Recruiting autistic employees

Hire other than what you already know. It is not risk free, but I would encourage others to take the risk.

Manager – Investment Bank

This content is meant for employers, managers, or any provider of meaningful activity. It provides guidance and suggestions for how to equitably and fairly accommodate autistic and neurodivergent employees (see The Terms We Use for a definition of this term). We use a definition of Meaningful Activity that includes all kinds of work, paid or unpaid.k/meaningful-activity

Many employers are making an active effort to promote inclusivity and accessibility in their recruitment and management strategies. When employing and recruiting autistic and neurodivergent people, employers have a legal requirement to make reasonable adjustments for work. Every person will have different needs and may require different adjustments which may also vary over time.

The majority of reasonable adjustments are free or inexpensive to implement

In general, the best way to address this legal requirement for reasonable adjustment is by encouraging a workplace culture that values dialogue. All employees should feel safe sharing their concerns and needs with the appropriate individual.  Creating a working environment that is clear, supportive and accessible to all benefits all employees, whether autistic or not.

Case study: Employer case study – Investment bank

All businesses need a range of skills and abilities to be able to succeed, develop and grow profitably.

Traditional recruitment strategies can fail to hire diverse groups of employees. Doing what we have always done perpetuates the status quo. Many processes assess an applicant’s ability to apply and interview for a position, rather their potential value as an employee. Similarly, automated screening can exclude people unable to make their knowledge conform to an employment profile.

I think we should restructure the way people find jobs so this process doesn’t bring so many people down, let alone autistic people

Community organiser

To make your recruitment more inclusive, you might consider the following:

  • The portfolio of skills, abilities and personal values you are looking for.
  • A broader selection process, which reduces reliance simply on an applicant’s performance at interview
  • Whether a candidate matches any vacancy in your company, not just the one they applied for.
  • Using a technical assessment to review skills which can be completed online
  • Not screening out applicants due to patchy employment histories. These could be the result of unsupportive working environments and employers not making reasonable changes.

Make sure that the selection process examines and tests the key skills you need the employee to use in the job.

The main challenge that I did face was communicating with people that I don’t really know … therefore for me it made the interview process very hard

Luke – autistic intern

There has recently been much criticism regarding the effectiveness of interviews in the recruitment of new employees. While they may be a strong tool for the recruitment of positions requiring strong communication and social skills e.g. receptionists, salespeople, or recruiters, they don’t always identify skills required for other, less socially oriented positions. Interviewer’s unconscious bias can also work against otherwise qualified applicants.

The best candidate for the job, may not be the one who gives the best interview!

Thinking carefully about how you recruit for a role can reap dividends in attracting the right applicants.

Before you even begin to advertise a position in your organisation, there are steps you can take to make practices more inclusive.

One of the biggest barriers to employment for autistic people is the workplace expectation that everyone should be at least average at everything and conform to a standard employee description. If we can define roles more specifically, and isolate the key skills required to deliver success, then we don’t need to assess those attributes that are at best nice to have and sometimes unnecessary.

Be specific about the skills you need in a job description.
Listing unnecessary attributes may deter the very applicant you need!

Defining a role too broadly, can discourage an autistic person from even applying to a position, as they will believe that they won’t be able to perform in the role as they may lack capability that the employer has explicitly requested. Some skills that may unintentionally deter an autistic applicant are:

  • Strong interpersonal communication
  • The ability to work well with a team
  • Flexibility
  • The ability to multi-task

These attributes are undoubtedly important in the workplace and are central to many roles, however there are many roles and tasks where they’re not all required, despite typically being stipulated.

Consider only the skills that are absolutely essential for the position you need to fill. Prioritise and value these skills throughout the process.

Every autistic person is different and will have different strengths and weaknesses. Deciding on a more narrow and precise set of values to guide your recruitment process will improve your chances of attracting and selecting interested neurodiverse applicants. It might also improve your applicant pool in general, attracting employees who can identify their skillset’s relevance for your position.

