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A third of autistic people say recruitment most difficult part of their career

Traditional recruitment involves unwritten social rules which are a barrier for autistic candidates, a new report has found.

The report, by Auticon, an IT consultancy which exclusively employs people on the autism spectrum, found almost a third (31%) of autistic people said the traditional recruitment process was the most difficult part of their career.

Andrea Girlanda, CEO of Auticon, said complicated job descriptions are the first barrier autistic candidates face.

Speaking to HR magazine, he said: “Autistic people may be more likely to deselect themselves from applying when faced with overly detailed job specifications, if they feel that they do not hit every single point in the criteria.

“To reduce this, we encourage hiring managers to be really thoughtful and realistic about the skills that are truly essential to the role and stick to those.”

Due to the dependence on social cues, Girlanda said interviews can also throw up hurdles for autistic people.

He said: “The interview process can be a challenge for autistic people due to factors like the number of unwritten social rules during the process, for example the expectation to make small talk or hold eye contact.

“There is also the added pressure of being unable to fully prepare in the absence of being provided with the interview questions ahead of time.”

To gain an accurate assessment of neurodivergent applicants’ abilities, he recommended a mix of skills-based assessments, informal conversations and group activities, rather than a traditional interview.

Another major issue is that many autistic workers do not feel comfortable disclosing their diagnosis.

Less than half (44%) of autistic people surveyed said they felt they could be their authentic selves at work and only 30% felt comfortable disclosing their disability to HR.

This was significantly impacted by age and seniority, with older and higher-ranking workers being far more likely to disclose than junior workers.

This was also reflected in the likelihood of workers to request reasonable adjustments to help support their needs: only 50% of junior workers compared with 78% of those in senior ranking roles.

Richmal Maybank, employer engagement manager at the National Autistic Society, said for autistic employees to feel comfortable enough to disclose, employers must create an inclusive culture with examples of how support can be given.

Speaking to HR magazine, she said: “Some autistic people may not consider themselves to be disabled or may worry about being discriminated against if they do disclose, so having a reassuring disclosure process with positive and accessible language, clear examples of how you can support as an employer, as well as case studies from other employees you’ve supported, can help put people at ease.”

Maybank said employers can create a more inclusive workplace by working together autistic employees to discuss what individual support they can provide.

She added: “This could be as straightforward as offering details of an interview format and sharing questions in advance, allowing extra time to process or answer questions, routinely circulating agendas before meetings, or using plain English and clear planning.“

Girlanda said employers must be proactive in educating themselves on what reasonable adjustments autistic workers might need.

He said: “The onus shouldn’t all be placed on the employee to necessarily know what they need. This can be particularly applicable to people who have been recently diagnosed and may still be learning about their condition.

“At Auticon, for example, from as early as the interview stage, we offer a whole list of suggestions of adjustments that people might find helpful. By making clear that reasonable adjustments are already on the organisational radar, will naturally make things easier for neurodivergent staff wondering if they are in an inclusive environment.”

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Six steps to DEI talent in traditionally non-diverse industries

While much progress has been made in technology or emerging sectors such as renewable energy, there is still much work to be done. Women, people of color and those with disabilities are underrepresented in leadership positions in all industries and organizations. Some sectors, particularly those that are traditionally ‘male-dominated’, such as agriculture, manufacturing, and industrial, suffer from a serious lack of diversity amongst the executive leadership.

Some statistics make for challenging reading:

Researchers such as Richard Florida and Katherine W. Phillips have established that diversity makes us smarter, more creative, and gives companies a competitive edge over their peers. Although individual companies are slowly moving the dial, many traditional industries have missed the mark on large-scale success due to a number of factors.

A lack of suitable mentors and training, unconscious bias and little to no expansion of recruiting channels have all contributed to the problem. Hiring managers in these industries often rely too heavily on their own networks to fill roles, which are typically limited in diversity. Concurrently, with little historical diversity, there are few role models available to provide guidance, advice and support.

Our focus is on providing strategic input to our CEO and Chief People Officer clients in tackling this issue.

