ARISE project

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?

Designing an accessible career guidance toolkit starts with the right questions.

In the ARISE project, AI is not seen as a replacement for human support but as a practical toolkit that helps people move forward in their career journey with greater self-confidence and self-esteem.

What the ARISE AI toolkit can support:

🔹 Helping users describe their skills and experience
🔹 Improving CV and professional profile
🔹 Supporting interview preparation
🔹 Suggesting relevant learning resources
🔹 Guiding users step by step within clear ethical and professional boundaries

Human oversight remains essential.

For people with disabilities, career guidance is not only about matching skills with job vacancies. It is also about accessibility needs, individual circumstances, rights, and real barriers in the labor market.

For this reason, the AI assistant must also be clear about what it should not do:

❌ provide medical advice
❌ replace a career counselor
❌ make decisions on the user's behalf
❌ expose sensitive information without consent

Five key design questions in ARISE

ARISE partners are exploring five key questions for the toolkit's development:

1️⃣ What information is truly needed at registration?
2️⃣ How can onboarding remain inclusive and non-stigmatizing?
3️⃣ What should a candidate profile include?
4️⃣ What should remain private?
5️⃣ What should the AI assistant never answer?

This is the direction of ARISE: an accessible, ethical, and human-centered approach to AI-supported career guidance.

Why traditional career platforms fail many people with disabilities

Digital career platforms have transformed how people search for jobs, apply for opportunities, and communicate with employers.
But for many people with disabilities, these systems still create barriers rather than opportunities.
Many digital recruitment systems still rely on standardised processes that fail to consider accessibility, adaptive communication, and diverse ways of interacting with technology.
As a result, qualified candidates may encounter barriers long before their skills and potential are ever recognised.

Accessibility is still treated as optional.

Many online employment systems remain difficult for people with disabilities to use.
Common barriers include:
🔹 Inaccessible interfaces
🔹 Complex navigation paths
🔹 CV systems are incompatible with assistive technologies
🔹 Information overload and confusing layouts
🔹 Lack of adaptive communication options
🔹 Automated filtering systems that exclude non-standard profiles

These barriers do not reflect a lack of talent. They reflect a lack of inclusive design. In many cases, candidates are excluded before a human even reviews their application.

Inclusion must be designed from the start. Accessibility cannot be added later as a “technical adjustment.”

A truly accessible career platform should:
✅ Support diverse communication methods
✅ Reduce cognitive overload
✅ Work with assistive technologies
✅ Offer adaptive, user-friendly interfaces
✅ Provide personalised guidance and support
✅ Combine AI efficiency with human oversight
Inclusive design improves the experience for everyone — not only people with disabilities.

How ARISE responds

The ARISE project addresses these challenges by developing an accessible, AI-supported career guidance ecosystem.

ARISE focuses on creating:
🧠 Accessible digital learning and guidance materials
🤝 AI-assisted career support tools
📄 Adaptive CV and job application support
💬 Inclusive communication approaches for career guidance
📚 Training resources for career counselors and educators
♿ Accessibility-oriented digital environment designed around real user needs

The project integrates accessibility, employability, digital inclusion, and ethical AI practices into a single, cohesive approach.

Accessibility should not be an afterthought

ARISE promotes a future where technology supports equal participation in employment and professional development for everyone!

The employment of occupies a central place on Europe’s social and economic agenda.

The Disability Employment Package (DEP) is a practice-oriented framework developed by the European Commission to strengthen the participation of people with disabilities in the labour market. The package forms part of the 2021-2030 Disability Rights Strategy and provides guidance to Member States on inclusive employment. The employment gap between people with disabilities and those without in the EU exceeds 20 percentage points; this situation clearly highlights the importance of structural and coordinated measures.
The package focuses on public employment services, recruitment processes, support for job retention, reasonable accommodation, vocational rehabilitation and the transition to quality employment. The European Commission contributes to helping organisations establish more accessible and inclusive systems by providing guidelines and best practices in these areas.
This framework serves as a robust reference point for employers, career advisers, VET providers, public bodies and civil society. The design of employment services, the continuity of support mechanisms and the accessibility of the workplace directly impact the economic and social participation of people with disabilities.
A more inclusive employment ecosystem is strengthened when policy, services and practice converge towards the same objective. DEP provides concrete tools, a shared vision and a Europe-wide framework to establish this common ground.
Therefore, it is beneficial for everyone -particularly employers and HR managers, regardless of whether they are currently in the workforce- to learn more about DEP. For further information, please visit https://employment-social-affairs.ec.europa.eu/policies-and-activities/eu-employment-policies/disability-employment-package_en