Dedication, punctuality, commitment and attention to detail” – strengths autistic people bring to employment

Family Liaison Officer

Job Descriptions

Job Descriptions are often recycled. When one person leaves, the same job description is used for the new appointment process, without considering whether the duties have changed, or whether the job description could be more effective. Some tips for designing more accessible job descriptions for those with autism:

  • Be clear, accurate and precise – To make your job description more inclusive and attractive to autistic applicants, it’s best to describe exactly what the specific position entails. Autistic applicants tend to look for work that matches their skills and experience closely. They might feel discouraged from applying for a position where they lack even a single skill. Likewise, vague descriptions have the potential to discourage autistic employees. Explicitly state only the necessary skills, the expected duties, and other details such as the required working hours. It is common practice to ask for a broad capability “excellent communication skills”, but the actual position requires a more narrow form of communication, like reporting discrepancies between documents.
  • Question your expectations – As an example, are you asking for the work to be done at your office in business hours, when it only matters that the work is completed on time and to your standard? What traits does your employee need to have, and what traits are less necessary?
  • Narrower skill sets can deliver more focussed benefits – Be aware of your autistic employee’s strengths and provide work assignments that match those strengths.
  • Consider job carving or job sharing – Match the skills of your employees with their roles. Consider swapping responsibilities that they find problematic with more compatible responsibilities of other employees.

In an ideal world, we would define and/or refine job descriptions based on the unique strengths of individuals having observed them in the workplace. For some organisations, running an alternative recruitment process, such as a work trial is a way to flip our traditional staffing mindset from skill demand, to skill supply, and would benefit many autistic, and non-autistic, jobseekers.

Signal your inclusivity

You can indicate on your initial advertisement that you are an inclusive employer:

  • Disability Confidence Scheme – Sign up for the government’s Disability Confident Scheme. This enables you to use the disability confident logo in your adverts and indicates that you are interested in attracting diverse talent.
  • Make your adjustment policies clear – Are you willing to provide adjustments for autistic employees? Make that information clear on your advertisement. You can even explain the adjustment process at your organisation.

Make your applicants aware of your adjustment and inclusion policies.
Include the policy link or text with a job description.

Be imaginative in order to attract diverse skills.

Traditional employee selection processes will only attract to you traditional employees.  Whilst non-autistic job applicants are able to reframe their experience and package it in the best possible light for the benefit of being selected for interview (and some even lie), autistic people will not. Automated selection of online submissions based on the competency frameworks used in most job descriptions is likely to screen out anyone who does not know how that process works. It will exclude people unable to generalise their knowledge to meet the employment profile if the terminology used isn’t identical or doesn’t reflect a completely accurate representation of their skills.

Work experience is a way for autistic people to prove their capabilities

You might like to consider the following:

  1. Think about the portfolio of skills, abilities and personal values you need
  2. Look at potential employee’s CV to see if it matches a vacancy you have
  3. Use a technical assessment to review skills which can be completed online
  4. Do not screen out applicants with a patchy employment history. It may be because their previous employer was not making reasonable adjustments, or they may not have had a supportive employment environment in the past.
Employers need to be actually aware of what autism can entail- rather than paying lip-service to being ‘inclusive’ but caring little when it comes down to it.

Parent of an autistic jobseeker

Having decided to employ an autistic person because you value the skill sets they could bring to your company, you may wish to approach schools, colleges and universities where the candidate may be studying the skill you need. Alternatively, you could look for specialist recruiters.

Since diagnosis, I have always been open and honest at interviews about my autism. This has generally not been a problem for me.

Kevin – Autistic employee

Make sure that the selection process examines and tests the skills you need the employee to use in the job.  If you are looking for someone to do training or coaching, an interview could be appropriate. If you are looking for a data analyst, give them sample data to analyse and see how accurate and effective they are.  Although interviews are popular in recruitment, they are a very poor way of assessing an applicant’s skill in the workplace. Autistic people in particular struggle with interviews as they are usually held in an unfamiliar place, with people the applicant hasn’t met before, and test interpersonal skills, which may not even be a key requirement of the job.