Below are six strategies for finding and attracting diverse talent in non-diverse industries:

Step 1: Overtly Align Organizational Culture and Business Strategy with Search and Recruitment Practices
This is the necessary foundational step, particularly for organizations that struggle to identify diversity hires. The crucial early phase is about refining both the business and cultural need for a diverse workforce, and ensuring both executive and departmental alignment.

Setting an effective and measurable plan for attracting diverse talent is not ‘just a HR problem’. It is important to engage all staff in the conversation, and to canvas ideas and approaches from across the organization. Imperatives for shifting the dial in diversity talent include discussions around the nature of the workforce that will meet the company’s emerging needs, the steps that need to take place, timeframes, what success looks like, and how to evaluate that success.

Following discussion and consultation, the senior leadership team needs to be accountable for a formal diversity and inclusion policy, with clearly defined strategic diversity targets and measures, along with clarity around accountability for delivery.

Step 2: Re-Evaluate Your Search and Recruitment Processes
Once there is a degree of clarity and cohesion around diversity targets and metrics, it’s important for HR leaders to take a look at their current search and recruitment processes. This will include identifying any potential biases that may be preventing diverse candidates from applying or advancing. What are the proactive approaches in place that address the policies? How have these changed, in, say, the past five or six years to recognize different expectations?

An effective analysis could include reviewing and re-writing role descriptions to avoid poor practices. This includes avoiding masculine language, and using more inclusive images and language on your career website.

To what extent is it clear that you welcome a diverse range of candidates, and provide appropriate arrangements and support for candidates with disabilities? To what extent does each role description indicate your approach to diversity and inclusion? For example, one of our university clients has the following statement on all role descriptions used in recruitment at all levels:

Equal Employment Statement
We are committed to all aspects of equal opportunity, diversity and inclusion in the workplace and to providing all staff, students, contractors and visitors with a safe, respectful and rewarding and flexible environment free from all forms of unlawful discrimination, harassment, bullying, vilification and victimization. We make decisions on employment, promotion, and reward based on merit.

Step 3: Increase Your Outreach
There are many ways to increase outreach to source a greater range of diverse candidates, even in industries that sometimes have more narrowly based representations of different groups. For example, in the mining industry, the estimates are that only between 8 and 17% of the sector’s global workforce are women).

Ideas include:

Step 4: Practice Inclusive Hiring
Inclusive hiring means that you are actively looking for candidates who might be different from the existing workforce. It means you have mechanisms in place that prevent or minimize recruitment biases, both conscious and unconscious.

Ideas include:

Step 5: Build a Diverse Hiring Committee and Interview Panel
It’s crucial to have both a diverse hiring committee and interview panel, including people on the committee or panel that reflect a good level of diversity. This can also bring different perspectives and experiences to the table which can help to identify potential biases and ensure that the hiring process is fair and inclusive. This not only helps to ensure that diverse candidates are evaluated fairly, but also helps to create a more inclusive culture within the organization, and offers a holistic candidate experience. In many of our clients today, there is a requirement that all short lists reflect a 40:40:20 balance. That is, at least 40% male, 40% female, and 20% addressing other diversity factors.

Step 6: Measure and Report on Your Progress
Diversifying your workforce is an ongoing process, and it’s important to measure and report on your progress. This could include tracking the diversity of your applicant pool, the diversity of new hires, and the retention rates of diverse employees. This not only holds the organization to account but also helps to identify areas that need improvement. It will also serve as an important communication and reinforcement piece to both employees and the broader stakeholder group (investors, shareholders, suppliers, etc.) regarding your organization’s commitment to diversity and inclusion.

Diversity and Inclusion
We also need to recognize that recruiting diverse talent is just the tip of the iceberg. The real challenge then is the ‘inclusion’ part of ‘diversity and inclusion’. Whilst diversity and inclusion are two different things, they are two sides of the same coin, by which long-term, measurable success in one won’t be achieved without the other.

The ongoing challenge, therefore, is the nature of a welcoming or supportive culture – or the absence of this – that is about the long-term sustainability of diversity and inclusion approaches.

