At a time when DE&I initiatives are facing increasing hostility, it’s more important than ever to highlight the real value of inclusive hiring. Beyond being the right thing to do, inclusive hiring broadens talent pools, fosters innovation, and ensures that organizations tap into the full spectrum of people’s skills and potential.
But what does true accessibility in hiring look like, and how can companies create recruitment processes that are genuinely fair for everyone?
My guest this week is Ron Fish, Global Talent Acquisition Leader at Ivanti and a passionate advocate for disability inclusion in the workplace. Ron is at the forefront of championing accessibility not just to comply with regulations but to build environments where everyone can succeed.
In the interview, we discuss:
• How a revelation about the corporate career site accelerated Ron’s journey as an advocate for disability inclusion.
• Optimal work environments work for everyone.
• How accessibility has massively advanced inclusion and belonging at Ivanti
• When bias outweighs common sense
• Focusing on skills and abilities
• Treating people as individuals rather than labels
• Accommodations in the hiring process, how simple changes can make a huge difference
• Why individuals with disabilities might be reluctant to disclose their needs during the recruitment process, and what strategies can address these concerns
• Shifting the perception of disability to make hiring more inclusive
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Could your hiring process be shutting out top talent? 16% of the world’s population has a significant disability and up to 20% are neurodiverse. Yet only 5% of employers include disability in their diversity initiatives. The good news is that small changes can make hiring more inclusive and unlock huge value for your organisation. Keep listening to find out how support for this podcast comes from. Workable Workable is the all in one hiring platform that empowers companies of all sizes to attract, evaluate and hire top talent. Effortlessly trusted by over 30,000 companies worldwide, Workable has facilitated over 1.5 million hires, streamlining recruitment with powerful automation and AI driven insights. Hire smarter, faster and with confidence. Learn more at workable.com.
Matt Alder [00:01:16]:
Hi there. Welcome to episode 675 of Recruiting Teacher with me, Matt Alder. At a time where De and I initiatives are facing increasing hostility, it’s more important than ever to highlight the real value of inclusive hiring. Beyond being the right thing to do, inclusive hiring broadens talent pools, fosters innovation, and ensures that organizations tap into the full spectrum of people’s skills and potential. But what does true accessibility in hiring look like? And how can companies create recruiting processes that are genuinely fair for hello everyone. My guest this week is Ron Fish, global talent acquisition leader at Ivanti and a passionate advocate for disability inclusion in the workplace. Ron is at the forefront of championing accessibility not just to comply with regulations, but to build environments where everyone can succeed.
Matt Alder [00:02:11]:
Hi Ron, and welcome to the podcast.
Ron Fish [00:02:13]:
Hey, thanks Matt. This is a bit of a bucket list item for me. I think many of us out here think of you as a legend in the talent acquisition and HR ecosystem. So thank you for opportunity today.
Matt Alder [00:02:25]:
Well, that’s very kind of you to say that. And could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Ron Fish [00:02:31]:
Sure. My name, of course is Ron Fish. I head up talent acquisition for a global software company based in Utah in the US called Ivanti. In addition, I also operate at my company as an ambassador for disability inclusion and accessibility and I would say in the broader HR and business ecosystem, also advocating for people with disabilities in the workplace, championing accessibility initiatives.
Matt Alder [00:02:59]:
I know that accessibility is something that’s obviously incredibly important to you. Tell us a bit more about your journey with it and why you feel it’s so important.
Ron Fish [00:03:09]:
Yeah, it’s definitely a key part of why I do what I do. So in my life, I’ve had a number of people with disabilities that have touched me, that I’ve helped them navigate an inaccessible world in many ways, including my father, who was blind my whole life, as well as immediate family members that are neurodivergent with adhd, dyslexia and related. So with that in mind, I’ve always had some thought around people with disabilities in the workplace and in the interview process as a talent acquisition leader. So in about 2017, I began to integrate some accessible aspects to hiring within hiring processes at the company that I was working for. You know, so that was always part of it. I would say I was kind of knee deep in doing this within the workplace. And then in 2022, things really accelerated for me. And I say now that I’m all in for disability, inclusion and accessibility. We had something that happened. I was approached by a UX manager that notified me that our career site was eliminating people with disabilities from our applicant pool. That was quite a shocking statement, to say the least, especially coming from somebody who is empathetic and sensitive to this. And we quickly determined that that was the case. We did not have accessibility functionality on our corporate website at all. So I plunged in and made it my mission to work with my website team, with other stakeholders to ultimately bring our website to ADA compliance in mid 2024. So that really kind of lit this spark for me that has created this inspiration where I’m now doing a lot of other initiatives at my company, but then more broadly trying to do outreach to the business community, the HR community, to hopefully help make an impact more broadly out there.