Recognising that interviews are likely to remain at least part of most organisations recruitment process, there are adaptations we can make to improve their accessibility for autistic applicants.

For the interviewer to bear in mind:

  • Make sure that you are treating all interviewees equally. Come up with consistent questions and an agreed scoring scheme for the responses.
  • If you are weighting questions such that certain questions count more than others, make sure that the questions that assess the primary skills you need are weighted heaviest, and more secondary or peripheral skills are weighted less.
  • Avoid allowing subconscious bias to interfere with a fair interview process. Make sure that your assessment only considers relevant information, and not body language, accent, dress, height, race, age, sex, or nation of origin.
  • Bear in mind someone’s ability to describe relevant past experiences as an indicator of how they actually performed in the past or will perform in the future.
  • Focus on the skills and experiences of the interviewee, and not how eloquently they speak.
  • Remember, there is little evidence that untrained managers can assess how well an individual candidate ‘fits’ organisational culture in an interview.

Very often, the people who are best placed to do the job fall at the hurdle of an interview that’s set up to fit only a tiny percentage of the people who applied.

Dean – Autistic freelance speaker

Not all autistic candidates choose to disclose, (tell you about) their condition, as they may be worried that it will affect their chance of receiving a job offer. Autism is a hidden disability, and some will mask their anxiety so effectively that it will not occur to you that they need reasonable adjustments. It is always good practice to offer reasonable adjustments to all candidates in appointment processes. You should focus on reasonable adjustments that minimise the impact of interviewing on autistic candidates (and by extension, on everyone else ).

If a candidate or employee discloses their condition to you, as an employer you are duty bound by the Equality Act 2010 to make reasonable adjustments for them.

You could incorporate the following accommodations as standard into your recruitment policy. Bear in mind that a candidate may request these as part of the Reasonable Adjustments  that they are entitled to:

  • Provide candidates with detailed information about both the role and the nature of the interview in advance, for example the competencies that will be assessed.
  • Where possible, provide interview questions in advance to allow reflective applicants to consider their responses. This is particularly relevant for roles where decision making doesn’t need to be instant and will allow all applicants, not simply those with autism, to better demonstrate their skills and experience.
  • Invite written submissions, either in the form of permitting candidates to bring notes with them, or actually asking them to submit answers to interview questions in advance, which will then form the basis for the interview.
  • Permit notes – some applicants might wish to write down questions, or refer to interview preparation during the interview.
  • Ask one question at a time, to make it easier for applicants to answer and not have to worry about forgetting the other part of the question.
  • Be specific, knowing how much information to convey can be a challenge for some applicants, so where possible define how many examples you might want and be prepared to tell a candidate when they have provided sufficient information.
  • Invite clarifications – applicants may worry that if they don’t understand the question that this reflects badly upon them. You can mitigate this by proactively inviting them to ask you to clarify their answer, or ask the same question using different words if the answer is not what you expected.
  • Avoid hypothetical questions which may be difficult for autistic applicants to answer with certainty, given the inherent unknowns. Instead focus on competency based questions, drawing on lived experience.
  • Many applicants are nervous about requesting adjustments and some won’t know what adjustments might help them. If you can provide them with a list of potential adjustments in advance, you signal that you are an inclusive employer and help them understand what you might be able to do to help them perform at their best.

Be proactive in offering adjustments

Other options which may help reduce a candidates anxiety include:

  • Providing proposed dates for interviewing as soon as possible
  • The opportunity to request specific interview time (e.g. to avoid rush hour travel)
  • Detailed directions to the interview location – ideally with a map and/or pictures of the front of the building
  • Names and photos of the interviewers with details of their role in the company and what role each will play in the interview
  • An explanation of the dress code
  • Minimising the number of interviewers
  • The use of other communication methods
  • A photo of the room in which the interview is to be held
  • Written confirmation by email of all arrangements made over the phone
  • A visit to the site of the interview in advance
  • An agenda for the interview detailing any exercises that are included in the process
  • The option of bringing a supporter to attend the interview if necessary, to assist in communication between you and the candidate
  • A copy of the interview questions in advance to all candidates
  • The option to interview remotely instead of in person to avoid unnecessary travel
  • The option to submit written responses to questions
  • , such as a job trial or work experience