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Disabled employees surges to record high thanks to remote working

Employment among disabled people in the US rose to 21.3% in 2022.

The embrace of remote work spurred by the pandemic helped the US employment rate for people with disabilities to reach an all-time high last year.

The percentage of disabled people who were employed rose to 21.3 per cent in 2022, according to data released Thursday by the US Bureau of Labour Statistics. That’s more than a two percentage point increase from 2021 and the most since 2008, when comparable data was first published.

The unemployment rate for disabled people dropped last year along with the national average. And while the labour force participation rate did tick up for those without disabilities, it went up by three times as much for people with disabilities.

Daily tasks such as commuting and navigating an office space can be difficult for people depending on their disabilities. As companies adopted remote and hybrid work arrangements, more disabled people applied for and landed jobs — sometimes for the first time in years.

The recent push by companies urging workers to return to the office may threaten the gains made by disabled people, who comprise about 12 per cent of the population, according to the bureau. A report by the consulting firm McKinsey and Company published last June estimated that 35 per cent of companies offered a fully remote option.

Overall, disabled people are still less likely to be employed than their counterparts who don’t have disabilities, and they are twice as likely to be employed part-time, the BLS report said. They’re also more likely to be self-employed.

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Mothers, older workers and disabled people hold the key to getting Britain back to work

Government efforts to boost Britain’s workforce should focus on supporting more mothers into work, and helping older workers and those with a disability stay in work, rather than persuading the large Covid cohort of older workers to ‘unretire’, according to new Resolution Foundation research published.

The issue of workforce participation has come to a head following a sharp rise in economic inactivity over the course of the pandemic – up by 830,000 between 2019 and 2022, with three quarters of the rise concentrated among those aged 50 and over.

This has prompted calls to action, with the Government’s response likely to form a major part of the upcoming Budget. The authors say that attention on this issue is welcome but warn that a policy focus on trying to persuade this recent ‘Covid cohort’ of lost workers back into the labour market is unlikely to work.

The report finds that increased labour market exits during the pandemic were disproportionately from higher-than-normal retirements among higher-paid professionals, with flows from employment into retirement from many low-paying occupations actually falling. It will be hard to persuade these people, two-thirds of whom own their own home outright and therefore have low living costs, to ‘unretire’ says the authors.

The Foundation adds that someone who took early retirement during the summer of 2020 has now been economically inactive for two-and-a-half years. Historically, just 1-in-50 people in this situation return to work every three months.

Using the benefit system – to target more support, or increase the pressure to work – is unlikely to work either, as just one-in-ten of the economically inactive 55-59 year olds who have left employment since the start of the pandemic are relying on benefit support in the first place.

Policy makers should instead look ahead and focus on three groups – older workers, mothers and those with ill-health or a disability – where the UK’s past experience tells us progress can be made.

In the decade running up to the pandemic, the UK saw employment rates rise by 13 percentage points for women aged 55-64 (and four percentage points for men) and by five percentage points for coupled mothers, while the employment gap between those with or without a disability fell by five percentage points between 2013 and 2022.

First, demographic changes mean that there will be many more older age workers in Britain in the 2020s – the number of people aged 65 and over will rise by 2.5 million between 2020 and 2030.

The Foundation warns against a narrow focus on simply raising the State Pension Age, which disproportionately impacts those on lower incomes and poor places with lower life expectancies. If the Government wants to discourage early retirement – having previously encouraged it for richer people with ‘pension freedoms’ – it could accelerate the rise in the minimum age at which people can draw their private pension, which is currently due to rise from 55 to 57 but to remain 10 years lower than the state pension age.

Second, the UK must address its maternal employment gap, where participation rates among low-income women aged 25-54 were just 50 per cent in 2017-2019, compared to 94 per cent among high-income women of the same age.

The Foundation warns that policy makers need to be clear what their objectives are when it comes to new childcare policies. Popular proposals to extend the number of ‘free’ childcare hours will largely boost the incomes of already-working parents in middle-and-high income households, rather than boost employment among lower income households. To achieve the latter, the government should reform childcare support and work incentives for second earners in Universal Credit.

