Why Prioritise Neurodiversity In Your Organisation?

Welcome to Hire Potential with Indeed, a series of fireside chats with experts in diversity and inclusion, employer branding, recruiting, HR and more.

WithYouWIthMe supplements this work with the creation of software that enables corporations to tap into underrepresented and underemployed talent pools.

Jay clearly defines neurodivergence as distinct from neurodiversity by explaining that human beings, by our very nature, are all neurodiverse. Neurodivergence refers to those who are diagnosed with things such as autism, ADHD or other cognitive conditions. 

So how do you help neurodivergent candidates succeed? One example Jay  offers is helping candidates self-promote, which is commonly difficult for a neurodivergent person. For example, imperfect eye contact does not mean someone isn't being truthful or honest. 

This episode explores the pros and cons of training that exists to help teams understand neurodivergent individuals, pointing out that sometimes this training can become a checkbox exercise, risking making it redundant. A reminder that we must always be seeking to find the humanity within our teams. By creating harmonious workplaces, productivity increases but this requires an environment that wholly sees and understands neurodiversity and divergence. 

Jay warns against relying on the outdated and antiquated resume as a hiring tool, for it inevitably fails to represent the totality of a candidate. In trying to hire a diverse talent pool, we need to be looking at the ability and potential of individuals to bring real value to our workplaces.

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Prologue

Erin: Welcome to Hire Potential with Indeed. A welcoming workplace is built from the ground up with attention to diversity, inclusion, accessibility and openness. But the way many leaders and companies approach this is full of gray areas, uncertainty and quite often, fear. Hire Potential with Indeed is here to demystify the process through the most powerful channel possible, conversations, groundbreaking ones, too. 

I'm your host, Erin Waddell, strategic insights consultant and D&I evangelist in Australia for Indeed. I've worked in the recruitment industry in Australia for the last seven years and have been in Australia for 10 years. 

In this podcast series will tackle the issues we face in the modern workplace, from diversity and inclusion to remote working, accessibility, fair hiring practices and more. This podcast is an initiative of indeed.com, the world's number one job site with over 250 million unique visitors every month from over 60 different countries. 

Introduction

Erin: Before we dive in, I wish to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land in which we are meeting today, and to any Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders who may be listening. I pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging.

In this week's episode, we'll be discussing why we should prioritise inclusivity of neurodiverse people in our organisations. With one in eight people in Australia living with dyslexia, autism, ADHD, Tourette syndrome, or learning disabilities, neuro diverse candidates make up a significant portion of the nation's talent pool. However, data by the Australian Bureau of Statistics show that in 2018, the unemployment rate for adults in Australia on the autism spectrum was more than three times the rate of people with a different disability, and almost eight times the rate of people without a disability. This doesn't even take into consideration the unemployment status of adults with other neurodiverse conditions.

With such a large percentage of neurodiverse adults being left out of the workforce, it's clear organisations can do more to understand and accommodate the needs of neuro diverse candidates and employees in order to create a truly diverse and inclusive workplace. In this episode, we are joined by Ja Munro, who is the Vice President of Marketing at WithYouWithMe, to discuss what organisations should do to start prioritising neurodiverse candidates and employees today. Welcome, Jay.

Jay: Hi, Erin. It's great to be here.

Erin: I'm just giggling a little because for those listeners out there who are just tuning in for the first time, Jay was the original host of this podcast and is my former manager.

Jay: [laughs]

Erin: Jay, you are working for a fantastic company called WithYouWithMe now. Could you share with us a little bit about what you're doing there?

Jay: Of course, and it's great to be back. Hello again. I am the Vice President of Marketing at WithYouWithMe. We are a company that focuses on helping underemployed and underrepresented individuals find employment, basically. We do that in a number of ways. One is we enable employees to find new careers in technology. We do that through testing their aptitude through psychometric and personality tests. They do that, and we help them to identify the technology careers that they're best suited to or have the best aptitude for. We then offer them free courses and training in those new technology careers, and they can develop those new skills so that they are job ready in a matter of hours. It could be just 100 hours rather than years that it could take through other more traditional pathways.

