Meeting the quota : the challenges encountered by employers when employing people with disability

Abstract

With the quota of 2% for persons with disabilities to be employed with companies employing twenty people or more being enforced in 2015 by the Maltese Government, many companies are paying large fines for not being able to meet this requirement. This research study set out to identify the challenges that employers are facing when trying to meet the quota, in order to understand what makes employers be portrayed as discriminating blatantly against persons with disabilities. Adopting a qualitative design, individual interviews were held with nine participants coming from five different fields within the private sector. All participants were human resource managers who are directly involved within the recruitment process of their organisation. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the data collected. The results acknowledged the fact that employers do not meet the quota as required by law, not because companies do not want to employ persons with disabilities, but because they face challenges, some of which can be seen to by the company itself, whereas other challenges go beyond the employers’ control. These results were grouped into four different themes: the type of disability, the type of job or role, the organisation and the legislation. It is interesting to note that some of the challenges that emerged from the research study confirmed the barriers and challenges that exist and which were discussed in the literature review at the beginning of the study. The study concludes by providing some recommendations that might be adopted in order to ease the challenges that emerged from the findings. Additionally, recommendations for future research studies were made at the end, with the hope of addressing the literature gap that currently exists locally with regards to persons with disability and employment.