Matt Alder [00:05:06]:
Well, that’s fantastic stuff. And I think the work you’re doing is amazing. Anything that kind of raises the profile around this is so important because a very large, sort of a much larger proportion of the population than people think have disabilities, you know, struggle sometimes in various aspects of work. And lots of people, particularly people who are neurodiverse, for example, they’ll very often kind of hide that from their working life and, you know, really, really struggle sometimes. So accommodations and really sort of thinking about how, you know, as a whole is more accessible. It’s just incredibly important, isn’t it?
Ron Fish [00:05:41]:
It is. And a couple of data points to mirror what you were saying is that about 16% of the Earth’s population reports having a significant disability. So we’re talking about 1.3 billion people in the world. That is actually the largest diversity segment, bar none. I was very surprised to learn that. But as you mentioned, neurodiversity and related, these invisible disabilities make up about 80% of the disabilities out there. So you can’t necessarily tell by looking at somebody. And then we also to drop one more data Point. We also know that about 75% of the global workers with disabilities don’t disclose it to their employer. So you have individuals out there that could probably benefit from accessible accommodations, but they don’t request them because they’re afraid of the stigma. So, yeah, very, very important elements to consider when you know that people out there are not accepting accommodations or not requesting accommodations that could probably benefit them and create an optimal work environment.
Matt Alder [00:06:47]:
And I think it’s interesting you say that optimal work environment, because very often some of the accommodations that we’re talking about actually make things better for everyone, don’t they?
Ron Fish [00:06:58]:
Yeah, great point. Absolutely. I’ve seen that at my own company. In fact, back In December of 2023, we invited the Governor’s Committee on Employment for People with Disabilities in the State of Utah to come tour our headquarters in Salt Lake City. I was a little nervous about that because I wasn’t sure if we were going to get, you know, bad marks or how it would play out. They actually were really impressed. Our head of facilities, a guy named Jeremy, did a fantastic job designing our facility where it’s right next to the train station, which is very accessible for people that need to take public transportation. The hallways are very wide. We literally had blind people with canes and somebody with a seeing eye dog or a service dog that were navigating, and they were commenting as they’re walking along, how accessible it was for them because they weren’t in cramped workplaces, cramped hallways, things of that nature. So we got really high marks. And that led to many other opportunities to do outreach in the local community there in Salt Lake City. For me, absolutely.
Matt Alder [00:08:08]:
I mean, that kind of makes perfect sense. And so you kind of do a lot of work within your organization around this. How’s that impacted the culture of the organization?
Ron Fish [00:08:18]:
It’s had a big cultural impact. In fact, I’m going to boldly say that I’ve never seen anything accelerate inclusion and belonging. Personally, I’ve never seen anything that’s accelerated it at the velocity that building an accessible environment, fostering disability inclusion. I’ve never seen anything accelerate it as quickly as the initiatives that I’ve been part of have done. Of course, it’s not all me. I do have a number of other folks. We’ve raised enough awareness, brought visibility that many other people have joined forces with me. But to see this play out in our. We have an accessibility club called Curb Cuts. Curb Cuts is a reference to the cutouts and the curbs at the corners of most streets that where people with wheelchairs can navigate. Senior citizens can navigate easily to the street. So Curb Cuts is our accessibility club. We raise awareness. We have monthly meetings where we talk about topics that relate to digital accessibility, accessible product design, as well as raising awareness around neurodiversity, other types of disabilities like traumatic brain injury, and really talk about these things. And during these calls, we have 80 to 100 people that attend during these calls. It’s amazing. In fact, it’s a beautiful opening up of individuals that are saying, hey, I’ve had a disability for a long time. I’ve never really told anybody at work that I do, but I feel comfortable talking about it. And others that spoke up and said, I’ve mentioned it before, but I’ve never felt comfortable just talking on a conference call in front of 80 other people. So it was really amazing to see that sort of belonging that we were creating within this community. And it’s been super exciting to witness it and be part of it.
Matt Alder [00:10:09]:
Let’s talk about the recruiting process for a second here. So from a personal perspective, I’m neurodiverse and I found out, I found out I had ADHD a couple of years ago now. And one of the biggest revelations for me in that process was I realized that I’ve never got a job through a conventional recruitment process. So, you know, I’ve had a number of jobs in my career, but I don’t think I got any of them through the kind of standard resume interview kind of first impression thing, which was kind of a bit of a revelation for me when I really thought about it. How important is inclusion in the recruit recruiting processes that we build? You know, what’s your kind of experience about that? What should people kind of bear in mind?