We then have the ability to place them in teams within organisations, quite large corporations, and give them that real on the job experience. We create software and we enable corporations to tap into those underrepresented, underemployed talent pools, as well to enable them to bring that talent into their organisation themselves. When we look at those underemployed talent pools, we actually started off helping veterans as our primary audience, and then we expanded out to military spouses and then we expanded out to neurodivergent individuals and then we further expanded to Indigenous. It just keeps going and going and going.

Erin: That's fantastic. How does WithYouWithMe define neurodiversity? Because I know that that is one of the major focus areas, or focus groups that you are passionate about getting into employment.

Jay: Well, what we've seen more recently is, there's been, I guess, a bit of a change in terminology or an evolution in terminology. We used to think of neurodiversity as being everyone who wasn't, I guess the neurotypical. Now, neurodiversity is a term that's used for everyone because we are all neuro diverse, even those who are neurotypical. When we talk about those who are non-neurotypical, we use the term neurodivergent now. Those are the individuals that we're really trying to help gain access to employment. When we're thinking about neurodivergent individuals, we're really speaking of those who fall on the autistic spectrum. So, who have autism, ADHD, dyslexia. There's a whole range of neuro divergences that fall within that classification.

How to make the recruitment process more accommodating to neurodivergent candidates

Erin: One thing that we worked on a lot together was making sure employers were aware that it doesn't start once you hire the candidate. It can actually start far before that in the job seeking phase, especially for both recruiters and job seekers. I think that you have a lot of experience with this, myself, as well. But I'd love to hear if you could talk a little bit about how traditional recruitment processes may not be a good way to accommodate neurodivergent candidates? In your opinion, what changes organisations should make to their recruitment process to help neurodivergent candidates succeed?

Jay: There are so many. I think I want to make a disclaimer here, as well is that I personally am autistic. I've only more recently, I think you and I spoke at a conference in May, which wasn't that long ago. That's really when I started to say it out loud. That's when I said I'd never previously got a job on my own before. I'd had to rely on other people, until more recently. That was because it was that application process that I always really wasn't able to nail myself being able to articulate what I was good at because I find it difficult to highlight what I'm good at. I think what I do is so very every day and standard because it's part of the job. Sometimes it's hard to really identify what you excel at. And going through the recruitment process, you're supposed to evangelise yourself or really call out and praise what you do. We need to realise that sometimes it needs a bit of coaxing out of people. We can't expect people to do that off their own back.

Eye contact can be an issue, as well. We can't expect everyone to maintain perfect eye contact. We can't make a judgement that if someone doesn't give you that perfect eye contact that there's something wrong or that they're not being truthful or honest. Sometimes presentation as well, personal presentation, the way that we dress or appear. We just can't make all these judgement calls because there may be circumstances that we don't understand. There are just so many considerations that we need to have through the recruitment process.

Erin: I like what you said about there being a lot of considerations for neurodivergent candidates and employees. Because what I'm seeing a lot of is that there's training out there available, a lot of training out there available for managers of neurodivergent employees, but there does not seem to be a lot of training for employees of neurodivergent managers. I would just love to hear your thoughts on that.

Jay: As we all become more and more familiar with or more conscious of diversity and inclusion within business. I feel like we're becoming a bit swamped with all this training. I feel like it's starting to verge on a checkbox exercise, not diversity and inclusion as such. I feel like we're making a bit of improvement in that space, but the training is becoming a checkbox exercise now. I have to say that when I joined my current organisation WithYouWithMe, I've never experienced anything like it before. It was kind of disarming in a way, because I've never felt so welcomed anywhere. 

