Graduate Recruiter’s Disability Café (GR’4)
Hosted by Linklaters
The key question continually being asked by recruiters is how to engage with disabled students. Careers services, disability officers and other student bodies are key in reaching out to disabled graduates. Recruiters need to understand how to work with all of these departments if they are to be more successful in reaching their target market.
On 15 June 2011, MyPlus Consulting hosted more than 40 delegates for a Graduate Recruiter’s Disability Café looking at how recruiters can more closely work with relevant university departments to better engage with disabled students. Delegates included a number of Careers Advisers and Disability Managers from various universities, recruiters representing a wide range of different companies, as well as a number of disabled students and graduates.
Following the same format as previously, delegates listened to key note speakers share their insights into how different university departments work to support disabled students, interspersed with rounds of café style discussion in small groups. During these discussions delegates were asked to consider what opportunities there were to develop relationships with university departments that they previously hadn’t considered.
Anne Dutton and Lizzie Darlington, Careers Advisers at Oxford University spoke in depth about how they work to support disabled students from pre-entry to post graduation. They highlight the particular challenges that disabled students face and some of the different ways that they aim to address these.
Vikki Chinn, Careers Advisor, and Nicola Martin, Welfare Officer at LSE, spoke about the Transition Event they hosted earlier this year for their disabled students. The event was designed to build the confidence and knowledge of disabled students to successfully apply for graduate careers.
The outputs from the event were graphically recorded by Doug Cameron of Grass Hopper Design. Click here to view a sample of the recordings.
Feedback from the event has, once again, been overwhelmingly positive. In addition to the learnings gained, delegates particularly benefited from meeting and hearing from disabled graduates about how they work with both the careers services and, more importantly, the Disability Officers.
Thanks go to hosts Linklaters for their amazing hospitality.
