Recruiters, businesses, HR departments – do you have the courage?

I’ve been in my job now for just two short weeks, and so far it has been an overwhelmingly positive experience. Sure, nothing is absolutely perfect, and I am beginning to get over all the internal training and reading of documents, but it’s a good place to be. Firstly and foremostly it’s a good place to be in just having a job. More than that is that it’s a good organisation that actually cares about their people and wants them to do well.

If it hadn’t been for the alternative process, finding myself in this position would in all likelihood never have happened. I would have or had the likelihood of failing at multiple points along the way. I could have stumbled in managing to match myself to the position to apply for, or I could have stumbled at the point of writing an application letter, of putting together a resume that was appropriate. Interviews are not set up to be places of success for autistic people, and going through a typical interview process was again a point of stumbling and failing.

There are so many points on a recruitment journey in which an autistic person is prone to stumble or fail. Mostly, those stumbles and failure points are not a reflection on how well the autistic person would be able to be successful in the position at all, but, about how well they are able to navigate a recruitment process that is, to put it bluntly, stacked against them from the beginning.

In Australia, where I live, the statistics of employed autistic people are staggeringly bad. It seems autistic people as a group have the worst employment outcomes of just about any disability group there are. Somewhere in the vicinity of 40% of us have employment. And by employment, well, that’s what they call the workplace participation rate, and it means as little as a couple of hours a week. Essentially 6 out of 10 autistic people have no work. Of course, there are some who are not able to manage work, but that is certainly a very small minority. Most of us, want to work, are capable of work, would add value and be able to be successful in the organisations that gave us a chance.

I spent the preceeding four years as one of those 6 out of 10 with no work, it was agonisingly difficult, a constant assault on my sense of self-worth, my resilience to keep going, my belief in myself as a person with something of value to give to the world.

I know I was not alone. I am beyond fortunate to have been able be a part of a couple of things, that placed me in a position where a couple of the right people were able to see that I did have value to offer the world, and those people were able to make contact with another who was able to institute a recruitment process outside of the normal.

But, here’s the thing, it shouldn’t have needed to take the formation of that perfect little sequence of events for it to happen. With all the education, history and knowledge housed in the human resources world, it’s about time they realised that sometimes they need to do things outside of the typical in order to achieve the best outcome.

I did have to have a couple of interviews, but they were in a setting that put me at ease, conducted more as an informal conversation and exchange of ideas and discussion around things I had done, could do, and where and how I might fit into the organisation. A very different experience to sitting in a boardroom or the like in front of a panel of people firing questions, which had to be answered in the right way, all the while negotiating and working out the hidden social communication frameworks that are to be adhered to.

Last year in Queensland and South Australia, a company decided they wanted to give a different way of doing things a try, they totally changed their recruitment process with a view to getting some autistic people into jobs with them. The company runs piggeries, and so is not the old stereotype of autistic IT nerds sitting in front of PC’s coding away. An alternative application process was devised. Potential applicants spent some time at the piggery and both potential employee and employer got to see how each other was, in effect an extended trial. Both employee and employer got the opportunity to work out if the situation was one that would be of benefit to them both. At the end of the trial, the majority of these autistic individuals were employed. A very wonderful outcome that impacts the lives of a bunch of autistic people in inimaginably positive ways, and at the same time provides value, productivity and so forth for the organisation they have been employed by.

There have been a few different organisations in the media in recent times, how they are getting jobs for autistic people in programs, but overwhelmingly these programs have been firmly and squarely centred within the IT industries. Organisations like SAP and HP should be greatly applauded for being involved in these programs. It is a good thing. It is though, a drop in the ocean.

The organisations that have contracted with these IT giants, need to think more broadly than just IT. That we autistics are all IT experts is one of the most pervasively incorrect stereotypes that persist about us as autistic people. Just like allistic people we are as diverse as the day is long.

We are artists, writers, tradespeople, drivers, managers and anything else you care to name. Yes negotiating the world of recruitment has challenges for us, and given the statistics of our workforce participation, we are not managing these challenges well at all.

When we fail to meet these challenges successfully we miss out, we are often forced into entrenched poverty. But it’s not only us that miss out, it’s the rest of the world that misses out on sharing our lives, our contributions, our expertise and the gift we bring by just being human colleagues and friends.

The statistics are damning, very damning, autistic people are here, wanting to work, ready to work, and are a source of great potential success for businesses that take a chance and give us a shot.

This is important, because, time and again it is shown that we will fail along the typical recruitment journey, but also time and again it has been shown when an alternate path is provided that we can in fact do the job, deliver the productivity and skills that an organisation is looking for.

Doing recruitment differently is not just about making it easier for us autistics to get a job, though it is certainly that, but is just as much about making businesses more productive better businesses delivering better service and products to their customers, and therefore being more successful.

If we do it a bit differently, think outside the box, both autistic people, and the companies that recruit them will benefit greatly.

The question of course, and yes it’s the big question, the elephant in the room if you will, are organisations, recruitment departments brave enough to try, to give it a go, to test the water.

I hope they are, because things have got to change. I spent too long in unemployment, and I have too many autistic friends still in that position still. For as long as it goes on the gift to the world that we can give is thwarted. It’s time to change that.

I wonder if business has the courage to try.