PWD: HR's Lost Pool

Every hard look at the road ahead for India's tech and BPO industries
returns a scary HR picture-of the Gap. We'll get the business, but where are
the people?

An old friend, scientist Sugata Mitra, uses speech-to-text software that
color-tags a candidate on speaking ability. Green is good, employable. Yellow is
trainable. Red is not OK. The BPO companies, he says, scramble for the 'green
guys', run out of them, then hunt for the yellow ones. (And no one's really
working on shifting the red majority into the yellow band.)

Industry persons go further. They ran out of the 'green guys'. They're
running out of the yellow ones.

But there's another invisible group spanning these bands. Over 70 mn people
with disabilities, PWDs. Often employable or trainable but for their disability,
they're rarely appropriately employed.

Many companies have inclusion and diversity policies. But a program to
recruit a PWD starts out a CSR activity, is passed on to HR, then on to the SBU:
where the manager sees a liability. And most workplaces don't have access
facilities: ramps, washrooms, Braille, software.

There's some change. With a few figuring out that it isn't CSR, but good
HR and good sense. Hotel chain Welcomgroup, which started with blind pianists
and moved on to PWD recruits in areas including reservations and data entry,
finds them better employees: more stable, dedicated-and productive. Anubhuti,
a small Delhi-based HR consultancy that has placed over 80 PWDs in companies
such as IBM Daksh, Hewitt, GE Money, Efunds, and others, cites similar response
from them.

There are deaf data entry operators, wheelchair bound call center CSAs, blind
HR executives and voice/soft-skills trainers. A Bangalore-based domestic call
center employs blind CSAs. A few software companies have blind programmers, who
work with software like Jaws. (Arun Mehta, who has worked in this area along
with the National Association for the Blind, describes as revolutionary other
open source, Linux-based access tools, from Gnopernicus, to emacspeak-which
“creates a true audio desktop”.)

It isn't, then, about CSR, or PWDs, though those are starting points for
many. It's about a talent pool that may be lying untapped, while the world is
hunting for people.

What will it take to tap this pool? CSR, HR policy, access facilities...they
help, but aren't the key. The challenge is in the mind of the manager who says
“good idea, but for some other SBU”. The key is in getting the CEO
convinced, interested and driving this.

The US and Europe are far better off on access and inclusion. If India
aspires to globalization, this is one rung of the ladder, which straddles a big
gap.

In the year ahead we'll watch this area. Do you have a success-or
other-story, with PWD recruits? Write to me.