Disabled Brit man rejected for 2000 jobs starts his own business

LONDON - A disabled man in Britain, who was rejected for almost 2000 jobs, has managed to start his own business.

Richard Shakespeare, from Sinfin, Derbyshire, was made redundant in 2009, but he did not waste time and applied for 1,923 jobs, almost six per day, to any employer within commuting distance of his home.

He also attended hundreds of interviews and spent more than 1,000 pounds on stamps for application letters since he lost his job as a customer advisor with Internet bank Egg.

“I applied for absolutely everything that I could physically do and didn’t know how to get out of the unemployment trap,” the Daily Mail quoted him as saying.

“After nearly a year without a job offer, I was starting to get depressed and the number of suitable jobs seemed to be going down,” he said.

Shakespeare was also at a disadvantage as he could not accept a job paying the minimum wage - because he would have lost the redundancy insurance that was paying his mortgage.

But when after 12 months of not getting anywhere, he ended his job search and instead became a consultant advising businesses on disability issues after he found that interviewers were unsure how to treat someone who’s disabled.

“It struck me that there must be hundreds of businesses that had no experience of dealing with disabled people and would benefit from speaking to someone with a real-life perspective on the matter,” he revealed.

He attended a number of networking events to bounce his idea off of local business leaders and decided it could work, so he set up his modest office in Derby.

“Now that I’m self-employed, the pressure is really on me to make ends meet but I’m determined to make it work and I’m confident that I can,” he stated.

And business has been booming so far - with clients already queuing up, one of his first was a local Novotel hotel.

General manager of the hotel, Mike Colman said that Shakespeare helped his staff to understand how to treat disabled guests.

Shakespeare has also worked with Nottingham-based health care practitioner Wendy Wells, who says that his knowledge and experience have been very helpful when she was setting up her podiatry practice. (ANI)