I do think it's probably because of a couple of reasons. One is, I mean, everyone is very open. But also, we have a very diverse employee population as well, we're an organisation that truly reflects the customer base that we serve. I think we're close to 30% of our employee base is neurodivergent, and around 60% of our employee base is veterans or military spouses. We actually practise what we preach in a way. I think, because we are very diverse, we are very open. It's kind of like we're very free to be who and what we are. And because of that, I mean, there's training, but the formalised training isn't being forced on us, so it doesn't feel like it's a checkbox exercise. Instead, it's very much an open forum for discussion. We're having these very open chats at any time of the day when we're in the office.

With my team, from the very first week, I had a team member come to me. It was my first one on one with this team member. He said, "I wanted to talk to you because on Tuesday, I was having a day where I felt really down." I didn't really know how to respond to that because it was Thursday of my first week, and he was being so honest with me. I ended up responding and being very honest, as well. I think that showed me that we can be very transparent. We don't need this formalised training, and that's the way that we should be. Now, we have very open discussions. I can talk to my team that I will be very direct, but I never intend to be offensive. I'm not that type of person. It's my neurodivergence that sometimes I'm not aware of the tone of my voice. Sometimes I don't maintain eye contact, because it's very uncomfortable for me.

I have someone with dyslexia in my team, and we spend time together so I can understand what that means and what his strengths are. I have someone with ADHD in my team. We spend time together so I can understand what his strengths are. I've changed his role so that we can harness his strengths and focus on how we can get the best out of him, rather than put pressure on him and make him stressed.

Erin: And fit him into some mould that's been designed arbitrarily.

Jay: Yeah. I mean, I want everyone to be as productive and as happy as they can be. I want us to be harmonious. By doing that, we're going to be extremely productive. They as well, in turn want me to be productive and happy. I see that when I'm with the team. 

Benefits of employing neurodivergent employees

Erin: I'm happy that you have a team that has a manager like you where you are open to those conversations, because I think a lot of people have been in situations where they have wanted to say something and not felt like they could. I think that's definitely something that happens in a lot of workplaces. One thing you talked about was the strengths of your employees. I think that that is a huge benefit to be able to take advantage of those. There's a lot of companies out there that are not currently embracing neurodiversity in their hiring practice, in their workplace, and they're missing out on a huge talent pool and a huge wealth of skill and knowledge. Can you talk a bit about the benefits of employing neurodivergent adults?

Jay: Yeah, and I think this is one of the very frustrating things, and this isn't just with neurodivergent individuals. This is with everyone who falls within a diverse or underrepresented group. But I'll speak about neurodivergence because that's why I'm here. We tend to be stereotyped. We tend to be thought of as data scientists or mathematicians or actuaries, whereas I work in marketing. I know other autistic people who are artists or musicians or opera singers, who are very creative. I work in marketing because I mean, one of my strengths is I'm a systematic thinker. In marketing, you have so many different systems or campaigns, let's say, working simultaneously all at once. If one small component in one of those campaigns is, let's say changed, it affects all of those other campaigns that are running at the same time. My skill is that I can see the bigger picture of the full system, and I am two steps ahead and I can see how it's affected across that entire system, rather than waiting for it to crash, basically. The other thing is, I'm not not creative. I do struggle with imagination. However, I have a very strong memory and I collect memories, so I collect memories of creative campaigns and executions going back decades and decades. Going back to loveable mascots like the Gobbledok and I take the best bits of different creative campaigns and advertisements and I piece that all together to come up with magical new creative campaigns. And that to me is creativity.

Erin: Absolutely. I also think that, for many years, you were happy to get up on stage and talk to hundreds of people. I feel like that is something that if someone was to say, "I'm on the autism spectrum." Or, "I am a neurodivergent person." That's the last thing someone would expect them to be comfortable doing. I think that there's so much of that stigma that gets put on to, it's not just neurodivergent people, it gets put on to anyone, like you said from an underrepresented group. It's funny when someone like yourself, someone like myself, when we break that stigma, we still get the surprise, "Oh, oh." People can't help but be shocked and surprised that we're not fitting their mould of what they expect us to be.

