27/05/2026
Building a candidate profile that focuses on skills, not labels!
A candidate profile should help people present what they can do — not reduce them to a label, a diagnosis, or a limitation.
For many job seekers with disabilities, traditional recruitment systems often start in the wrong place. They focus on standard CV formats, linear work histories, and rigid application fields. But not everyone’s path to employment looks the same.
Some candidates may have limited formal work experience. Others may have developed valuable skills through training, volunteering, personal projects, informal work, community activities, or lived experience. These skills should not go unnoticed.
This is why an accessible career guidance toolkit should support a skills-first approach.
A useful candidate profile can help users present:
🔹 their skills and strengths
🔹 their education and training
🔹 their previous experience
🔹 projects or portfolio work
🔹 volunteering or informal experience
🔹 languages and certifications
🔹 work preferences
🔹 accessibility preferences
🔹 career interests and goals
The aim is not to ask intrusive questions about disability.
The aim is to help users describe their abilities, preferences, and support needs in a clear, respectful, and empowering way.
In an AI-supported environment, this becomes even more important. AI can help users improve their profile wording, describe their skills more professionally, prepare a CV, and connect their experience to potential career pathways. But the user must remain in control of what is shared, what stays private, and how their profile is presented.
A skills-first profile can also support more inclusive recruitment.
Instead of focusing solely on gaps, labels, or assumptions, employers can better understand what a person can contribute: their competencies, motivation, learning achievements, and potential.
In ARISE, this approach is central to developing an accessible, ethical, and human-centered career guidance toolkit.
Because inclusive employment does not start by asking “What is missing?”
It starts by asking:
What can this person do, what support do they need, and how can we help them move forward?