A partnership that turned out to be a boon for CDT’s Hearing Impaired (HI) candidates, the relationship between CDT and Amazon’s facility at Hoskote is a story of continued success. Starting from a facility visit to ensure levels of disability friendliness & accessibility, the team from CDT soon learned that a clause in Amazon’s hiring policies had thus far prevented any HI candidates from being hired. This policy necessitated a sign-language interpreter on-roll as an employee of Amazon before any interviews with HI candidates could be conducted. Up until that time, Amazon’s hiring team had been unsuccessful in finding a sign-language interpreter available to join them immediately and were also unable to work with external consultants on a retainer basis as that is was also forbidden by Amazon’s policies.
Given that CDT had just finished a Livelihood Training Program and had 17 HI students ready for recruitment, the team was adamant to not let this opportunity slip away for want of an interpreter. More importantly, the team also was also working against the clock to not allow Amazon’s team to have second thoughts on the entire process due to the inherent challenges associated with interviewing and hiring people with disabilities.
In the end, CDT’s team was able to meet its goal of having Amazon as a recruitment partner. It accomplished this by:
- Coordinating with Amazon’s hiring team for two walk-in recruitment drives.
- Providing accommodation support for the candidates who were not from Bangalore.
- Accompanying the candidates as they appeared for the interview. This was necessary as Amazon’s facility is in an interior part of Hoskote.
- Arranging for an interpreter to be available for the entire recruitment process.
- Providing post-placement support to the recruited candidates in terms of location awareness and familiarity with Amazon’s own in-house transport services.
- Lastly assisting Amazon with the training and development of their newly hired in-house sign-language interpreter.