Small Empires: How Equipped are Small Business Owners to Hire People with Disabilities?

This study explores small businesses’ knowledge base and practices concerning interviewing and hiring job candidates with disabilities, as they are not required to comply with the provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). We first conducted 18 in-depth interviews with small business owners to explore their knowledge of the ADA, their practices surrounding hiring (for those with and without disabilities), and their sense of the best practices for how a candidate should navigate the interview and request for accommodations. Responses were then used to create a survey of an additional 110 small business owners. Six themes arose from the interviews, illuminating the steep learning curve involved in each (1) hiring well, (2) the need to trust an employee’s character as much as their skill set, (3) the need for an employee to fit within the small business’s family-like environment, (4) the preference for job candidates to be transparent about their needs as early as possible, (5) the importance of personal experience with disability, and (6) the difficulty in obtaining precise information about the ADA. Survey responses supported the general findings of the interviews while also providing information about the relative rarity of encountering a job candidate with a disability. Hiring employees with disabilities is challenging for small businesses, and bias is difficult to avoid. The availability of clear information on how to comply with the ADA and other laws and practices would be welcome by many small business owners.