Ron Fish [00:10:54]:
Yeah, there are lots of ways to be more inclusive and to create accessibility. And to your point, just because somebody’s different doesn’t mean that they’re not as smart as the individual that you need to hire. And if we look at making sure we have accessibility functionality on our career site, so people with limited dexterity that can’t use a mouse, they need to navigate via keyboard, can easily navigate to each job and apply looking for a path for interview accommodation requests. If I’m deaf or hard of hearing, I need to have a sign language interpreter, join a call. We need to request that and have a hiring manager coached, knowing that you’re going to have to be a little patient. This is going to take a little bit longer. In fact, let’s offer an extended interview. Let’s go from the standard hour to 90 minutes to make sure we have plenty of time to accommodate this individual. Because just because there’s a difference in the way the communication happens doesn’t mean they’re less qualified. You know, partnering with hr, I keep talking about raising awareness and visibility. We all, we all have empathy baked in to our DNA, I think, in, in many regards. So if we know that there’s something that’s different about somebody or that they could benefit from an accommodation, typically that’s going to kick in. Right. But if we don’t know, it’s easy to let our biases jump in and simply judge somebody. Oh, they weren’t looking at the camera, therefore they, they’re hiding something. Right. I mean, these silly things that, you know, often our biases outweigh our common sense. Instead of looking at it as a data point, we look at it as an overarching element and we rule people out for, for reasons that really are not fair.
Matt Alder [00:12:43]:
One of the issues, particularly with neurodiversity in the recruitment process is that people often very reluctant to, to kind of bring it up, to kind of label themselves because they, they fear there might be kind of some kind of discrimination or they might not get a fair chance. How do you help people feel comfortable that this is accessible and inclusive and sort of really get past that. Get past that issue?
Ron Fish [00:13:09]:
Yeah. I’ll tell you two incredible ways to really make that impact without having to go way out of your way and also not embarrass somebody. Right. Because you can’t just sort of come in and say, hey, do you have a disability? We’d like to accommodate you, but if you include on every job description you post something along the lines of, we invite people of all backgrounds and abilities to apply, people are right away going to feel a little bit more welcomed because of that. And if hiring managers and recruiters learn to start interviews or screenings with something along the lines of, is there anything I can do to optimize your interview experience today before we begin? That might simply be somebody saying, yeah, absolutely. Would you give me a couple minutes? I need to turn on captioning. I don’t hear as well as I used to. And I need to see the words to ensure the flow of the interview kind of thing. So some simple ways you can really make an impact and make somebody feel more welcome and from the outside. Right. And then also publishing things on your social media and on your career site, all the great accessibility initiatives that we get. Visibility externally creates that eminence that is obvious to those individuals that have disabilities.
Matt Alder [00:14:21]:
That makes Perfect sense.
Matt Alder [00:14:23]:
And I think it’s. It’s kind of really being authentic about it, isn’t it? It’s kind of proving that this is very much in the kind of the values of the organization. This is much how we are, and this is very much what we do.
Ron Fish [00:14:35]:
Yeah. And that’s why you have to start with. I don’t recommend that anybody immediately start offering an optimized interview experience unless you actually have some coaching and training and you have the support, you know, so recruiters should have the support from their hiring stakeholders. And that’s where upfront, all the, you know, raising awareness, the training and related is so important because then individuals tend to be more open to it, and then they’ll take that coaching. If there’s somebody who is neurodiverse and, you know, offering them accommodation, hey, if, you know, I’ve seen what you look like, we’ve seen each other, we’ve smiled. If you’d like to turn off your camera, if you’re more comfortable, that’d be okay. Somebody with ADHD might want to play with a fidget toy and doesn’t want you to see them doing that. Right. Somebody with autism may not be comfortable having to look at the camera or look at the screen and figure out which one I should be looking at to make eye contact. And you kind of take that away and make them feel a little bit more comfortable, create that accessible environment.
Matt Alder [00:15:34]:
Absolutely. And I think that the eye contact thing is really an interesting one because again, this is kind of about making the recruiting process better, because I know that from kind of past experience that, you know, there are hiring managers and recruiters who will make judgments about people in an interview process based on things like eye contact or handshakes or things like that, things that are kind of irrelevant to their performance in the job, but particularly affect neurodiverse people. And I suppose it’s kind of by dealing with that, we’re kind of making recruiting better because we’re focusing on judging people by the skills that they actually have.