Jay: Exactly. You know, we just finished one of the things that I think is fantastic, is we have this software that people come and do their aptitude and psychometric testing, and we can start to build up these amazing insights into the strengths and capabilities of neurodivergent individuals. We're starting to see that people with different neuro divergences have all these strengths that no one else has been able to see before. We're starting to wash that against some of Silicon Valley's brightest minds. We're going to release a report very soon, which is going to be absolutely incredible and show that people with autism are surprisingly, having strengths that no one thought they had. People with ADHD are surprisingly having a strength that no one thought they would have, and we're going to break those misconceptions. It's surprising, but it's also frustrating that we have to do this. There shouldn't be those stereotypes and misconceptions in the first place. I'm excited about it anyway, because at least we can show this finally.

Erin: I think that there's a lot of organisations that will benefit from having the concrete evidence, where if they do want to start to create a neurodivergent friendly workplace, or they wanted to make sure that when we talk about a lot of the grassroots efforts, when it comes to ensuring that there's inclusion in companies. I feel like if there's a report out there like that, that's going to help give motivation to the people that are trying to make that change by saying, "Look, we really want to include this in our recruitment process. Here is the proof that these neurodivergent candidates could really bring something great to our company, and this is why we should potentially make sure that we are accommodating for them."

Jay: What needs to change and this is what gets me. We have been talking about recruitment. Well, I've been talking about recruitment for over 20 years now and how things need to change, and nothing has changed. We've continued to do the same stuff over and over and over again. We're relying on the same tools, the same practices. We're relying on the same resume. It's the same tool that no one really pays attention to that misrepresents people. It is full of prejudice. If you're trying to hire a diverse talent pool and to give everyone the equity that they need to bring them into your organisation, then that is one of the things that really needs to go. Like seriously. We need to be looking at the ability and potential of these individuals to bring real value into an organisation and stop relying on an antiquated tool that is actually meaningless.

Erin: Literally, the discrimination can start at the resume with just the person's name. Just having a name on a resume can knock someone out of an application, depending on what their name is. We've seen that, especially in Australia.

Jay: It tells you nothing. I mean, introduce screening questions, testing, show us what the candidate can actually do, and that's how they can add value to your business.

Erin: Yeah, it's such a great point you make about the fact that we're always saying it needs to change. What is it going to take to get this change to happen?

Jay: Well, I think companies like WithYouWithMe, are really trying to drive that change. Where we are giving direct access to organisations in Australia, Canada, the UK, the US. We're giving a direct pathway to these diverse talent pools, to corporations. We need employers to actually look at their recruitment practices and stop talking about taking action and actually take that action. They need to actually do something.

Resources and support systems to provide your neurodivergent employees with 

Erin: For companies that have neurodivergent employees or are looking to make their workplace more neurodivergent friendly, what are some resources or support systems that they can provide to their neurodivergent employees?

Jay: That's a tricky one, because I don't feel comfortable speaking on behalf of all neurodivergent people because everyone's presentation is unique to themselves. I can take a stab at it based on myself, I guess. Lighting can be something to consider. Lighting can be something that can affect individuals if it's too bright or too dark. Noise is another thing. I was in the office this week, and someone made a comment because I always sit at the same desk. I can only sit at a desk, which is by a wall and I can't have my back to an open space. I need to feel very secure. Considerations like that, and my colleague was very supportive of that. They just wanted to know and be aware so that that space would always be available to me. That's another thing.

There seems to be a movement over the last few years and particularly, with returning to workplaces with vaccination rates increasing and with COVID, where we'll be going back to flexible working and shared workspaces and no fixed workstations. That can be quite uncomfortable. I know that I need to have a fixed work desk to know where I'm going every day, to have my things at my desk because change can be very upsetting. I need to have my things where they need to be. Some people might not understand that. They might think, "Well, that's just because you want to have your own desk." But it's actually because autistic people can be very routine based.