The future of AI-powered recruitment tools is shaped also by the extent to which people trust these tools.
This time, we’d love to share some information with you about a different article! A study by Calluso and Devetag (2025) shows that the willingness to use AI-powered recruitment applications is strongly linked to technology acceptance. The research also reveals that individuals who are organised, systematic and reliability-oriented are more open to these processes. In particular, there is a significant relationship between the personality trait of conscientiousness and the willingness to use AI-powered recruitment applications.
One of the study’s striking findings is that individuals who have previously had experience with AI-powered recruitment tools show a lower willingness to use these systems. This result demonstrates that user experience, trust and perceived fairness directly influence attitudes towards technology. The increasing prevalence of recruitment technologies makes the question of how people experience these tools even more important. This aligns perfectly with the goal we have set for the conclusion of the ARISE project: leading the creation of more qualified and successful processes with AI...
This discussion is also highly valuable for . Accessibility, understandability and a sense of trust directly shape the impact of AI-based career guidance tools. An inclusive design approach centred on the user experience contributes to recruitment technologies creating a broader and fairer impact.

Calluso, C., & Devetag, M. G. (2025). The impact of technology acceptance and personality traits on the willingness to use AI-assisted hiring practices. International Journal of Organizational Analysis, 33(5), 1368-1385.

Can create fairer processes?

We would like to bring a very recent study to your attention. Yang’s 2026 study shows that disability-based bias increases, particularly when decision-making processes become more complex.

The research found that when evaluation criteria are clear, the selection rate for candidates with disabilities reaches 47.6%, approaching a level of impartiality, whereas in complex decision-making contexts, this rate drops to 32%. This tells us that the issue lies not only in bias but also in how uncertain and cognitively demanding the decision-making environment is.

One of the study’s most striking findings concerns the impact of inclusion-focused generative AI. According to the article, this approach helps employers/HR managers focus on concrete job-related competencies rather than stereotypes. For example, in some complex scenarios, the selection rate for disabled candidates is 36.2% with standard generative AI (G*I), whereas it rises to 70.2% with inclusion-focused G*I. In other words, the issue lies in the ethical and inclusive principles on which the AI is designed.

The article’s most important conclusion is: AI is not inherently unbiased. However, when designed around the principles of “fairness”, “accountability” and “inclusivity”, it can become a genuine support mechanism that reduces bias in recruitment processes. This is why we need to discuss future technologies in terms of equality and human dignity.

Yang, M. M. (2026). Mitigating Disability Bias in Hiring: The Role of Inclusion‐Focused Generative AI in Complex HR Decisions. Human Resource Management Journal.

🔍 We’re solving the wrong problem.

The barrier is not a lack of talent, it’s a system that isn’t designed to connect people, opportunities, and support in an inclusive way.

🧩 Job seekers with disabilities are navigating complex, often automated processes, facing repeated rejection, uncertainty and lack of feedback.
🏢 Employers are generally open but still don’t have enough practical knowledge, clear guidance and confidence on how to find the right talents or implement inclusive hiring processes in reality.
🎯 Career counsellors are trying to bridge the gap, but often without the right tools, frameworks or knowledge on how to use specific digital solutions.

⚠️ The result is a fragmented system where each group operates in isolation and opportunities get lost in between.

This is not a single-point problem.
It’s a disconnection between people, processes and systems.

💡And this is exactly the gap ARISE is addressing, not only by building skills, but by creating tools and approaches that actually connect all stakeholders.

💡 What skills actually matter in today’s job market?

It’s easy to assume that technical skills are key.

Our research shows something quite interesting. Across Austria, Cyprus, Greece, Estonia and Latvia, we saw that many people with disabilities already have strong educational backgrounds and technical knowledge, yet still struggle to access employment.

The skills that consistently emerged as critical and in demand from employers’ perspectives are:
✅ Communication skills
✅ Self-advocacy
✅ Digital & AI literacy
✅ Time and task management

These are not “nice to have”, nowadays they are what make the difference in a hiring process that is more and more automated.

⚠️ The challenge? These skills are rarely taught in a structured, accessible way, especially for people with disabilities. And this is exactly where change is needed.

Today, many companies already use AI to screen CVs, rank candidates, generate job descriptions, structure and even lead interviews. This increases efficiency but it also creates additional risks.
⚠️ Algorithms are trained on existing data. If that data reflects bias, the system can replicate or even amplify it.
For people with disabilities, this can mean:
🔴 being filtered out before a human (HR) even sees their application
🔴 not fitting “standardised” career patterns
🔴 being evaluated without context
💡 AI should support decision-making, not replace it. Human oversight, transparency and inclusive design are not optional, they are essential.

🤖 AI is already shaping who gets hired, algorithms are everywhere.

But here’s the challenge:
🔴 Lack of transparency
🔴 Risk of bias
🔴 Over-reliance on automated decisions

In ARISE, we have just completed the project research phase across 5 European countries, working with our three main target groups - jobseekers with disabilities,career counsellors/ HR professionals and employers.

Across all groups, one concern clearly stood out - AI can support inclusion but only if it is used responsibly. The question is not if we use it, but how.