The most deserving jobseeker may be waiting downstairs…

Even after founding the all-time finest tech company in the world, Apple, Steve continued to be described by persons close to him as a “reality distortion” person, a man of awkward manners and a vegetarian who will work the whole week without bathing his body . His was turned down severally as he attempted to secure a deal for his outlandish tech dreams. And like one of British finest Prime Ministers, Tony Blair, he would have been laughed at by the team who recruit for the London metro bus transport system.

And I am sure that if Capt {Retd} Prince Amoabeng had not headed for our nation’s proud military, his chances of ever making an impression sound enough to secure him an office in a company as prestigious as the one he founded would have been a near impossible feat.

A lot of men and women who run our HR offices are the ones who, when they are recruiting, bet their chances on the candidates who usually lie in the fiftieth, sixtieth and at best seventieth percentiles. Candidates in these categories are the ones who fit into the general context, are not “weird” and often have a fetishist adoration for the status-quo and almost always listen and act almost thoughtlessly to the so-called social norms.

They usually have attended the “right schools” and ended up with an easily employable degree. Even though their natural predisposition leads them towards the liberal arts or a certain branch of science like food and nutrition, entomology, botany, they have ended up with a first class honours in business administration.

Smart as they are, the candidates in these categories know how to hunt jobs: they pay to get groomed for a job interview by some of the very best little firms who specialise in these services. At the interview, they will awe all the interviewers; outmatch the real gems and book a prestigious seat in one of the offices of the company.

Physical looks The gem is sometimes and oftentimes, the person we think is handicapped in a non-physical way because they do not behave the way a lot of us who fall in the above category behave.

The lady with squinted eyes and the gentleman candidate wearing highly medicated glasses may not make it past the preliminary stages of screening because of the conditions of their eyes. But with same eye condition, these jobseekers have competed with the most talented and certified by their universities as fit for any job within their fields of study. Except where such trivial visual conditions compromise productivity and/or expose the victim to one form of danger or another, it will be narrow-minded and even silly to rule out candidates on grounds such as a minor visual challenge.

A midget jobseeker competing with the rest of the candidates whose heights are considered acceptable will have a herculean task ahead. Except where humans serve as forklifts on the floor of the factory or warehouse, of what use is a candidate’s so-called height?

In a world where the top cities are competing with each other over which community has the tallest buildings, candidates who are height-challenged may suffer a predisposition that makes them second fiddles in a race for survival that was supposed to be fair and focus solely on productivity traits.

The treatment we mete out to the physically challenged, either as persons with no power to decide who is the next newcomer to join the company or the head of HR in whose hands vast powers lie, is often lamentable. It is painful that the wretched stories of the handicapped jobseekers have been so told that these spirit-ravaging accounts have become romanticised fictions that we have all over-rehearsed and turned into mantras.

From the candidate with the squint eyes all the way to the ones whose limbs were wickedly damaged either by polio or a sickness in the same vile class or a mere car accident, countless number of hurdles have to be overcome by these jobseekers. Even in job settings where the physicality is not relevant and no extra resources of significance are necessary to make these jobseekers functional, some HRs have never proposed even a simple office entrance that is friendly to these victims.

But in real life, who is walking under the sun without one form of disability or another? Considered from a broader perspective, humans are a miserable flock suffering from sicknesses visible and unseen. Many of us have only succeeded in passing ourselves as socially acceptable. But behind the scenes, we battle worse maladies than the ones that have afflicted the persons we victimise.

We could be spiritually dumb, dumber than the lady the HR rejects because she has a vocal impairment, has a squint, is vertically challenged or is simply awkward in manners. On the emotional scale as well as considering the excellence of the intellect, we (including the HR) could be sicker than the intelligent, diploma-holding polio victim jobseekers we leave behind in the basement because our offices have no stairs for persons with physical infirmities.