Ron Fish [00:16:12]:
Yeah. And that’s another way you can build your job descriptions is really focus on skills and abilities as opposed to, you know, what somebody, you know absolutely needs to have or this long, long, you know, we’ve all seen it as recruiters, this long laundry list of nice to haves. Well, that’s intimidating for individuals that maybe maybe of a different ability level. Right. They’re, you know, looking at that, going, I can’t possibly measure up to that. But if we really focus on skills and abilities and in the interview focus on skills and abilities and don’t ask trick questions about how to build or how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Describe the process or I have a plane full of jelly beans. Describe the process you would build to unload it. You know, things, these crazy questions. Managers think, think they’re gamifying interviews, but they’re not. They’re really making candidates uncomfortable.
Matt Alder [00:17:04]:
No, absolutely. Although I was thinking, to be honest, if you had adhd, some of those questions would be kind of, kind of rabbit hole that you might want to go down. And I guess also it’s, it’s important that people are treated as individuals, not, not as labels. And people don’t make assumptions about what they can do and can’t do.
Ron Fish [00:17:23]:
Yeah. Building a team with multiple perspectives, you definitely, when you look at the neurodivergent conditions, many of those individuals come in with innovative ideas. They see things from different perspectives. Like you said, there might be a rabbit hole that you’re eager to go down to really dig in and do the research, to find the information where somebody who’s neurotypical may not see the sense in it, but it could be a game changer for teams. So when you have people coming from different ability levels, different walks of life, building a diverse team, there is something to be said for it, you know, to have some more seasoned veterans as well as some that are younger in their career. I think it’s super valuable for companies.
Matt Alder [00:18:08]:
And what would your advice to employers be? I suppose kind of by way of summary of a lot of the things that you’ve been talking about already. But what would your advice to employers be in terms of, you know, how to get the sort of the biggest impact in the sort of the shortest time.
Ron Fish [00:18:21]:
With all of this, I would say, well, I mean, if you want a quick impact, spend money because you can begin to make partnerships. Have banners to share out on your social media, have logos that you can share. So if you do have some money, instead of giving the money from, to a charity, give money to, to an organization that promotes disability inclusion in the workplace. And I think that’s the biggest gap for employers out there. Again, we’re all empathetic by nature in most regards. So what happens with disabilities? The reason that only 5% of employers in the US, even in the UK, Matt, I think the number is like 4 to 5% of employers include disability in their diversity initiatives. And the reason for that isn’t that there’s no empathy or companies don’t care about it. They typically look at it as charity. So they move disability to the charity side and say, well, let’s give money to the Special Olympics or some other disability organization where if they funnel it more in the direction of workplace inclusion and to make an impact for people with disabilities, that’s really where they need to, you know, where the game changer would be. Because individuals with disabilities don’t want to just be your inspiration. They want you to hire them. You know, they want a job.
Matt Alder [00:19:43]:
Absolutely. And what do you think the future looks like? Because, you know, there’s certainly been a lot of progress in the last few years around this, but as you say, there’s still a long way to go. But you know, with everything that’s kind of going on in the world at the moment, particularly kind of around sort of de and I. Do you hope that we’ll make more progress? What do you think the future might look like?
Ron Fish [00:20:04]:
So when we talk specifically about disability, inclusion and accessibility, I think there’s a difference. So, yeah, there’s definitely an evolving ecosystem out there relating to how diversity is being looked at in the US Even in the UK today. With that said, when we look at people with disabilities, we still have the Americans with Disabilities act in the US and we have the EAA in Europe, which, you know, is. Is directly governing, you know, even the UK itself. So with that, and we look at things as more of a federal regulation, federal guidelines, I don’t think they’re going to be impacted quite as much. Calling it a diversity initiative might be looked at a little bit differently, but I think we can still work in this regard, make a big impact. So I don’t necessarily see it making a huge difference in this area, only that I hope companies who may not be focusing in some of the other diversity sectors, 90% are focused on gender diversity in the workplace, 75% are focused on race and ethnicity in the workplace. With only 5% of employers focused on disability, hopefully more will engage in that area. And I’m trying to be one of those voices, one of many that are out there on LinkedIn and other platforms trying to make an impact and get the word out that let’s move disability from the charity side to how can we impact the workplace.
Matt Alder [00:21:32]:
Ron, thank you so much for talking to me.
Ron Fish [00:21:34]:
Yeah, thank you, Matt. I really appreciate this and you continuing to give me a voice out there to hopefully make an impact for my colleagues and other employers in the business community.
Matt Alder [00:21:46]:
My thanks to Ron. You can follow this podcast on Apple, podcasts on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track on everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
