From the Wall Street Journal:

Only 38 percent of working-age people with disabilities have a job, compared with 78 percent of those without disabilities. Over the past few years, companies have begun trying to bring more people with disabilities into the professional workforce

One such effort was launched by Rich Donovan, a former Merrill Lynch trader who has cerebral palsy. He founded LimeConnect to recruit qualified people with disabilities for corporate jobs. The organization matches disabled college-level and professional candidates with companies that include Merrill, Goldman Sachs, PepsiCo and Google.

This initiative is aimed to benefit both employees and employers. With a shrinking labor pool in the U.S., employers need more capable workers. They also gain better access to a pool of potential customers that is estimated at one in every 10 consumers.

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.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 11:58 am and is filed under ADA, employment/jobs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.