Creating More Neuro-Inclusive Recruitment Practices

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Michelle Minnikin of Work Pirates uses her experience as a neurodivergent Organisational Psychologist to tell us 5 ideas that will help everyone succeed in interviews. This blog first appeared on the Work Pirates website.

 

I’m a neurodivergent Organisational Psychologist who has spent most of my career helping organisations select and develop people. I really struggled in organisations to fit in, follow the rules, to hide my creativity and problem solving skills so I wouldn’t be ‘too much’. Following multiple burnouts from all this extra effort I expended trying to be ‘normal’, I took myself off to start my own company.

There are estimations that 15-20% of the world’s population are neurodivergent – and so many of us are unemployed, or underemployed. If you don’t accommodate us, we’ll leave to set up on our own and take our fabulous strengths with us.

What a shame this is for organisations! There are companies who are actively attracting and accommodating neurodiverse humans, such as SAP, EY, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard and they’re showing real benefits:

  • Higher productivity
  • Improved quality
  • Greater capabilities in innovation
  • Better communication
  • Increases in employee engagement

 

One of the greatest barriers for neurodiverse people is getting through recruitment processes. Most organisations recruit like this:

  1. CV
  2. Interview
  3. References

And we’re surprised that we get it wrong so often and close the door to awesome talent?

What do these things measure anyway?

  • CVs – how good someone is at crafting and presenting a story (or you can bypass all that by paying someone else to write your CV for you).
  • Interviews – how good you are at building rapport with other people, being ‘normal’, remembering what you’ve done, selling your skills and making friends.
  • References – most companies don’t do personal references nowadays, but I wouldn’t give the name of someone who didn’t like me to be a reference.

 

So many neurodivergent people struggle with interviews, creating a barrier for them! I’ve had some terrible experiences in my career and fairly harsh feedback.

When you design recruitment processes to be more sensitive to individual needs, you don’t just help the neurodiverse individuals, you help everyone and are more likely to get the best out of people.

So here are 5 quick ideas that will help everyone succeed in interviews:

  1. Provide clear, concise written and visual information about the entire recruitment process, what the steps are, what to expect, what the timescales are, who is the point of contact for questions and to request adjustments
  2. Manage expectations of the interview – who is going to be there, their roles, the topics they are going to be covering, ground rules, timings etc.
  3. Give people the questions beforehand so they can properly prepare and allow them to refer to their notes in the interview
  4. Help the candidate through the interview by giving feedback if they are talking too much, or too little and guide them through the process of information gathering
  5. Don’t just rely on an interview – give the candidate a chance to demonstrate some of the skills they will need on the job, give them a problem they will come across in the job and give them some time to show you how they would solve that problem.

How about it? Worth a try?

 

The way we’ve always done things is no longer working. We created Work Pirates, to re-write the rules of work. Find out more here.

 

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

How to Attract and Recruit Neurodivergent Talent

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Neurodiversity consultant and coach Mark Charlesworth writes the second post in our series on neurodiversity in which he explains how to attract and recruit neurodivergent talent. Read his first post, Closing the Neurodiversity Employment Gap here.

 

Candidate Attraction

The employment rate disparity as well the previous experiences of neurodivergent people provide a recipe for low self-esteem in the recruitment process. This is further exacerbated when a person with ADHD experiences ‘rejection-sensitive dysphoria’ as a presentation of their condition. This is where previous rejection is mis-interpreted as a personal thing in that the applicant was not liked, rather than ‘not successful this time’. Because of this, a lot can be done with company image and the wording used in order to shout loudly that as an organisation you encourage neurodiverse talent.

The wording of any job advert is key to find and talk to your chosen audience, but ideally attract them too. Avoid words such as ‘social skills’ because these will likely cause an autistic candidate to not apply. Meanwhile, a candidate with dyspraxia or dyslexia will be put off by a role that requires lots of writing, for example.

