When employees feel left out at work, they’re more likely to leave their jobs. And yet, 48% of US adults who are blind, deafblind, or have low vision report facing accessibility challenges with digital onboarding forms before they’ve even started their jobs, according to a study released in January by the American Foundation for the Blind.

Some companies, including Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, have taken a proactive approach to accessible technology and disability hiring. Microsoft’s focus on accessibility and disability inclusion in the workplace even predates Clippy.

HR Brew caught up with chief accessibility officer Jenny Lay-Flurrie, who is proudly Deaf, at the 2022 Disability:IN Conference to learn more about Microsoft’s accessibility efforts.

The Microsoft approach. Since its first disability hiring initiatives in the late 1990s, Microsoft has taken a holistic approach to ensuring disability inclusion for everyone, whether or not they identify as disabled. “When any new employee comes to Microsoft, they have mandatory accessibility training,” explained Lay-Flurrie. “When they’re in their new employee orientation, they are taught about the disability group [and] about benefits and accommodations. It is on every piece of literature that we can put it on.” The company also offers more than 22 disability communities, a Neurodiversity Hiring Program, and hackathons led by disabled people.

In April 2021, Microsoft announced a five-year commitment to new accessibility efforts, in part through creating more and affordable accessible technology and increasing its number of disabled employees. Keep reading here.—KP

Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @Kris10Parisi on Twitter. For completely confidential conversations, ask Kristen for her number on Signal.

If recruiters were to collectively lampoon one aspect of their jobs, like the comedian Jeff Ross at nearly every Comedy Central Roast, what do you wager they’d target?

For Meta recruiter Nicole Fernandez-Valle, cover letters are downright useless. In a LinkedIn post that went viral earlier this month, Fernandez-Valle detailed her gripes with the hiring-process formality, opening with, “I’m a recruiter and I hate cover letters.”

The denizens of the internet were spurred to action and descended upon the post with a flurry of comments, many of which disagreed with Fernandez-Valle’s stance. “I strongly disagree…The interest and motivation of a candidate to the role cannot just be implied because they have sent their application,” wrote Konstantinos Voulgaris, a career counselor and recruiter in Greece.

Jan Johnston Osburn, a career success coach and résumé writer, also offered a different take: “I’m not particularly a fan of cover letters and I’ve only read a few from candidates that were great. However, there are those hiring managers (and they may be in the minority) that really like to see what you say in a cover letter.”

Not the first time. This isn’t the first time someone has questioned the efficacy of the cover letter. To wit, here are five examples asking whether it has officially met its demise. Given the polarizing, well-documented debate, it’s no wonder Ferndanez-Valle’s post drew commenters like a 10,0000-watt light bulb next to a moth farm.

Hey, you. Yes, YOU, there in the back. What do you make of all this noise? Should candidates sell themselves through a formal letter, or can they do it in other ways that might be more relevant to the job they’re applying to, particularly if it isn’t a writing-intensive role?

Join the discussion on HR Brew’s LinkedIn page, or reply to this email with your thoughts.—SB

Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @SammBlum on Twitter. For completely confidential conversations, ask Sam for his number on Signal.

We hope you’re sitting down, ’cause do we have news for you…HR, it turns out, is busy.

You’ve seen the data. Since the beginning of the pandemic, study after study after study has come to the same conclusion: HR departments are generally understaffed, overworked, unhappy, and burning out.

You’ve heard the story. HR professionals have been asked to do more—usually much more—often with less. Over 40% of respondents to a 2021 SHRM survey of global HR leaders said they had too many projects and too few staff to complete them.

You’ve probably seen the result. As one HR employee told us anonymously in October, creating Covid testing policies took over his fall.

“I don’t ever stop working anymore,” he told HR Brew. “Figuring out this [testing] mess takes 150% of my day.”

Though many Covid-related challenges are in the rearview mirror, new challenges, such as a potential economic downturn, continue to threaten work-life balance.

Last week, we asked readers if they’ve been logging more hours since the beginning of the pandemic: 60% said yes, while 40% said no.

For those in the 60%, experts recommend setting boundaries to preserve personal time.

“Whether it is blocking your calendar for a lunch workout, meditation time, or setting aside two nights per week where everyone knows you don’t check and won’t respond to messages—unapologetically set boundaries and stick to them to ensure you are recharging,” Kimberly Paris, director of human resources at Penn State Behrend, told HR Executive.

If you’re worried work won’t get done, Sharon Kittredje, VP of people at streaming platform Agora, says to “delegate aggressively.”

As she told SHRM, “One trap HR folks fall into is believing they have to do it all, all the time.”—SV

Today’s top HR reads.

Stat: A tech firm that adopted a hybrid work arrangement reduced its attrition rate by 35%. (National Bureau of Economic Research)

Quote: “We are experiencing one of the tightest labor markets in history and if an employer is not willing to train and upskill its workforce, its employees may begin to look for an employer that will.”—Richard Wahlquist, president and CEO of the American Staffing Association, on why he believes employers need to invest in their employees’ skills (WorkLife)

Read: When Starbucks and Chipotle announced plans to close some stores where employees had unionized, citing safety issues and other unrelated concerns, some wondered: Is this union busting? (Quartz)

Support your managers: Managers bear the weight of linking company strategy to day-to-day action—and it’s a lot! Humu helps them succeed with timely, personalized, and easy-to-implement nudges. Request a demo today.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content.}