You do need to have things in a certain place, and that's the way that your mind works. They need to be in a certain place at a certain time, very dependable, so that you know where things are. When they're not where you expect them to be, then it can cause a great deal of anxiety. Autism is underpinned by anxiety and unknowns. We don't like our knowns, because they sparks off the anxiety and that can be very uncontrollable. Not having that fixed workspace can be very disturbing to an autistic person. And so, that I feel is going to be a very big issue with companies going back to an office environment, and something that we really, really need to be considerate of.

Erin: I think even just making it known that you're open to accommodations, as a company is a good place to start and to say, "If you need something, just come talk to us." Or, "We can accommodate if you need something to better perform your role, have a chat with us, and we'll see what we can do." Even just that level of offering accommodation, I think could be a really great place to start. That way, at least employees feel like they can start the conversation, have a conversation. It could be, "I'm sorry, we're unable to accommodate that." But at least it's going to open that channel of communication from the get go instead of not saying anything, and then having someone trying to do their job while facing anxiety from unknown forces.

Jay: We've also had this whole shift in terms of work life--. I don't like the word balance anymore. It's integration, where everything has just melded together over the last couple of years. We've done everything from home, work from home. We've done everything from the comfort of our couch or our home office, and that includes doctor's appointments and therapy sessions. I know that for me, for example, I have therapy once a fortnight for support for my autism, which is incredibly valuable. And knowing that I have that during a business day, once every two weeks. Knowing with return to the office, my employer is going to have a very flexible working arrangement where we can work from home or the office. Offering your employees to work from home or the office is enabling them to also be able to have those appointments, as well, to maintain those which are extremely important. We need to continue to support that for their own health and wellbeing. We need to be mindful of that. If we enforce going back to the office after two years of not or close to two years, then that's going to put a real strain on all these other supports that they've built up over that time. That’s something to consider.

Erin: This has been fantastic, and I really loved chatting, too about this today. The final question, which is how we finish every episode of Hire Potential with Indeed is, what do you think it will ultimately take to ensure a better and more inclusive workplace in the future?

Jay: I think it is going to be about actually making change and not just talking about it. We've been talking about it for, as I said. I mean, I've been in this industry for 22 years, this year. All we've done is talked about it. We need to actually make the change now, and that includes giving up on everything that we've continued to rely on for decades. The most basic of things, the resume, the bits of paper. We've given up paper in every other aspect of our lives. It's time to give it up in recruitment as well. But to be more open, transparent and accepting of everyone, and realise the potential that people have, rather than what's written on a piece of paper.

Erin: Thank you so much for coming on the podcast today, Jay. I'm so glad I'm able to carry the torch forward from when you departed. It's been fantastic to talk to you and I'm really proud of where you've gone with your career and how you're going to make such a big change for a lot of people in the neurodivergent community.

Jay: Thank you so much. I've loved coming back. Thanks, Erin.

Conclusion 

Erin: Thank you for listening to Hire Potential with Indeed. Before you go and start building a better workplace, don't forget to hit subscribe, and leave a review if you found this podcast helpful. If you'd like to read our full D&I report, click the link in this episode's description to fill out the form. 

Just a quick note, the views and opinions expressed in this episode by the guests do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Indeed. Additionally, the information in this episode does not and is not intended to constitute legal advice. Instead, all content we discuss is for general informational purposes only and you should consult with a legal professional for any legal issues you may be experiencing.

The data in this podcast references Indeed’s 2021 D&I report. 

Sources: Indeed is the world's #1 job site according to Comscore, Total Visits, March 2021.

Sources: Over 250 million unique visitors every month, Google Analytics, Unique Visitors, February 2020.

Sources: The research in the report referenced in this episode was commissioned by ThatComms Co on behalf of Indeed and conducted by YouGov. The study was conducted online between 11 - 17 February 2021, involving 2,060 working age Australians (aged between 18-64) currently in either full or part-time employment, or actively looking for work