Four out of seven employers that have embedded a disability framework within their own organisation aimed at barrier-free recruitment of people with disabilities have ditched agency suppliers for failing to meet sufficiently high standards on disability. 

So says Gareth Headley, commercial director at the Clear Company, a disability advisory firm that carries out disability audits on employers. The Clear Company’s ClearAssured Programme assesses employers’ progress towards best practice in recruiting disabled people, including the use of candidate feedback and ‘mystery shoppers’.

Headley says he expects the proportion of ClearAssured clients who stop using suppliers because they fail to match up to  expected standards to increase to between 80% and 90%.  

Headley warns that recruitment agencies are no further along the road towards understanding disability and to complying with the law than they were a year ago, when ClearAssured began.

“The comment that we get the most are that recruitment companies don’t see disabled candidates because we are in engineering, construction or technical, but frankly that’s because they don’t understand what disabled means,” says Headley. “We are still at the awareness-building stage.”

Headley says that employers are increasingly looking to reduce the risks of not complying with disability legislation, notably the Equality Act 2010.

He tells Recruiter that some of the seven companies, which have embedded ClearAssured within their own organisations, are asking the agencies on their preferred supplier lists (PSLs) to go through the same ClearAssured process.  

“Some are insisting that their suppliers use the ClearAssured Programme,” adds Headley, though others he says are not insisting on this programme, but just looking for evidence that their suppliers are addressing the issue of disability and complying with the law. 

BT and E.ON are among the companies that have embedded ClearAssured within their own organisations. [For more on how E.ON is working towards barrier-free recruitment for people with disabilities, please see the September issue of Recruiter.]

Both ClearAssured and ClearKit, another Clear Company service, were developed in conjunction with the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP). 

Agencies pay a range of fees for the ClearAssured audit depending on their size. The Clear Company, a private limited company, also generates income from sponsorship on its website. 

ClearKit includes a range of free services, including online information and advice such as top-level guidance, top tips and checklists. Other ClearKit services must be paid for.

The DWP tells Recruiter that it “fully endorses the free section of ClearKit’s offering” which includes online information, top tips and checklists. However, the DWP says it “is not able to support paid-for content for propriety reasons”.