Third, the report notes that a growing share of the population lives with a disability or ill-health. As well as a wider policy agenda to tackle the underlying causes of this trend, including rising mental ill-health, policy makers can do far more to help those affected stay in employment.

The Government should build on the success of statutory maternity leave in boosting maternal employment, and create a new ‘right-to-return’ so that workers who need take some time off work for ill-health remain attached to their employer and job. The Foundation also warns that proposals from both main parties to reform disability benefits to ease the path back into work are well intentioned, but either relatively minor or fraught with implementation challenges.

Without further progress on these three areas, the authors warn that the economic inactivity rate for 15-75 year olds is set to rise from 29.5 per cent up to 30.8 per cent by 2030, the highest rate since the turn of the century (2001).

Louise Murphy, Economist at the Resolution Foundation, said:

“Britain did a great job of getting more people into work in the 2010s. But some of that progress has been undone by the pandemic, with economic inactivity rising by 830,000 over the past three years.

“We need to reboot progress on getting people into work, but we’re not going to achieve it by persuading the recent Covid cohort of older workers to ‘unretire’.

“Instead, we need to do more to encourage mothers in low-income families into work, and help people who need to take periods of time-off for ill-health stay attached to their jobs.

“Taking the right approach to workforce participation would boost individuals’ living standards, and improve the wider health of our economy.”

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'Access to Work' scheme delays costing blind people jobs

Many blind and partially-sighted people are having job offers withdrawn because of delays in getting an assessment for the government’s Access to Work scheme, according to a sight loss charity.

The Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) claimed that it takes on average five to six months from initial application to assessment under the Department for Work and Pensions’ scheme, and there are significant delays in receiving payment against existing awards. This is compromising the ability of blind and other disabled people to secure or maintain employment, it says.

RNIB’s Access to work report says there were 25,103 outstanding Access to Work applications in December 2022, up from 15,000 a year earlier, while many people with sight loss or visual impairments are having to subsidise their own support to start or stay in work.

It claims job offers are routinely being withdrawn because people cannot access the support they need to start work when their employer requires. One applicant was unable to take up a teaching role they had secured because they had been waiting 20 weeks for an assessment, while another person’s six-month contract ended before their Access to Work claim had been determined.

One person told the charity: “I require a support worker. Due to the delays, I am unable to perform elements of my role. I have had to have my duties reduced. This is having a significant effect on my mental health and has meant I have lost a lot
of confidence. I am worried that if a support worker isn’t in place, I may not pass my probationary period.”

RNIB chief operating officer David Clarke said six months is far too long for people with sight loss or visual impairments to be without support.

“We are calling on the Department of Work and Pensions, which runs Access to Work, to take decisive and comprehensive action to cut the backlog urgently. RNIB has repeatedly raised concerns about their ongoing inability to administer the scheme since December 2021,” he said.

“We have met with the DWP on numerous occasions to discuss the delays, but little progress has been made.

“The steps taken so far by the DWP to address the problem are clearly inadequate and RNIB believes that the ongoing delays in administration of the scheme are so significant as to risk being unlawful.”

The public sector equality duty requires the DWP to have due regard to the need to eliminate discrimination and to advance equality of opportunity. The RNIB says the DWP could be failing in this duty, as it believes it is placing disabled employees at risk of discrimination and potentially “pitting” disabled people against non-disabled candidates.

RNIB has put forward six recommendations for the DWP to cut Access to Work scheme delays:

The report adds that once delays are addressed, the DWP should ensure that Access to Work advisers undertake training around sight loss and improve their understanding of the reasonable adjustments available.

The charity would also like to see an independent review of the Access to Work scheme, to consider whether processes can be streamlined.

A Department for Work and Pensions spokesperson said it has seen an improvement in the length of time people have been waiting for an Access to Work decision, and applications from those who are due to start a job within the next four weeks are prioritised.

The spokesperson said: “Our priority is to ensure everyone entitled to support through Access to Work has their claim progressed as soon as possible.

