As the subject of neurodiversity continues to grow and as more employers develop their ED&I strategies to be neuroinclusive, we have been researching the subject over the past few months and delivered our first internal training session to our team this week.

Public understanding of the area is developing as more is reported in the media, methods of diagnosis are improving, and more neurodivergent celebrities are talking more openly and loudly about their experiences.

Neurodiversity and recruitment

A report from the Recruitment & Employment Confederation in January this year highlighted the following statistics:

85% of recruiters believed that diversity was important to hiring managers.

50% of recruiters were familiar with the topic of neurodiversity at work.

7% of recruiters had been trained in neuroinclusive practices.

There is a long way for us all to go in our learning of such an important subject, but we are pleased that we have taken the first few strides to ensure that our processes are as neuroinclusive as possible, and that we are advising our clients to embrace the subject and capitalise on the wide range of positive results that they can achieve.

Some of the examples that we listened to were of the “autism hiring programmes” of EY, JPMorgan Chase and SAP, and JPMorgan Chase’s discovery that neurodivergent hires can be as much as 140% more effective than their peers.

We have learned how to make all aspects of the recruitment process more neuroinclusive - ranging from how candidates are briefed, to how to structure an equitable interview format. We will be evaluating how our processes work, continuing our research and entering into a lot more dialogue with our clients to ensure that our processes continue to improve and produce the very best results.

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