Employment Consulting & Expert Services

London | Miami

  

Employment Aviation News

Articles & News

GMR consultants are experts in their fields, providing consulting and
expert witness testimony to leading companies worldwide.

Following an Employment Appeal Tribunal decision, an applicant with Asperger’s syndrome was found to have been unfairly disadvantaged by an online multiple-choice psychometric test and in future, persons recruiting for employees will have to – where necessary – make adjustments to the format of recruitment assessments for the disabled.

The claim was brought by an aspiring lawyer, Ms Brookes - who has Asperger’s syndrome and who applied for a job as a trainee solicitor with the government Legal Service (GLS), having successfully completed her university law degree.

To test candidates’ ability to make effective decisions, the very competitive recruitment process - with several thousand applicants a year applying for just 35 places - starts with an online situational judgment test (SJT), which uses multiple-choice questions.  Because of her condition, Ms Brookes asked the GLS if she could submit her answers in a short narrative form, but she was informed that an alternative format was not available.  However, GLS did inform Ms Brookes that provision could be made for an extension of time to complete the SJT. She completed the SJT in its multiple-choice format, but she only scored 12 out of 22 and the pass mark to enable her progression to the next stage of the recruitment process was 14.

Ms Brookes represented herself successfully throughout the tribunal.  She brought claims against GLS for indirect disability discrimination; discrimination arising from a disability and failure to comply with the duty to make reasonable adjustments.

The employment tribunal accepted that the multiple-choice format put her at a particular disadvantage because of her condition.  Ms Brookes provided the ET with extensive medical evidence that her Asperger’s meant she "lacked social imagination and so had difficulties in imaginative and counter-factual reasoning in hypothetical scenarios".  This is an essential requirement for success in the multiple-choice SJT.

The employment tribunal accepted that GLS’s testing for core competencies in an efficient manner was a legitimate aim, but decided that it was not ‘a proportionate means of achieving that aim’, as there are other less discriminatory methods of testing.  GLS’s actions were also found to amount to ‘discrimination arising in consequence of Ms Brookes’ disability’. By refusing to allow Ms Brookes to provide answers in an alternative format to multiple-choice selection, the employment tribunal found GLS to have failed in its duty to make ‘reasonable adjustments’.

The employment tribunal recommended that GLS issue Ms Brookes with a formal written apology and review its recruitment procedures in relation to disabled job applicants.  Ms Brookes was also made a compensation award.

GLS appealed the decision, but the Employment Appeal Tribunal agreed with the employment tribunal assessment that the adjustments suggested by Ms Brookes had been reasonable, and GLS’s unwillingness to implement them amounted to a failure to comply with the duty to make reasonable adjustments.

This case shows the dangers of rigid thinking by employers when it comes to recruitment, and the importance of considering reasonable adjustments for disabled applicants. A willingness to be flexible and to consider potential alternative methods for such assessments is essential to avoiding successful claims of disability discrimination