Perfectly Able: How to Attract and Hire Talented People With Disabilities

Perfectly Able is your all-in-one guide to finding and keeping some of your best, most valuable employees. Packed with firsthand accounts of how people with disabilities handle workplace challenges and real-world examples of innovative HR strategies used by major corporations, Perfectly Able offers insights from eSight Careers Network, Lighthouse International’s online resource for job seekers, employers, and small businesses. The book:

• Provides useful information about how to recruit talented individuals with a disability and strengthen your team’s productivity

• Redefines diversity, arguing that the “numbers game” approach is an outdated concept and that full inclusion is the new diversity

• Calls attention to often undetected “special employment” attitudes that can create artificial limits for people who have disabilities

• Supplies dozens of interview questions for pinpointing people with the qualities and skills your organization or company needs

• Provides tips about how to translate a candidate’s volunteer or entrepreneurial achievements into corporate workplace experience

• Outlines effective recruitment strategies for locating top job candidates with disabilities

• Explodes the myth that ADA’s accommodation guidelines make it too expensive to employ workers with disabilities

This insightful, paradigm-busting book will help you redefine your recruitment and hiring practices and open your eyes to the untapped potential for building a truly diverse and inclusive workforce.

Lighthouse International, founded in 1905, is the leading nonprofit organization dedicated to fighting vision loss through prevention, treatment, and empowerment. The organization’s headquarters is in New York City.

Jim Hasse, ABC, GCDF, is owner of Hasse Communication Counseling, which specializes in developing, marketing, and facilitating online communities that focus on disability issues. He served as senior content developer for eSight Career Network, where he wrote and edited more than a thousand articles about career management from a disability perspective, and, prior to that, was head of corporate communications for Foremost Farms USA. He is an Accredited Business Communicator and Global Career Development Facilitator and the author of Break Out: Finding Freedom When You Don’t Quite Fit the Mold.

Advance Praise for Perfectly Able:

“Too many employers and their recruiters are unaware that addressing a disability is often only a matter of mechanics. There’s a too-common assumption that being disabled means being unable. That robs an employer of the opportunity to consider people with disabilities as intelligent, capable, and often innovative people who just happen to have some faculty in disrepair.” — Katy Jo Meyer, technical recruiter, Microsoft Corporation

“We need a constructive dialogue between job seekers with disabilities and employers. Both are passing each other by—sometimes missing each other by miles. This book is intended to assist all employers and all job seekers to find one another. Not connecting is a loss for us all.” — John D. Kemp, Executive Director, U.S. Business Leadership Network

“Perfectly Able is full of insight and practical help for both job applicants and employ­ers [that] is utterly compelling and convincing. . . . Every employer in the world should have a copy on his or her desk.” — Robert W. Fuller, former President of Oberlin College and author of Somebodies and Nobodies: Overcoming the Abuse of Rank