the physical aspects of a busy trader's job. Even his mentors at Columbia University's business school tried to talk him out of it, saying he'd make a "fine risk manager." He was hired at Merrill and quickly hatched a plan to get more disabled people hired at the firm.

Mr. Donovan's idea was based on the premise that corporate America should recruit and give qualified people with disabilities the same sort of opportunities that his firm -- and most big companies -- already had in place for minorities and women.

Merrill agreed to give it a try, and in 2006 Mr. Donovan founded LimeConnect, with the company as its first partner. Today, the organization matches disabled college-level and professional candidates through private recruiting efforts led by its four major partners: Merrill, Goldman Sachs, PepsiCo and Google. Last fall, Lime helped its partners source more than 300 disabled internship candidates from two dozen universities, including Harvard, M.I.T., Princeton and Georgetown. In May, Lime invited 60 candidates for job interviews in New York; at least a dozen have been invited back for further interviews.

It isn't just a goodwill gesture, say Lime's partner companies. "There's a business case for hiring people with disabilities. This is a market we need to, and want to, tap into as much as we can," says Ron Parker, chief diversity and inclusion officer at PepsiCo.

Corporations are casting a wider net for good reasons. With the labor pool shrinking, U.S. employers will face a shortage of 20 million workers by 2020 as baby boomers retire. What's more, one out of every 10 consumers is a person with a disability, representing $200 billion in annual buying power, according to the National Organization on Disability in Washington.

"We want to be an organization that reflects the globally diverse audience that our search engine and tools serve," says Jordan Bookey, Google's global-diversity and inclusion programs manager, who used Lime to find applicants for its new diversity summer internship program.

Building a disability candidate pipeline isn't easy, as many companies still lack a centralized talent pool from which to draw. Still, companies can join corporate partnerships, such as Lime, or become members of one of several nonprofit organizations geared toward linking disabled professionals with corporations.

One group, the National Business & Disability Council, runs a diversity-internship program called Emerging Leaders. The program was founded by consulting company Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. and now has more than 30 corporate members, including AIG, KPMG, Liz Claiborne and Procter & Gamble. It has placed 75 students in summer internships since 2005.

Booz Allen's efforts to hire people with disabilities began at the top: Its chairman and CEO, Ralph Shrader, has a son with disabilities. "Finding a job -- and gaining the significant benefits that come with employment -- is difficult, but when the right opportunity comes together, the rewards for the employee and the company are extraordinary," Dr. Shrader says.

The group also hosts an annual invitation-only Wall Street job fair for candidates seeking jobs at financial-services firms, including Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs. Last fall, Merrill also hosted a Wall Street consortium with business and government leaders to explore strategies for recruiting and retaining people with disabilities.

"We're making an intellectual-capital decision," says Elizabeth Wamai, head of global campus recruiting at Merrill. "To continue to win in this business, we need the creative eclectic approaches that different people bring."

Companies like KPMG say they also work to attract candidates by changing their workplace to include more professionals with disabilities. Creating an employee network for the disabled, establishing disabled-specific mentoring programs, or changing benefits to allow for time off for medical issues can make a difference.

KPMG recently launched a disabilities network, and this year, Eastman Kodak, IBM and Pepsi all landed on DiversityInc's Top 10 Companies for People with Disabilities list in part because they run employee networks geared toward disabilities. PepsiCo's EnAble network gained fame when it sponsored a Super Bowl commercial featuring two deaf employees.

By SUZANNE ROBITAILLE- Wall Street Journal