Whenever people talk about hiring someone with a disability, it’s often viewed as a “nice” or “charitable” thing to do. Or a matter of regulatory compliance.

But that’s the wrong way to look at the issue, said Jim Atwater, the founder of local startup InReturn Strategies.

The company has built a platform for employers interested in workers with disabilities. InReturn, whose service should launch this fall, has already lined up some valuable early customers, including Commerce Bank, the Kansas City Public Library and C2FO.

There are powerful, market-driven reasons why it’s smart to hire people with disabilities, Atwater said. For starters, they tend to have significantly lower rates of turnover and absenteeism. There also are tax breaks available to companies that hire them.

A lot of companies already understand why it’s a good idea to hire people with disabilities, and have invested serious time and money into recruitment and marketing. Even then, Atwater said, it can be hard to proactively find the right people for the right jobs.

“Businesses understand this value,” Atwater said. “They just can’t scale it.”

That’s because employers usually find disabled workers through different nonprofit groups dedicated to one particular disability, such as blindness, Down syndrome and others. Depending on the size and reach of the business, an employer could be dealing with dozens of organizations.

Right now, the system is set up so that Priority No. 1 is finding a job for a disabled person, when it really needs to put more emphasis on making it easy for companies to hire people with disabilities.

“This is the way it’s been done since the beginning of time,” Atwater said.

InReturn Strategies changes things by bringing all those different groups together on one platform, simplifying the hiring process for employers.

Atwater has been working on InReturn Strategies for about five years, about three of them on a full-time basis. “It’s been a very long process,” he said.

It’s taken Atwater longer to research the market because, as someone with hearing impairment, it works better for him to conduct meetings in person. Instead of dialing up state officials in Topeka or Jefferson City, he had to get in his car and drive there.

He’s optimistic about InReturn Strategies’ potential to not only help employers, but create opportunities for workers with disabilities.

“We’re going to be a rapid-change mechanism,” said Atwater.