Re-phrase to ensure that within the advert you emphasise that you are “flexible in the process to ensure neurodivergent colleagues can produce the end goal” or something along those lines. This encouragement is enhanced if you were also to offer alternative methods of application, such as videos, CVs, or work-trials. This ensures that interview barriers can be avoided for an autistic person who would be great at the job, but may otherwise fail an interview.

 

Job fairs are an excellent way to engage with pro-active candidates who can have a conversation with you about whether or not to apply, but job fairs are noisy and have lots of people milling around. This can be a psychologically distressing environment for an autistic person, so why not consider having a ‘neurodiverse hour’ at the beginning and the end of the fair?

Autistic people can also have anxiety about approaching people and may not actually interact with any of the recruiters and employers, and so will miss out as a result. Furthermore, just getting to and from a location can by traumatic for a neurodivergent person, which depends on the time of day of course and the location of the job fair too. So, to attract neurodivergent talent, why not approach the organisations that support people to let them share the role you want to advertise with their email list?

 

Recruitment Process

A person with ADHD is likely to have job hopped and there is a high chance there will be gaps between roles. Rather than seeing this as a negative, see it as a positive – at least the candidate is being honest. When considering the employment rate disparity, would you put yourself through a process that gave continuous rejections, and didn’t make reasonable adjustments?

It may be that a neurodivergent candidate struggles with writing a CV or completing an application form. Why not ask them to record a video or audio file of themself answering your needs?

Those with autism and ADHD may have difficulty with off-the-cuff and open questions. This means that, despite high intelligence, they may have difficulty describing themselves. This is not a negative, just part of their condition.

During the interview process, be aware of the working memory difficulties that those with ADHD, Dyslexia and Dyspraxia have. It may appear the candidate doesn’t know an answer, even though they do. The filing cabinet drawer to jammed, and we cannot pull out the file to show you. We know exactly which drawer, file, and section to go to, but we need a little more time. Think of this as a positive. We don’t give probable answers to fill a gap; we continually double check our facts to know we are correct. This is a benefit and safety element, especially in a detail orientated environment.

The STAR interview technique is fantastic from the interviewer’s perspective, but a neurodiverse candidate can struggle to answer “give me an example of when you last gave great customer service?” because they always give great service and are searching from something out of the norm. Also, working memory difficulties mean that examples cannot always be presented even when there are many.

Most if not all people on the ADHD and autistic spectrum very rarely lie, if at all, so they always tell the truth. This means that neurodiverse people are at a disadvantage in an interview, because we are honest and will tell you when we cannot remember something. Meanwhile, a neurotypical will have the ability to fib for the purpose of an interview and appear ‘polished and perfect’.

When interviewing a neurodiverse candidate, then, ask for their response to a given situation, but always try to give the questions to the candidate just before the interview so they will not be as nervous.

 

Throughout the interview, it may seem that an autistic candidate is not interested, partly because of a lack of eye contact or seeming blunt or rude. By being at the interview, they are most definitely interested because it takes a lot for an autistic person to gain the confidence to engage in such a social situation.

You may want, then, to rely on personality or psychometric tests, but you need to calibrate where your pass and fail is. Many of the original test groups were neurotypical, so this sets neurodivergent people up for failure. Are they really necessary? If not, then junk them.

 

When evolving your recruitment function for a neurodiverse application, humans are the best algorithm money can buy. By using AI, you are at risk of excluding neurodiverse talent, especially when autistic people talk about ‘I’ rather than ‘we’ and you exclude the ‘I’s. This is also true of grammatical errors produced by dyslexic applicants too.

 

Throughout the recruitment process and beyond, there will be different forms of communication. Whether it be a rejection, an offer, request for further information, or something else, you need to be mindful that neurodivergent people may take a little longer to respond. Chase them or give them the benefit of doubt if they miss a deadline but otherwise showed interest.

 

People on the autistic spectrum are flexible and open to change, but the difficulty arises when there is a sudden change or stop, so introduce changes in a process or make sure you’re letting a person down gradually. Introduce the possibility of failed outcome at the beginning as well as being clear on expectations throughout.

