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Candidate accommodation requests aren't new. The ADA has required employers to provide reasonable accommodations throughout the hiring process — not just after an offer is extended — for decades. What's changing isn't the law. It's the scale and structure of hiring at some of the fastest-growing companies in the market right now.
AI companies are hiring aggressively. And the processes they've built to evaluate candidates are, by design, long and demanding: multiple interview rounds, timed technical assessments, take-home projects, written case studies, panel presentations. The more stages a process has, and the more cognitive load each stage carries, the more opportunity there is for a candidate to need an adjustment to participate fully.
That's the dynamic driving the rise in accommodation requests in hiring. Not a sudden wave of awareness. Not a single generation. Just more hiring, more complex processes, and more candidates who need — and are increasingly comfortable asking for — some form of support.
In a competitive hiring environment, the interview process functions as the primary selection mechanism. When hundreds or thousands of people apply for a role, employers lean harder on structured evaluation: standardized assessments, timed exercises, multi-stage screens. These tools are useful. They're also, by their nature, more likely to surface accommodation needs than a single conversation with a hiring manager ever would.
Think about what a typical AI company hiring process actually contains: a 60-minute timed coding challenge, a written case study with a 48-hour turnaround, a four-panel interview day. Each of those stages is a moment where a candidate with ADHD, a chronic condition, a processing difference, or a physical or sensory disability may need something different to demonstrate their actual capabilities — not more capability, just a different container for it.
That's worth naming plainly: the rise in accommodation requests at AI companies isn't a signal that something has gone wrong. It's a predictable consequence of building high-bar, multi-stage hiring at scale. Organizations that understand that will handle it better than those that treat every request as an anomaly.
It's also consistent with a broader trend. EEOC data shows a rise in disability discrimination charges related to neurodiversity — conditions like ADHD, autism, dyslexia, and sensory processing differences — that coincides with growing diagnosis rates over the past two decades. The candidates in your pipeline today are more likely to have a formal diagnosis than candidates a generation ago — and more likely to know they're entitled to request support.
The most common requests aren't unusual. Extended time on timed assessments is by far the most frequent — particularly relevant when processes include coding challenges, written exercises, or any evaluation with a hard cutoff. Alternative formats come up regularly too: written instructions instead of verbal, or a different submission method for a take-home project. Scheduling adjustments for medical appointments or energy management needs related to chronic conditions are more common than most recruiting teams expect. Accessible technology — captioning, screen readers, adjustable interfaces — rounds out the typical picture.
None of these are inherently difficult to provide. What makes them difficult is the absence of a process for handling them — which is the situation most recruiting teams find themselves in.
Consider this scenario: A strong candidate reaches out to your recruiting coordinator asking whether extended time is available on your technical assessment. The coordinator doesn't know. They forward it to the hiring manager or HR, who might flag legal, who responds four days later asking for documentation — more than the ADA generally permits at the pre-offer stage. The candidate, already juggling other processes, withdraws. The team never knows why. The whole exchange took ten days and produced no outcome except friction.
Accommodation requests during hiring tend to fall into a gap between functions. HR owns accommodations for employees. Legal owns compliance exposure. Recruiting coordinates the process. No one fully owns the candidate request.
The result is that these requests often get handled inconsistently — routed differently depending on which recruiter picks up the email, resolved based on whoever has bandwidth to look into it, and documented only if someone remembers to. In a high-volume hiring environment, that variability compounds quickly. It also creates exactly the kind of inconsistency that draws regulatory attention and, more practically, leaves candidates with a wildly uneven experience depending on the luck of who they happened to reach.
There's also a documentation problem. One of the core protections against ADA liability in hiring is demonstrating that your process was consistent — that you responded to requests in good faith and provided accommodations that were reasonable. Without records, that's very hard to show.
Title I of the ADA applies from the first touchpoint in the hiring process, not from day one of employment. The EEOC has been consistent on this: employers must engage in a good-faith effort to accommodate candidates with disabilities during interviews and assessments, and the same interactive process obligations that govern employee accommodations apply in the hiring context — adapted for the fact that pre-offer, there are strict limits on what documentation you can request and what questions you can ask.
The EEOC has made the hiring stage an explicit enforcement priority. In its 2024–2028 Strategic Enforcement Plan, the agency pledged to focus on eliminating barriers in recruitment and hiring, specifically calling out "inflexible policies" that discourage applicants with disabilities from applying or discriminate against them in the selection process.
That pre-offer dynamic is where teams most often stumble. Asking a candidate for detailed medical documentation before extending an offer is generally not permissible. Understanding what you can ask for, at what stage, and how to document your response requires a process — not just good intentions from an individual recruiter.
Candidate experience at AI companies matters because the talent market for these roles is genuinely competitive. The engineers, researchers, and technical specialists these companies are trying to hire have options — often many. How an organization handles something like an accommodation request is noticed, talked about, and remembered.
Candidates who ask for an accommodation and have a smooth, respectful, efficient experience will complete the process. They'll show up prepared. And when they talk to peers about where to apply, they'll remember that your company made it easy. The inverse is equally true.
A structured, proactive accommodation process in hiring isn't a compliance checkbox that sits alongside your talent strategy. It's part of it.
The organizations handling this well have built a clear path that everyone in recruiting knows to follow: how candidates are invited to request accommodations proactively (not just reactively when they ask), who receives and owns the request, what the response timeline is, how modifications to assessments or interviews are implemented, and how the interaction is documented.
Disclo Hire was built to operationalize exactly that. It gives candidates a structured, proactive way to request accommodations at the start of the process — before they have to figure out who to email or whether it's even safe to ask. And it gives recruiting teams a consistent, compliant workflow for handling, documenting, and resolving those requests, so the outcome doesn't depend on which recruiter happened to see the message.
The goal isn't to make accommodations a bigger part of your hiring process. It's to make them a handled part — so that when a candidate needs something, the answer is already clear.
