Make the Flexible Version the Default So Nobody Has to Disclose

Why is a low request rate not good news?

The disclosure decision runs before your process does, and it filters. A candidate weighing whether to ask is weighing whether asking will be remembered in the debrief, and plenty decide it will. So the number of requests you receive is not the number of people who needed one. Read a rate near zero as a fact about the invitation you sent.

The law sets the bar for what counts as asking very low, which cuts against treating requests as a tidy queue. Under the EEOC's 2022 technical assistance, a candidate who says a medical condition may make a test difficult, or may produce a result the employer finds less acceptable, has requested a reasonable accommodation, without mentioning the ADA and without using the phrase ¹. A request can therefore arrive in a reply to a recruiter, in a chat window, or in a sentence somebody nearly deleted. A process that only recognises requests arriving through one form has already missed some.

That also means the form was never the design problem. Application-stage accommodation is old ground: the EEOC's 2002 enforcement guidance, still published on eeoc.gov, says an employer must accommodate a qualified applicant with a disability so that person has an equal opportunity to participate in the application process and to be considered, absent undue hardship ². Neither document is law. Both carry the disclaimer saying so, and the 2022 one has been off the agency's website since January 2025.

Make the common requests the default

List what candidates have actually asked you for, then price giving each of those things to everyone. The cheap ones usually look like this. Questions in advance. No camera requirement. A choice between speaking and typing. A window measured in days rather than a countdown. Notes and reference material allowed. Most of that costs nothing, and several items improve the signal for every candidate, because they remove variance that was never about the job.

Surveillance is the default worth examining hardest, because opting out of it is the most conspicuous thing a candidate can ask for. Sixteen interviews with university students who hold documented testing accommodations and had sat online proctored exams found recurring anxiety about how the monitoring interacts with their disability, fear of being misread, and added cognitive load during the exam itself ³. Sixteen interviews establish that the harm occurs and describe its shape; they cannot say how common it is. The mechanism transfers to hiring directly, because the behaviours a monitoring system treats as suspicious are behaviours some candidates cannot avoid. What you owe somebody before recording anything is set out in recording a candidate's screen during a work sample.

A default has a second property worth naming: it is auditable. You can show the document, and it applies to people who never spoke to you. An exception process leaves a trail only where somebody asked, so the candidates it failed are invisible in it by construction. That is the same measurement problem that makes a disability adverse-impact number impossible to compute.

What does a real route have to do that a form does not?

Three things, and a linked form usually does none of them. It has to be visible where the candidate is still deciding whether to start. It has to reach somebody who is not evaluating the candidate. And it has to ask about the format, because before an offer the person is off the table ⁴.

That third one is statutory. 42 U.S.C. 12112(d)(2) bars a pre-offer medical examination and any inquiry into whether an applicant has a disability, or its nature or severity, while expressly allowing questions about the ability to perform job-related functions ⁴. So the question you may ask is what someone would need in order to do this exercise. The question you may not ask is why. Keep the exchange on the limitation and the adjustment that answers it, and the condition itself never has to reach you. Which questions your own process can safely ask is a matter to confirm with counsel before the invitation goes out.

What follows is a conversation. The regulation at 29 CFR 1630.2(o)(3) says it may be necessary to start an informal, interactive process with the individual, one that should identify the precise limitations and the accommodations that could overcome them ⁵. Read the verbs, because they are permissive. This is not a workflow with service levels, and it requires no portal and no policy document. It requires somebody to reply, and to have the authority to change the exercise.

Put the route in the invitation, not the footer

Rewrite one sentence of the assessment invitation you already send. Name the flexibility available to everybody by default, then name a person for anything beyond it, then say what asking changes. Three clauses, before the link, in the same type size as the rest. Anything a candidate has to scroll past the start button to find was written for a file.

A version that does the work:

> This exercise takes most people about an hour, and the window is open for four days. There is no camera and no monitoring software. You can work through it out loud or in writing, whichever suits you. If a different format would work better, write to [the named coordinator], who is not involved in evaluating the work. Asking changes the format and nothing else.

Every clause is doing a job. The duration lets a candidate plan without setting a deadline they can fail. The absence of monitoring is stated outright, so nobody has to wonder. The choice of channel removes the most common request without anyone having to make it. The named contact sits outside the evaluation. And the last sentence answers the fear that produced the low request rate, which is the only sentence some candidates will read twice.

Then check the thing an invitation cannot fix. If the exercise itself requires a capability the job does not, no sentence in an email makes that acceptable, and the repair is upstream in the assessment. An invitation is where a good process becomes legible to the person on the other side of it. It is not where a bad one gets forgiven.

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