Employers reveal excluding candidates with mental illness, disability and age in new report
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-17/employers-excluding-candidates-with-mental-illness-disability/106459246?utm_source=abc_news_app&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_app&utm_content=other
36 Comments
Or as a hiring manager would say:
>They’re just not the right fit for the team.
lol this is SO not a surprise
This is common sense. Businesses don’t want instability or liability.
Argh – I’m a candidate with age!
That’s why you never tick those diversity questions.
That’s why these invasive questions are a joke. Yes accommodations are important but you shouldn’t HAVE to disclose anything until the interview process, preferably after. Every single job straight away asking you to list disabilities makes it impossible to land a job, however if you don’t do it and need an accommodation or a day off you get in shit for lying on the resume. It’s the same for jobs asking for your sexuality and gender, why do you need to know if I am a gay or transgender individual? Why on earth would I answer yes if I was?
When there are other candidates available it’s an easy pick if you are an employer.
That’s why people don’t answer these invasive questions truthfully
57, male. Chronic Pain disability. On depression meds.
Yep. Impossible to find work.
That’s why, speaking as a person with mental illness, I do not disclose. I know I probably won’t get any accommodations for it anyway, so why risk it?
This is really not surprising. Employers always want the best and most capable employee who is the least hard work and needs the least special arrangements, preferably for the least money. If you have any disability, that is immediately making it harder for the employer, before they are en get to know how good you might be.
Yes, this absolutely happens. Probably not for the reasons most people assume though; it’s rarely malicious but rather commercially rational.
When you layer OHS/WHS obligations, common law negligence, workers compensation exposure, and protected class discrimination law on top of each other, you’ve made hiring someone with a mental illness or disability a genuinely higher-risk commercial decision. Not because employers are monsters, but because the legal and financial downside of a bad outcome is asymmetric and significant. The logical response is to screen people out before the employment relationship ever begins: at the stage that’s almost impossible to police. Employment gap filtering does the job without exposing hiring managers to discrimination arguments. The easiest method of risk control is elimination; simply not hiring the person in the first place.
The cruel irony is that the stronger your employment protections, the stronger the incentive to discriminate at the hiring stage in ways that are opaque and legally defensible. Unless there are genuine countervailing incentives (and I’d argue there really aren’t under current common law negligence, workers comp frameworks, or anti-discrimination law) this will keep happening.
The legislation pushes in one direction, the commercial reality pushes back in another, and the people it was designed to protect end up worse off. You’d need governments willing to actually absorb some of that employer-side risk, which nobody is seriously proposing.
Absolutely nobody is shocked by this.
Why i had to be a sole trader.
GenX and neurodiverse, work injuries , completely 100% unemployable.
Yet i have successfully run a small business for 15 years now, even hired others once, made sure they were unemployable also.
Given how incredibly thorough medicals are these days, it makes it very easy for employers. They want full medical history since birth. This needs tightened.
Im 55 and a trade qualified boilermaker. Ive put in hundreds of resumes in the last year trying to get work. I’ve not gotten one response from any jobs!!
I did not disclose my ADHD for this reason!
As someone with a disability who needs accomodations tf am I meant to do just stay unemployed.
Shits been so hard :/
Im surprised at the honesty of the corporations lol
This just makes me appreciate my ASD son’s employer so much more. They hired him knowing full well he is on the spectrum. They also supported him, above and beyond many may say, when he recently had a mental health episode and wanted to off himself. He didn’t, sought help and is back on track.
My son is a very hard worker and is now even stronger in his mental health after being supported by his employer, his family and professional mental health services.
Employers would do better to treat employees how they want to be treated. With respect.
Lie on your resume.
The amount of people in this thread trying to justify discrimination againt disabled people in employment is disgusting.
People who arent disabled seem for forget that one accident is all it takes for someone to be permanently disabled, and no one here is exempt from that. It is quite literally in your best interests to defend disabled peoples access to the same work opportunities as everyone else.
well duh. employers discriminate all the time, and there’s effectively nothing that can be done about it unless the employer is dumb enough to actually say so.
what gets said: although your application was of a high quality and we thank you for your time, unfortunately on this occasion another candidate had a skill and experience set more closely aligned with the requirements of the role.
Well no shit.
I think this a case of no $hit. I suffer from multiple issues and it took 5 years last time to find a job. They say that ADHD and Autism aren’t necessarily disabilities but the job market does care and the government certainly doesn’t either.
Wow what a total, complete and utter shock /s
This isn’t new. People who don’t fit the “young and healthy” stereotype have their resumes tossed in the trash, people with disabilities have known this for years. I’m a wheelchair user and before COVID, getting a job was next to impossible, especially with companies that didn’t need a diversity trophy. Now that everyone uses video conferencing, I have no issues landing gigs and contracts.
Companies want to put on a big show and dance about being inclusive, but they don’t give a shit. It’s performative nonsense for the masses.
In other news, water is wet
Yeah no shit, when they have 500 people applying for a job they’ll just move on to next qualified person.
I remember ticking yes on “history of depression” for a job and they disqualified me because I wasn’t cheerful and happy go enough on a training day.
… and race.
My favourite is how companies use the mandatory medical to find out things they legally can’t ask about.
So I guess the little spiel they write about being a diverse workplace at the end of most job applications is just bullshit. Go figure.
Even offering myself on a Supported Wage System and with a wage subsidy I can’t find work.
As someone who works in IT and is over 55… I’ve known for a while that this will be my last IT job. The odds of getting hired again are very low. Luckily I can afford a frugal retirement (downsize to somewhere cheaper, live mortgage free on the dole… yay) so I’m just saving enthusiastically pending the day.
I don’t *think* they’ll fire me while I can still work, but you never know. If management changes all bets are off.
Add first nations to that list.
As a 50+ year-old woman with a disability this is no surprise to me. However, it won’t stop people telling people with the disability that they should work. A lot of of us would like to work more but we are just not given the opportunity.
Some of these, you can choose not to disclose but more visually obvious discrimination factors like age or some physical disabilities make the prospect of job hunting sound so depressing.
From my own biased perspective (mid-40s), age discrimination feels especially grim when Australia has an aging population and people are having to work longer so they can afford to live. The whole thing makes work feel even more depressing.