Abstract
Hiring processes often unintentionally disadvantage neurodivergent candidates by expecting neuronormative performances without due scrutiny of their merits. We offer reflections as a neurodiverse research group on our experiences of hiring a researcher colleague while aligning with compassionate and neurodiversity affirmative frameworks. We make recommendations informed by our learning through this process. Ultimately, we are motivated to enable every candidate to demonstrate their abilities to perform the essential tasks of the job, while minimizing nonessential, and often unspoken, social, sensory, and thinking performances. Our hiring decisions differed from default practices by sharing responsibility for the interview process, making explicit the value of personal and professional experiences of neurodivergence, providing a choice of interview format, allowing the uncertainty of an encounter, providing honest feedback, and minimizing an expectation of neurodivergent disclosure or aesthetic diversity. We readdressed these details to enable each candidate to best represent themselves and minimize learned and ableist conventions. This Perspective offers a novel, critical reflection on recruitment, occupying both the hiring employer and candidate perspectives. We invite further scrutiny from researchers and hiring organizations on decisions that can unintentionally marginalize and stigmatize neurodivergent candidates, and on actions that can enable genuine equal opportunity for employment to all.
Community Brief
Why is this topic important?
Neurodivergent people should be part of workplaces. The ways in which we hire researchers can exclude neurodivergent applicants, sometimes unintentionally. Neurodivergent people then have too little say over research, including who participates and which research methods are used. We describe practical steps that employers may want to follow to make hiring processes fairer for neurodivergent candidates.
What is the purpose of this article?
This article encourages researchers and employers to demonstrate “compassionate” and “neurodiversity affirmative” hiring practices. This means giving all candidates equal opportunity for employment, including neurodivergent candidates.
What personal or professional perspectives do the authors bring to this topic?
We wrote this article as a research group of mixed neurotypes. We offer reflections from both job applicants and employers in a university setting to share honest and personal experiences of hiring.
What is already known about this topic?
Neurodivergent people do not have fair opportunities for employment. Employment statistics show that many capable and motivated neurodivergent people are not in suitable jobs. Limited workplace opportunities can have negative impacts on physical and mental well-being. A growing body of research has explored barriers that affect neurodivergent people in workplaces and shows that they rarely provide supportive adjustments and often have unsuitable sensory environments and unsupportive cultures. Relatively little literature has focused on all stages of the recruitment process, from the kinds of employment opportunities offered, through advertising, shortlisting, and interviewing of candidates. There is a gap in understanding how organizations can be more inclusive in how they recruit neurodivergent employees.
What do the authors recommend?
Employers should: reflect honestly on the reasons for hiring and design a role based on essential tasks; write in job advertisements that difference and varied expertise is welcomed, but that applicants do not need to share any diagnoses if they do not want to; offer choice over the interview process, including the location, format, sensory environment, and presentation style; share interview questions in advance; invite conversation about the interview process so that everybody can learn about what is working well; show compassion and support of vulnerabilities and discomforts; make clear that differences in communication style are accepted and do not need to be adjusted; and provide feedback after the interview.
We recommend these changes so that every candidate can show their abilities to do the job, without having to perform in the limited ways that employers often expect.
How will these recommendations help autistic adults now or in the future?
These recommendations share our responsibility for making sure that neurodivergent people have fair access to recruitment processes. We ask researchers and employers to look at the unnecessary expectations placed on job applicants and remove these barriers so that neurodivergent candidates can demonstrate their strengths. We hope these changes will help employers make informed hiring decisions that improve recruitment and, critically, retention of a neurodiverse workforce.
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