All our candidates have had anxiety about work. We give them exposure to the office, meeting people, the working day. Work experience has given them the understanding of what work is like and gives them more confidence about being in the workplace

Manager – Investment Bank

Alternative or Additional Selection Processes to Interviewing

…to realize the benefits, most companies would have to adjust their recruitment, selection, and career development policies to reflect a broader definition of talent

Harvard Business Review

The following assessments types could allow a person who may not perform at their best in an interview to prove their worth in other ways:

  • Computerised testing – When designed well, these can used to identify strengths and characteristics. Try to ensure that they only focus on what is being assessed. Many assessments of this nature have recently been gamified, but in making them more attractive, distractions have been added to the task which may hinder some neurodivergent applicants.
  • Portfolio assessment – Especially helpful in creative industries, a portfolio allows candidates to show the body of work detailing their relevant accomplishments, and in the process reveals their skill-level.
  • Practical assessment – Particularly effective for more practical positions, you can have your applicant perform a short task that is relevant for your position. For example, you might have an applicant for a culinary position prepare a quick meal.
  • Roleplay – Set a problem or a scenario that often occurs in your workplace and assess how candidates meet that challenge.
  • Extended work placements – Assess how your candidate performs while working in the sought position for a period of time. This provides a holistic picture of the applicant’s strengths and weaknesses.
  • Pre-recorded interviews – Have your applicant submit a written filmed response to a predetermined question or questions rather than a face to face interview. This removes the stress of travel and allows candidates to respond at their best, rather than under a social stress, which they would not face when actually working.
  • Knowledge testing – A written or practical test may be appropriate as a part of jobs that require technical knowledge. For example, you might assess an Information Technologies applicant with a coding test.
  • Work Experience – Often, the best way of assessing an applicant’s aptitude for a specific job is to see them perform that job in real time as a work trial. A number of large companies use internships and work experience programmes to pre-screen people they may later wish to employ. It has a number of other benefits:
    • Giving the candidate chance to experience the reality of the job
    • Offering an exploratory period where you can assess organisational fit
    • Giving the company chance to establish, trial and tailor reasonable adjustments to match the actual needs of the individual
    • Showing how they are likely to function as an employee
    • Demonstrating their commitment and reliability
  • It should be clear from the outset how long the period covers and how the work experience process works. If you are using it for recruitment, you should have a clear process determining and stating whether the candidate is appointed at the end of the work experience.

Employers should understand the importance of a well-planned and well executed induction process. Making sure a new employee is thoroughly oriented not only with the culture of their new workplace environment, but also with its physical geography, can mean the difference between success or immediate failure.

The more information all new employees have about your workplace, the easier it will be for them to settle in

As with any employee, after you hire a new autistic employee, it’s important to make sure they know:

  • Where exactly they’ll be working
  • What their daily duties will be
  • What the typical working day looks like at your organisation:
    • When are scheduled breaks?
    • Is there a place to purchase lunch onsite?
  • What are specific policies relating to things like:
    • Taking unscheduled breaks
    • Dress code
    • Making reasonable adjustments if needed

On the first day on the job, an autistic person should understand where they can go for support. This includes meeting people important to the reasonable adjustment process or the workplace culture in general like:

  • HR officers
  • Line managers
  • Co-workers
  • Immediate supervisor

Newly hired autistic employees should also understand the location of spaces important to their wellbeing. You could even provide a map detailing this information. For example:

  • Where can they go for silence and solitude?
  • Where is the nearest lavatory?
  • Where is the office of their supervisor?
  • Where is the HR department?

The specific information you need to provide during your induction will depend on the structure of your organisation and the needs of your individual staff.