 

Many but not all people on the autistic spectrum interpret things literally. Make sure to instrict clearly, and always back this up in an email. For example:

A “Can you go to Cragside for an interview on Monday?”

B “You have an interview on Monday 1st May at 2pm. Go to 1 The Street, Newcastle, NE1 1AA”

A is asking if they can, and if the person has a literal interpretation, they are likely to respond based purely on their capability of attending. B, on the other hand, is a clear instruction, which the candidate will follow if they are able to do so.

 

Keep an eye out for the next blog in this series in which Mark explains how to onboard and retain neurodiverse talent!

 

To find out more about Mark’s services you can visit him on his website, call him on 07502 464481, or email him at [email protected]

 

Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash

Closing the Neurodiversity Employment Gap

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Neurodiversity consultant and coach Mark Charlesworth kicks off our series on neurodiversity by explaining what neurodiversity is and the steps we need to take in order to put an end to the neurodiversity employment gap.

 

What is Neurodiversity?

The term ‘neurodiversity’ was first coined in 1998 by Judy Singer in her contribution to an academic series on disability, human rights, and society. The phrase initially referred to those on the autism spectrum. Autism Spectrum Condition is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects how a person thinks, recites, recalls, processes, learns, and retains information differently to those not on the autistic spectrum.

‘Neurodiversity’ has since branched into becoming an umbrella term for other neurodevelopmental conditions that handle information differently in the ways described, such as ADHD, Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, Dysgraphia, and Dyspraxia.

Whilst in its purest sense, ‘neurodiversity’ means a diversity of difficulties, styles, and strengths of thinking, recalling, learning, etc., the neurodiversity ‘movement’ focuses on those who handle information differently because of a neurodevelopmental condition.

The conditions have an impact on a person’s social interaction too, but there is no correlation between a person’s intelligence and whether or not they have a neurodevelopmental condition.

 

The Neurodiversity Employment Gap

Despite, in most cases, having good to high intelligence, there is an employment rate disparity between those with the neurodiverse conditions above and their peers. Less than 20% of neurodiverse adults aged 16 to 64 are employed. The next lowest rate of employment is those with epilepsy, at 37%.

Once you know about a condition and how it affects a person in a given situation, then you are in a stronger position to help the candidate and colleague thrive in the process and become a valued member of the team.

Despite legislation and a vast array of information available in the internet age, very well-meaning recruiters and employers are not sure how to close that employment gap, or sure where to turn for help.

Because of the employment rate gap and also being personally excluded from the job market, I, like many other neurodivergents, have turned to being self-employed to help educate employers and recruiters to ensure that we can progress with equal opportunity.

 

How Can We Close the Neurodiversity Employment Gap?

Ok, so if you want to change and close that gap, where can you start?

Firstly, you should understand the basics of neurodiversity, and therefore each condition, so that you have a good grounding to make progress.

Secondly, you should keep the message and understanding of neurodiversity simple. If you complicate matters, then the message becomes confused and less likely to be acted on. Each condition affects everybody differently, so the details are theoretical and hypothetical until you actually meet a candidate with a particular condition. The candidate can then explain the detail of their needs, which you can fine-tune as you progress together.

Thirdly, you should remember that each person has a multiple number of strengths they will bring as part of their condition. To identify what they are, you will need to encourage confidence and trust so that the candidate will open up about a very personal matter. Once you have built that trust, then, and only then, is the candidate likely to open up.

Fourthly, if a person does open up about their condition, you should bear in mind that those with neurodiverse conditions very often hide and underplay their needs.

And fifthly, if a person tells you about a condition they have, then they may also have a comorbid condition, but not always. This condition may or may not have a diagnosis, and they may not know how to tell you or want to share with you part or all of their neurodiversity that makes them special.

 

Keep an eye out for the next blog in this series in which Mark explains how to attract and recruit neurodiverse talent!

 

To find out more about Mark’s services you can visit him on his website, call him on 07502 464481, or email him at [email protected]

 

Photo by Keenan Beasley on Unsplash