Leaving school and entering the labour market is an important but often challenging step for young people with disabilities. While many societies commit to education for all and invest in all students’ learning potential, access to the labour market is not guaranteed (Pérez, 2018; Tschanz & Powell, 2020). Employers play a crucial role in enabling the transition into employment, as they act as gatekeepers who decide who is hired and who is not. However, many are reluctant to hire people with disabilities, anticipating reduced work performance and the burden of providing workplace or job accommodations (Bonaccio et al., 2020; Nagtegaal et al., 2023). Meanwhile, positive views on implementation of workplace and job accommodations, such as flexible work arrangements, the provision of extra support or rearranging duties, have been shown to be positively associated with attitudes towards hiring people with disabilities (D’Souza & Kuntz, 2023). Building on this literature, the present study investigates whether employer support for workplace and job accommodations increases the chances that young people with disabilities are considered for a job. The study draws on data from a factorial survey experiment embedded in a broader employer survey conducted in Switzerland. Employers and human resources personnel from different occupational sectors were sampled from real job vacancies and company registries and presented five short vignettes describing young job candidates. The vignettes were experimentally varied across several characteristics, including gender, migration background, and type of disability. Employers rated each candidate’s chances of being considered for a job on an 11-point scale. The survey also included an adapted version of the Job Accommodation Scale (JAS; Shaw et al., 2014) measuring support for workplace and job accommodations. The analytic sample of 304 recruiters and 1520 vignette evaluations was analysed using multilevel random-intercept models with the lme4 package in R, accounting for the nested structure of the data. Overall, employers and human resources personnel rated candidates with disabilities lower than candidates without disabilities. However, the disability penalty decreased as employer support for workplace and job accommodations increased, particularly for young people with a physical disability. These findings suggest that fostering supportive employer attitudes towards workplace and job accommodations may improve the employment prospects of young people with disabilities.

Bonaccio, S., Connelly, C. E., Gellatly, I. R., Jetha, A., & Martin Ginis, K. A. (2020). The Participation of People with Disabilities in the Workplace Across the Employment Cycle: Employer Concerns and Research Evidence. Journal of Business and Psychology, 35(2), 135–158. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-018-9602-5 Nagtegaal, R., De Boer, N., Van Berkel, R., Derks, B., & Tummers, L. (2023). Why Do Employers (Fail to) Hire People with Disabilities? A Systematic Review of Capabilities, Opportunities and Motivations. Journal of Occupational Rehabilitation, 33(2), 329–340. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10926-022-10076-1 Pérez, J. L. R. (2018). Una revisión de los conceptos de accesibilidad, apoyos y ajustes razonables para su aplicación en el ámbito laboral. Derechos y Libertades, 39(2), 259–284. https://doi.org/10.14679/1089 Shaw, W. S., Kristman, V. L., Williams-Whitt, K., Soklaridis, S., Huang, Y.-H., Côté, P., & Loisel, P. (2014). The Job Accommodation Scale (JAS): Psychometric Evaluation of a New Measure of Employer Support for Temporary Job Modifications. Journal of Occupational Rehabilitation, 24(4), 755–765. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10926-014-9508-7 Tschanz, C., & Powell, J. J. W. (2020). Competing Institutional Logics and Paradoxical Universalism: School-to-Work Transitions of Disabled Youth in Switzerland and the United States. Social Inclusion, 8(1), 155–167. https://doi.org/10.17645/si.v8i1.2373