“We have recruited additional staff to meet customer demand, which has already improved processing times, and a new digital claims process is being tested to help customers better track progress of their claims going forward.”

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Why businesses must stop disregarding people with disabilities

After having been cast aside for years, equality of gender, race, and sexuality have risen up the ranks of importance to become issues that are addressed in the boardroom. Yet one category is strikingly absent: disability inclusion. Perhaps this is because disability comes in many forms, and as a result necessitates a multi-layered, thorough approach. One could also argue that there is an unconscious bias and fear within business leadership of “getting it wrong” and being called out for doing so. Whatever the reasoning, one thing is clear—people with disabilities are being neglected.

The World Health Organization estimates that more than 15% of the approximately 8 billion people on the planet experience disability—a figure that might surprise many, and which is only expected to grow, because of factors including an aging population.

And yet this community remains largely side-lined by business, with only 4% of the 90% of companies that claim to prioritize diversity and inclusion considering disability in their initiatives, according to a report from the Return on Disability Group. In contrast to equality pillars to which it is often compared—such as gender, racial, and ethnic representation—there are intricacies that make it harder to retrieve clear and standardized data. A fundamental issue lies in the fact that 4 in 5 disabilities are invisible, such as heart disease, lung disease, hearing loss, and multiple chemical sensitivities. Employees are also hesitant to disclose whether they identify as disabled for fear of discrimination, prejudice, and bias within their working environments. The quality of disability data is, therefore, incumbent on the presence of an organizational culture in which employees feel comfortable to self-disclose.

There are many obstacles in the way of progress, but one of the most significant is the reluctance of senior leaders to disclose. Research from the Valuable 500 shows that only 3% of leaders would speak openly about their disability or caregiving role. Furthermore, disability matters are largely excluded from the board agenda. And the laws in place, like the Americans With Disabilities Act, mandate that businesses do just the bare minimum to achieve equality in the workplace, so the responsibility falls to businesses to take action.

Ensuring business-led inclusivity of disabled consumers and employees alike is no longer an invitation. In addition to being a moral imperative, failing to account for the disabled population poses a risk to a company’s brand. Together, the disability market controls over $13 trillion. By ignoring the diverse wants and needs of consumers, businesses risk losing out on the immense spending power of disabled households. New legislation, such as the European Accessibility Act and the Websites and Software Applications Accessibility Act in the U.S., increases the risk of businesses incurring reputational and financial damage if they fail to treat disabled employees fairly.

In recent years, we have seen some exceptional examples of leadership and commitment to disability inclusion, including the October launch by the German retailer Zalando of its first adaptive fashion collection, Telefonica’s recent pledge to double the number of employees with disabilities in its workforce by 2024, and Channel 4’s launch of an extensive examination of access and inclusion for disabled talent in the British TV industry.

Despite this progress, there is still huge variability in these efforts. Without standardized, publicly disclosed data, it is nearly impossible to create meaningful change, as there is no benchmark to measure against. Business leaders have the power to rectify this glaring inequality themselves—and they must take on the responsibility with urgency.

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US web accessibility lawsuits grows by 15% in 2021

The number of US web accessibility lawsuits has grown 15% in 2021, with more than 10 such cases now filed everyday.

New research by UsableNet shows the ways lazy, often nonexistent, accessibility features on websites continue to make retailers vulnerable to a growing wave of web accessibility lawsuits. And so far, the courts are not offering much guidance to retailers.

'Retailers face the bulk of web accessibility lawsuits for several reasons,' says Jason Taylor, CIO at UsableNet. 'Among the causes are the complexity of retail sites and the enormous number of changes they undergo daily, the complexity and rate of change increase the chances for merchants to make mistakes updating their sites or adding third-party technology.' he says.

William Goren an attorney who specializes in ADA-related issues, says the best defense is for retailers to design their websites with accessibility in mind. As a guide, he says merchants and their web designers follow the World Wide Web Consortium’s widely used Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, Version 2.1 (WCAG 2.1)

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