Welcome back to Reading the Research, where I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects, then discuss it in brief with bits from my own life, research, and observations.
Today's article touches on a sore spot for many unemployed and underemployed autistic people (hi!).
The fact is, the hiring process in most companies is extremely discriminatory. Not in some cartoonish way, with an evil HR person twirling his mustache and leeringly stating, "we don't hire black people/women/neurodiverse people here." And yet, it might as well happen like that, because that's more or less the results, repeated over and over across thousands of companies worldwide.
As far as I've seen and heard, there isn't really a standard set of practices for hiring. As a result, hiring managers are pretty much given criteria for what skills the job requires, which lets them sort resumes... but after that, and sometimes even during that, is when things go wrong.
Hiring managers tend to hire people they personally like. Their gut tells them this person or that would do a good job, and so they hire that person. The problem is the criteria used. Humans tend to shorthand "this person is like me" to "this person is competent and will fit well into the company." Which puts neurodiverse people out in the cold unless the company is already mainly neurodiverse. So effectively the hiring process is gatekeeping, and on a massive scale.
It's during the interview process that many autistic people fall flat on our faces. It's not that we lack the skills necessary. It's that the interview process is an elaborate dance of lies and wordplay. Is anyone really enthusiastic about a job in retail? Especially after applying for 20 more positions elsewhere, managing multiple interviews, and being turned down repeatedly. And yet "enthusiasm and positivity" are major hiring criteria for most retail chains, if not most workplaces.
Autistic people often aren't great at lying. So we're more likely to give honest answers, which get us disqualified. Sometimes even before the interview, since there's an increasing movement to use online psychiatric measures with opaque criteria.
The typical path for autistic people to even be considered is for our work to speak for us. Portfolios and work samples are key. Or knowing someone in the company, someone who can vouch for your skill and usefulness, and someone who can help mediate issues as they arise, is another path. Not all jobs have a portfolio option, though, and connections to others even more limited in autistic people than they are in neurotypical people.
So it's kind of a mess, and a major reason why neurodiverse and autistic people aren't well represented in the workforce.
This article offers a solution to the problem, in the form of changing the hiring criteria, and changing workplaces so they actively invite and support neurodiverse people. I agree with the suggestion that doing so would lead to businesses being more successful and competitive.
As the Hollywood movie industry has shown us in recent years, you can only get so many interesting stories out of older white male Americans. If you want new ideas, you need to look new places. Women, people of color, neurodiverse humans of all stripes, our ideas will differ. To continue improving and growing businesses, those different ideas are necessary.
For all of our sakes, I hope people listen.
(Pst! If you like seeing the latest autism-relevant research, visit my Twitter, which has links and brief comments on studies that were interesting, but didn't get a whole Reading the Research article about them.)
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